“How is a person changed by power?” asks Alex Pheby in the opening pages of Waterblack, the thought-provoking conclusion to his Cities of the Weft trilogy. “That is the question that occupies many of the pages of this book and those of its predecessors. […] Can a person remain a person when they have power over life and death?” (pp. 28-9).

Readers familiar with the first two volumes of Pheby’s weird fantasy series will know that the answer to this question will be anything but simple. Like Mordew (2020) and Malarkoi (2022)—the first two books in the Cities of the Weft trilogy—Waterblack takes place in a loosely Dickensian steampunk world with clear debts to Mervyn Peake’s midcentury Gormenghast novels (1946-1956). Nathan Treeves, godling and purported hero of the series, has been returned from death by Portia Hall, the Mistress of Malarkoi, and has been taken to the drowned city of Waterblack to assume his rightful place as Master of its dead. Once he has claimed this birthright, he will finally have what he has lacked for his entire life, from his time as a poor slum boy, through his tutelage under Sebastian Cope, the Master of Mordew, to his eventual death and imprisonment in the Master’s Tinderbox: the power to take vengeance on those who have wronged him.

I call Nathan the “purported” hero of Pheby’s trilogy because, for a main character, he occupies very little of this concluding novel. Pheby comes from a tradition of experimental and neo-modernist writing that stresses the value of radical innovations in language, imagery, and narrative form; and nowhere is this more apparent than in the shifts in point of view and elaborate paratext that structure Waterblack and its fellow novels. [1] Each of the Weft novels is dotted with glossaries, appendices, essays, interludes, character lists, summaries, and excerpts from notebooks. These narrative supplements can take up as much as a quarter of the novel and are decidedly non-optional (no matter Pheby’s occasional tongue-in-cheek remarks about skipping them). Key storylines are resolved in appendices, important plot details are conveyed in character summaries, and digressive academic essays provide us with commentary on the major themes of the novel. We don’t learn, for instance, what happens to Sebastian Cope, Portia Hall, and Nathan’s mother, Clarissa Delacroix—three of the main dramatis personae of the series—until the appendices that follow the main narrative. So, too, is the epic battle between the Eighth Atheistic Crusade of the Assembly, the gods of Malarkoi, and an army of angels created by Nathan—the very sort of titanic clash that would feature as the climax to many epic fantasy novels—subordinated to a concluding essay with the mock-academic title “A Consideration of the Dynamics of the Collapse Zone.”

Added to this are more traditional shifts in narrative perspective that are no less jarring for their familiarity. Pheby first introduced this technique in the second book of the trilogy, Malarkoi, when—after having killed off Nathan at the end of Book I—he replaced Nathan’s focalizing consciousness with that of his friends and erstwhile allies as they navigated the nested realms of Malarkoi’s Golden Pyramid and the Island of the White Hills. Unlike the shifting points of view common to much epic fantasy—in which the dispersal of narration across a wide cast of characters tends to signal both the vast scope of the action and, in some cases, a cynical rejection of any unifying moral code—Pheby’s transitions are intentionally alienating, so much so that it can be unclear at times where he is heading. [2] This is especially true of Waterblack, where Nathan’s perspective is displaced by those of would-be assassins, talking dogs, fragments of Assembly propaganda, and a fugitive ship captain—few of which directly comment on Nathan or progress the arc of his story toward any clear resolution. In this regard, Pheby seems to be taking his cue more from the weird fantasy of China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer, for whom pastiches of academic language and radical shifts in point of view function as ways of upending stock fantasy tropes and of stirring critical reflection in the reader (as, for instance, in the dueling footnotes of VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword [2006]).

To the extent that Waterblack has a focalizing perspective, it is lent not by Nathan but by Sharli, an assassin who played an extremely minor part in Book II. Pheby’s choice here may seem odd—Sharli only appears briefly in Malarkoi, at which point she is quickly killed by Clarissa during a botched attempt to avenge the death of Sharli’s former employer, Mr. Padge; and it is only in that middle novel’s appendices that we discover that the Sharli who died was not the “real” Sharli but an impostor, and that the original Sharli had been abducted by the shadowy Assembly, a technologically advanced utopia whose existence has been hinted at in the first two novels but never fully explained. Waterblack opens by picking up this dangling plot thread, offering us a full history of Sharli’s life up to her conscription into the Assembly. This life, we learn, has been one of constant abuse and deprivation—groomed as a child sacrifice in Malarkoi; enslaved in a nail factory in Mordew; led into a near-stint as a prostitute that is only averted by savagely murdering a would-be pedophilic assaulter; marched through a series of menial jobs in kitchens, slaughterhouses, and casinos; and, of course, trained as an assassin and eventually apprehended by the Assembly.

Pheby is coy as to why he casts Sharli as the central character in Waterblack. (“This is often the way with life, you will come to understand,” he writes about the choice at the beginning of the novel. “[P]eople to whom your attention has not been directed can have a direct and powerful influence over what happens to you in the future” [p. 29].) But it doesn’t take us long to see that Sharli’s life story is in many ways a reflection of Nathan’s, and that her narrative will tell us something about the disastrous effects of wanting and wielding power. Like Nathan, Sharli spends her formative years in the brutally exploitative, neo-Dickensian underworld of Mordew. Her ascent from enslaved factory worker to well-paid assassin allows Pheby to map the contours of this society in a much more meticulous way than in previous volumes of the series, showing us how the injustices Nathan suffered as a slum boy were underwritten by an extensive network of money, extortion, and predation that he only glimpsed in passing. In doing so, Pheby uses Sharli’s narrative to investigate a question Mordew had elided by granting Nathan superhuman magical abilities: In a world where those in power wield total control over the lives of the poor, how can one carve out any space of agency for oneself?

If Sharli is Pheby’s response to this question, then we may not like the answer. Because what Sharli’s story is, more than anything else, is an allegory of how those who are exploited by a deeply hierarchical capitalist system come to identify with the interests of their employers. In Sharli’s case, that employer is Mr. Padge, one of the central villains of Mordew and a character with no clear redeeming qualities. Sharli idolizes Padge for rescuing her from the brothels, and her professions of love for Padge are one of the more disturbing features of the novel. We readers know that Padge saved Sharli from a life of rape and drug addiction. But we know equally well that he has done so only to use Sharli to inflict some of the most horrific violence possible on his enemies (demands that will extend from poisonings and dismemberments all the way to infanticide). Sharli’s choice to idealize her life as an assassin and to adopt Padge’s needs as her own hint at a dark truth—that for Sharli, as for many who find themselves destitute and powerless, there may be only three options available in life: work docilely and be ground down by the wheels of capitalism; resist and be crushed; or seize what little power you can by acting as the willing enforcer to those with wealth and influence. Her love for Padge is in this respect a fetishization of power. It is an admission that to have power is better than to have nothing—even if what having “power” entails is perpetuating an immoral and inegalitarian system through theft, intimidation, and murder.

What Pheby seems to be asking us to recognize is that Nathan’s decision to wield magic—to “Itch the Spark,” in the novel’s parlance—is on a fundamental level the same decision that Sharli comes to when she elects to be Padge’s favorite assassin. The difficulty of Waterblack is that the novel refuses to come out and say this directly. We have been so preconditioned to empathize with Nathan by the first two volumes of the Weft trilogy that it can be hard to see him as anything but a victim—an unfortunate boy who has been cast aside by his parents, betrayed by his friends, and used for his magic. This perspective is initially established by the Dickensian framing of Mordew, which uses the pervasive squalor of the slums to make a moralistic critique of unrestrained capitalism, and which in tried-and-true Dickensian fashion holds up the kindhearted poor as exemplars of moral virtue. It is, furthermore, a perspective that is reinforced by the series’ similarities to epic fantasy, a resemblance which implicitly positions Nathan as a fated hero whose special gifts are destined to save the world. (There are just enough religious references in Waterblack to imagine Nathan as a Christ-like figure cast in the C. S. Lewis mold.)

But Nathan is no hero. In its most insidious aspect, the magic he controls is literally the power to violently reshape the world to suit one’s desires. This is what the members of the so-called Weftling Tontine, who include among their number the Master of Mordew and the Mistress of Malarkoi, have been doing for centuries: using the power of God to rewrite what is possible. In this, they are not all that dissimilar from capitalists like Padge or the factory owners, who claim total control over their workers’ bodies and use them to reshape the physical world to suit their needs. For Nathan to assume the mantle of Master of Waterblack would thus be to claim for himself the same right as the rest of the Tontine: to force the world to conform to his wants and needs. It would be to become—like Sharli—the abuser and the exploiter. (It is not for nothing that Pheby lists Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series as one of his favorite dark fantasies: For all their differences in tone and theme, both Pheby’s and Donaldson’s texts are about a hero who turns out to be a villain. [3])

The skill and complexity of Pheby’s narrative lies in its ability to present its characters as both victims of power and as its willing accomplices. In true modernist fashion, Pheby accomplishes this through pastiches of familiar literary genres that reveal how the narrative tropes we use to describe the world shape our understanding of that world. Thus, Nathan and Sharli are both portrayed as figures deserving of compassion when described in the sentimental mode common to both nineteenth-century fiction and much of today’s literary fiction; but when the pair are transported into the hyper-rationalist language of utopian social critique, they appear instead as parasites feeding on the spoils of power. This ultimately seems to be the purpose of including the Assembly in Waterblack (a faction that can otherwise come off as something between a superfluous plot thread and a deus ex machina). In contrast to the neo-Victorian world of Mordew—a society built on hyper-capitalist exploitation—the Assembly is a futuristic techno-utopia modeled more closely on science fiction than on fantasy. Leaning on the rhetorical affordances of science fiction, Pheby is able to level neo-Marxist criticisms against the foundational principles of Mordew and the other Weft cities: that they are built on competition rather than collective wellbeing; that they rely on a system that conceives of individuals as physical tools rather than as persons; that they instill a certain false consciousness in the people who inhabit them. How Pheby wants us to feel about these critiques can be a bit unclear. (The Assembly seems more egalitarian than the Weft Cities, but also more pedantic and inflexible in its ideology.) What is clear is that the inclusion of the Assembly provides Pheby with a science-fictional language through which to diagnose the limitations of fantasy as a genre—the most notable of which, from Pheby’s perspective, seems to be its indulgence in fantasies of omnipotent, dictatorial power. 

Waterblack won’t be for everyone. It is a novel that demands patience, reflection, and a willingness to forgo the comforts of plot. But for those readers open to ambitious, challenging novels full of big ideas, Waterblack will be greeted as a fitting conclusion to one of the landmark works of experimental fantasy of the twenty-first century, joining the likes of China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy (2000-2004), Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris novels (2001-2009), Michael Cisco’s The Narrator (2010), and Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall (2024). It is a series that sets a new standard for what is possible in fantasy; and it is a series whose legacy will be determined as much by the authors who find the need to grapple with it in the future as by its reception in the here and now.

Endnotes

[1] Alexandra Marraccini, “‘Mordew’ and the New Leftist Imaginary,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 19, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mordew-and-the-new-leftist-imaginary/ [return]

[2] I am thinking in particular of series such as George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire and Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen. [return]

[3] “The Best Dark Fantasy Books Recommended by Alex Pheby,” Five Books, January 27, 2025, https://fivebooks.com/best-books/dark-fantasy-alex-pheby/ [return]