blog: Tower of the Tyrant book review

src/content/blog/2026-02-04-book-review-the-tower-of-the-tyrant-jt-greathouse.md

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+---
+title: 'Book Review: "The Tower of the Tyrant" - J.T. Greathouse'
+date: 2026-02-04T20:37:14.936Z
+slug: 2026-02-04-book-review-the-tower-of-the-tyrant-jt-greathouse
+author: Thomas Wilson
+tags:
+  - book-review
+
+---
+I pre-ordered *The Tower of the Tyrant* (by J.T. Greathouse), not realising quite how chonky it was (just under 600 pages, and she's not a small hardback).  Which is why it sat on my bookshelf for several months.  Unfortunately, during those months, I polished off some of the best modern fantasy books I have read in the last decade[^1], so to be honest I was a little scared I'd come to this book with an unfairly skewed perspective.
+
+I ended up really enjoying it for what it was: a stand alone fantasy novel with a focus on world-building and ideas.  We follow, among others, Fola, a scholar in search of clues for how to speak to the dead.  She stumbles into a long-standing haunting in a country that is definitely not Fantasy Wales.  We watch as the old ways of Fantasy Wales are threatened by the Fantasy Catholic Church, or perhaps the Fantasy Roman Empire.
+
+After crashing through so many good series last year - it was refreshing to read something designed to be stand alone.  Fantasy authors keep writing books in a series, and fantasy readers keep buying them.  It makes sense, they've set up characters and a world that they (and their readers) want to spend time in.  See also: long-running detective series, or crime thrillers.
+
+Although the book was a bit hefty, it was self-contained.  And the author takes a stab at some quite big themes: how do we make meaning from the stories we're told, when they're as pliable to (mis)interpretation as stories are?  Why does an absence of fame, renown, or glory bear down on us when all other material needs are met?  Can anything ever be *enough* for the human psyche?  What if a chaotic forest goddess lives in the body of a young tree woman?  
+
+It doesn't answer those things fully.  Not the first three at least, that last one is actually explored in quite thorough detail.  But we all know those questions can't really be answered.  It would be a weird way to measure the quality of modern genre fiction: does it definitively explain, and then overcome, our shared wrestling with identity, self, and happiness?
+
+Greathouse engages with these ideas just enough.  Shows you them from enough angles, in a way that makes you realise their complexity.  It's not "good" or "bad", it's just... human.  Which is hard to do when the central narrative of your fantasy book is creating a series of intertwined good-vs-bad conflicts at the personal, political, and spiritual levels.  Because it's *still* a fantasy book.  Greathouse shows us the ability of love to overcome adversity, and the thrill of adventure and battle (though the conflict scenes themselves always felt a little rushed or skipped-over) - while also giving us a good level of ambiguity.  It's a tough needle to thread, and he does a good job, even if the pacing is a little uneven in places.
+
+And then, blessedly - it ends.  It gives you enough ambiguity for you to colour in the edges, or perhaps even draw the rest of the map.  To go back to my point from earlier: so many authors seem intent to explore each corner of a person or history over 5+ books.  I love books that do this, and I find the closing of a long-running narrative arc to be really pleasing.  But the author has done all the imagining for me.  
+
+I don't think it was a perfectly written book.  I think the character development is front-loaded then almost rushed-through at the end.  I never felt, as I like to feel when reading fantasy, that my characters are actually in danger.  Some people died, yes - but the minute you get a point-of-view chapter from that one side character half-way through the book, you know what's about to happen[^2].  
+
+I think the ambiguity around the competing magic systems is interesting, but I'm not convinced it would withstand much scrutiny.  Some things can just be ✨ v i b e s ✨, but I worry that a little more explanation might have made it a bit too obvious that some of the central national/religious/political differences either didn't exist at all or couldn't exist.  
+
+It's fine and good to say "actually we were inventing distinctions over nothingness" - but *show* me.  Show me how all the bloody same they all are, and how the characters, or societies, not noticing or admitting their sameness is a problem they are both inventing and then suffering for.  I can think of one or two things that could be an allegory for.  Or show me actually they *are* all different things.  And if that's the case, why weren't more people using multiple kinds of magic?  It leaned hard into the idea that these things were once known, but the knowledge has since been lost and no trace of it has been rediscovered or guessed-at.
+
+All of that said, one of the reasons I adore sci-fi and fantasy as genres is their ability to pose fantastic scenarios and then allow very grounded themes to emerge in their exploration[^3].  It's sort of like how I recommend everyone read Juno Dawson because takes you on a great ride through witches fighting to the death, and then suddenly you realise you're having to think about what gender and prejudice in western societies look like.  
+This book gave me that feeling.  Greathouse didn't stick the landing, but I don't think they're trying to show you all the technical complexity of flying a plane and *not* having it end in pyrotechnics.  I think they're telling you a cool story on a bus home when you're eighteen years old, and neither of you are completely sober, and then they get off one stop before you, and you just sort of sit there and think about what they said as you finish your journey.  That's a great feeling, and a rare one.  
+
+Books are so cool, dude.
+
+
+[^1]: Namely Joe Abercrombie's *The Age of Madness* trilogy.
+
+[^2]: They die, dear reader.  We may see it coming a mile off, but they did not.
+
+[^3]: My favourite example of this is Peter V. Brett's *Demon Cycle* series, which asks the question "what if demons came out at night to eat people?" and then slowly walks you to "what if the divine leader of a theocratic society was forced to slowly encounter the idea that there is no god?".  I have yet to persuade anyone to read this series because apparently that's an *awful* way to sell something.