I was at a nerdy wedding recently and somehow my table got to talking about books that accurately capture the feel of the medieval worldview. Among several others, I had to put in a plug for Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage, which isn’t historical fantasy—it’s just fantasy—but which nonetheless has something of the medieval in it. It is set in a world in which tradition weighs heavily on the living, as does the pressure of the ancient, half-forgotten past in whose ruins the living persist—and in which just about anything can and does happen, since reason is not the be-all and end-all of people’s subjectivity. The world of the palace, and the five Towers within it, is made of stranger stuff.

In the palace, the Ladies reign in their Towers, although Grey Tower has no Lady. Two of its young servitors, Kew and Pell, are thrust into positions of responsibility: Kew is the apprentice of the Guardian, who lives in Grey but whose duty is to protect the entire palace against the Beast—but Kew finds himself in limbo when the Guardian dies without confirming Kew to her office as the seventy-fourth Hawthorn. Pell, meanwhile, takes over as the Seventy-Sixth Yarrow after the aged Mother of Grey House dies. Kew and Yarrow distrust each other:

Nobody in Grey thought much of the Guardians. Like every other position, the office was respected for its age if nothing else, but since the Guardians had not been needed in generations, hardly anyone remembered what they were for or why they were for it. Unlike the women in grey, the Guardian served no function in ordinary life, except to take a tithe of the cloisters’ produce and stand at the mothers’ side for certain antiquated ceremonies. (p. 13)

For their own reasons, both Kew and Yarrow set off on different journeys to reach the Towers in other regions of the palace. Obedient to his master’s dying request—“Before anything else, tell Black it’s coming” (p. 14)—Kew takes the West Passage of the title, where the Guardian must face the Beast whenever it rises; there are plenty of signs that the Beast is rising, but everyone more or less ignores the warnings. The world of the palace is old and tired, its grandeur mostly a memory, its halls increasingly depopulated as its traditions fade away, both literally and metaphorically. Indeed, though she is also loath to leave her home, Yarrow also follows her predecessor’s dying request, seeking out Black Tower to beg for relief from the unnatural winter that envelops Grey.

There’s an obvious debt to Mervyn Peake and Gormenghast (1950) here, made almost textually explicit by Yarrow’s office number—Titus Groan, of course, being the seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast. The books share a mood and the same atmosphere of setting, with the young protagonists almost overwhelmed by the ancient, crumbling edifices they are meant to serve. There isn’t really a Steerpike in The West Passage; no one in the book has his ruthless, single-minded ambition, to say nothing of his grasp of the whole of the edifice’s power structure and its weak points. In The West Passage, Yarrow’s and Kew’s knowledge of what’s really going on remains fragmented almost until their paths cross once more at the end, although one of the book’s pleasures is the way that little, seemingly random asides turn out to be deeply meaningful as their journeys progress and both Yarrow and Kew begin to put together parts of what’s going on. And even without a Steerpike, there are still long-fermenting power struggles and conspiracies amongst the Ladies and their closest servitors, power struggles that our heroes stumble into and meddle in at their peril. The Ladies are not safe for the people they rule.

When I’ve described this book to people, I’ve consistently mentioned the Ladies, who are very large. I think people have gotten the wrong idea about what I mean by “large.” I mean they are monumental. Only the smallest of full-grown Ladies are the size of She-Hulk. Some of these Ladies are the size of the Statue of Liberty. Some of them are cannibals. All of them are indifferent at best and at worst actively predatory on the lesser, human, and human-sized denizens of the palace. And yet it is the Ladies that Kew and Yarrow must seek if they are to accomplish their goals, regardless of the perils involved in finding them and drawing their attention.

The Ladies are maybe the weirdest aspect of The West Passage, but this is a book that has a lot of competition for that title. Another medieval-ish aspect of the book is the ways in which unmarked humans without comment mix with humans who are different in various ways: “She had no spines like the old Yarrow, no claws like Ban, no fur like Grits, no twigs for hair like the new Yarrow. She was simple flesh and bone, but nothing was more frightening than her anger. In a house of the old, it was the first new thing in years” (p. 89). If anything, humans without any physiological differences seem to be somewhat unusual in the palace.

There are plenty of actual animals wandering around too: At one point Yarrow meets the Last Schoolmaster of Yellow Tower, Jasper, “an elderly, owlish person” who lays eggs and who has devoted his life to teaching a group of apes to speak and write. After working as the schoolhouse help for a time, Yarrow winds up inadvertently masterminding a permanent vacation for its students. Some other things are just random and strange, unexplained and unremarked. Even the things that have a clear explanation, such as miracles—gifts of the Ladies—do terrible and wondrous things when they are used: The palace contains many wonders that rub shoulders with horrors. But there are also simply sad scenes of thoughtless forgetting: At one point Kew encounters a trash heap that has evidently been growing for centuries, choking the West Passage; later, another character carelessly displaces stones onto it (“Most land harmlessly in fruitcake, waterlogged pastry, a haunch of withered meat. One shatters the last blue wineglass from the Hellebore Era” [p. 162]).

The book is also copiously illustrated by Pechaček himself, in a style that variously recalls woodcuts or illuminated manuscripts, further contributing to the book’s overall tone. (I only wish that these illustrations had been published in color.) Adding to this medieval atmosphere are the interspersed short extracts drawn from chronicles that have been destroyed, or lessons and stories that have been forgotten. As the title of one such extract has it, “A Treatise of the Doctors of Grey House (But as the Doctors Are Dead, It Is Forgotten), Concerning Honey” (p. 52). These interpolations in particular are an effective way of conveying snippets of the palace’s long history and also what is happening in the background or middle ground of the book, leading to a situation where the reader is increasingly concerned about the Beast’s impending arrival—and has suspicions about the Beast’s identity—while many of the palace’s denizens remain ignorant of the same.

Notably, the book’s plot pivots on transformations: transformations in characters’ ranks and offices, but also transformations in their very states of being. Many of the miracles in the palace offer immediate transformations when they are used, but they are only at the extreme end of the spectrum. People start out one thing and become another, and that is taken in stride by everyone else around them, because such transformations are a normal part of the world. But in The West Passage, crucially, that capacity for transformation is closely associated with queerness. While that may be a break with actual medieval literature (which isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of incidents in medieval literature that seem queer to contemporary eyes), queerness is absolutely taken as normal within the world of the palace. That queerness encompasses everything from same-sex sexuality to people changing their gender, which some people routinely do as part of taking up their offices. One character reflects that he never sought higher office within the palace because he wanted to remain male; and the Guardians of the West Passage are all female, no matter what gender they may have been born as.

Ultimately, if Pechaček traffics in medieval elements and tips his cap to Gormenghast in more ways than one, then, The West Passage carves its own distinctive place in the fantasy landscape. When one character looks back on it from the outside at a distance, the palace stands proud, alone, under its own weather. Similarly, singular and weird in the best way, The West Passage is a book that deserves to be savored for the unique achievement that it is.