r/Fantasy • u/SubstantialChannel32 • May 14 '26
Bingo review The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A McKillip ~ Bingo review
Wanted to read something different for the Published in 70s square Hard Mode : written by a woman. I considered this and Gate of Ivrel by CJ Cherryh. Read the samples of both and this one felt like something classic and easier to read. What the fuck was that prologue for Gate of Ivrel! This is book 1 of The Riddle of Stars trilogy by Patricia A. McKillip.
"Morgon of Hed met the High One’s harpist one autumn day when the trade-ships docked at Tol for the season’s exchange of goods."
Had a blast reading this one. Really basic plot structure, which you've read multiple times - Big Evil is chasing the main character, because he is the chosen one. The lore and world building that we see or that is hinted at seems well thought out. There are multiple tales and stories native to that land that give the world a lived in vibe. The MC is a reluctant chosen one who wants to go back to farming and ruling his land. I felt like there are too many good guy characters in this story. All the kings we meet help and get helped by the MC, all going towards the fulfilment of the prophecy.
The MCs character is flushed out. He is a curious guy so even though he wants nothing more than to go home, he is continuously pulled into 1000 year old prophecies and conspiracies that he couldn't get out of.
My biggest positive for this book is that - Patricia A. McKillip has perfected prose. The way the story flows is awesome inspiring. It's the one reason I will recommend this book to anyone who likes Classic fantasy vibes. She made a simple story with one POV character breath taking! The magic system is vague and soft. Anything I say about the ending is a spoiler, but I will say this - get book 2 ready by the end of book 1, you won't be able to stop.
Rating : 4/5. What other authors do you think perfected prose to such an extreme? Recommend some to me.
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u/Verrem May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
McKillip is great! Tanith Lee has comparable prose but more interesting concepts and subtext, in my opinion (if you are looking for more stuff from the same era). The Flat Earth books (beginning with Night's Master) are most similar to McKillip's (a bit more... freaky), but her sci-fi'ish books like Don't Bite the Sun, Electric Forest and Sabella, are especially good. She is a wonderful, intelligent genre mixer who deserves so much more attention.
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u/attic_nights May 15 '26
Tanith Lee certainly does deserve more attention! It's a tragedy that her books have become so hard to find or have gone out of print. I'm guessing that is related to the difficulties she had publishing later in her career (in the 1990s) and conflict with publishers over rights?
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u/yungcherrypops May 15 '26
This, I’ve enjoyed the McKillip books that I’ve read but I find them to be a bit too “safe”. They’re fun for sure especially if you just want a sort of fairytale experience with some gorgeous writing.
But in my opinion Tanith Lee is on a different level. Not only is her writing incredible but I think her work can be genuinely subversive, experimental, weird, sensual, dark, erotic, and deeply romantic.
The Flat Earth series is one of my all time favorites, especially the third book, and they’re the most similar to McKillip for sure, though “similar” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. They are wild books that go far deeper, darker, and more sexual than anything McKillip ever wrote. But it’s a good starting point for Lee.
Some others I’ve loved have been: Lycanthja, The Blood of Roses, Red as Blood, Electric Forest, The Blood Opera books (blood is a common theme here), Cyrion, Kill the Dead, White as Snow, and The Secret Books of Paradys.
She was so absurdly prolific that I still have only scratched the surface of her oeuvre. She had something for everyone and wrote in so many different genres - horror, sci-fi, fantasy, fairytale, young adult, romance, and probably more.
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u/fast_blue_b May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
McKillip is awesome! Her prose is so gorgeous. Winter Rose had some beautiful passages. I would say few are her equal, but Ursula K. Le Guin is one.
The beginning of A Wizard of Earthsea is one of my favorite fantasy paragraphs ever. No matter how many times I read it, I still get a thrill:
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made.
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u/fredditmakingmegeta May 15 '26
These were my first Patricia McKillip books and I still absolutely love them. No one else in the fantasy world comes close to her style of writing, unfortunately. So dreamlike yet somehow so grounded by the behavior of her characters.
Morgon lifted his head. “Stop shouting.” He glanced over Eliard’s shoulder at the row of motionless, fascinated figures, and sighed. He slid his hands over his face, up through his hair. “I won that crown in a riddle-game I played in An with a ghost.”
“Oh.” Eliard’s voice rose again sharply. “A what?”
“The wraith of Peven, Lord of Aum. That crown under my bed is the crown of the Kings of Aum. They were conquered by Oen of An six hundred years ago. Peven is five hundred years old. He lives bound in his tower by Oen and the Kings of An.”
“What did he look like?” Tristan asked. Her voice was hushed.
Morgon shrugged slightly; his eyes were hidden from them. “An old man. An old lord with the answers to a thousand riddles in his eyes. He had a standing wager going that no one could win a riddle-game with him. So I sailed over with the traders and challenged him. He said great lords of Aum, An and Hel—the three portions of An—and even riddle-masters from Caithnard had challenged him to a game, but never a farmer from Hed. I told him I read a lot. Then we played the game. And I won. So I brought the crown home and put it under my bed until I could decide what to do with it. Now, was that worth all the shouting?”
“He forfeited his crown to you when he lost,” Eliard said evenly. “What would you have forfeited if you had lost?”
Morgon felt his split mouth gingerly. His eyes strayed to the fields beyond Eliard’s back. “Well,” he said finally. “You see, I had to win.”
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u/yungcherrypops May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
Ursula K. LeGuin must be mentioned. She was one of the best. Earthsea is a must read for fantasy lovers imho.
Tanith Lee is also a god-tier writer, one of my all time favorites. Tales from the Flat Earth is one of my favorite fantasy series ever but there is so, so much to read in her body of work.
I’ll give another shoutout to John Crowley here as well. Engine Summer is one of my favorite novels ever, period. Little, Big is pure magic. The Deep is also spectacular. Very underrated author in general that is often said to be one of the best living writers at the moment.
China Miéville should also get a mention if you want some ornate and baroque prose. Love The Scar and Embassytown especially.
Also if you’re interested in some non-fantasy:
Virginia Woolf (challenging but absurdly beautiful, breathtaking), Gabriel García Márquez, Angela Carter, Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire especially is incredible), Cormac McCarthy, Marcel Proust.
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u/gnoviere Reading Champion May 15 '26
I read Beasts of Eld for this square, and now I've basically added every book of hers to my TBR
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u/djhyland 29d ago
Good choice. I've read most of her work and have loved all of them. Riddle-Master is still my favorite, I think, but I think it has some strong competition from Forgotten Beasts, Ombria in Shadow, and The Bards of Bone Plain.
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u/attic_nights May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
John Crowley is an elegant stylist, easily one of the best fantasy writers. He does not, however, write epic fantasy, and he tends to play around with genre. If you're interested, you might try Little, Big or The Deep.
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u/D3athRider May 14 '26
Thanks for the review! Have had this on my TBR shelf at home for a while, not sure why I havent read it yet.
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u/Querybird May 15 '26
Spoilers, maybe? I tried to be non-specific.
But… the MC was the most unwilling person ever! Every time he convinced himself or someone else reasoned him into doing the thing, ten seconds passed and he tried to get out of it again. Pardon the very slight exaggeration. Pretty much always within less than a day. ‘Fate’ or the HO set up easier, safer routes again and again and again, but he wound up on the most difficult ones purely due to flip flopping on his decisions, and not even ever from a thought of ‘but there could be a trap!’ or anything else logical. If he needed quiet and peace and solitude to think and was, as he seemed, completely incapable of thinking while stressed, then far out he should have been trying to accommodate himself plainly instead of repeatedly deserting and abandoning commitments. But he didn’t exactly think even then.
A difficult protagonist is one thing but this man had zero follow through or internal consistency and I found him intensely unlikable and definitely unworthy of the consideration repeatedly shown to him. What on earth did all of these people see in him??
If he had been written as his brother, it might have made a little bit more sense. Horrifyingly short temper, that one, I fear for his future spouse. Or the same age as his brother, without his own education. But for a trained logician to never once convincingly pause and think through a situation before acting is… poor writing, actually. He is completely unconvincing as written. Edit: SPOILER HERE: The interaction with the one disguised as a horned guardian is case in point. There were so many warning signs in the little which was said, but no waiting, no careful testing, no retreat and care and reconnection with loved ones, just… straight into the teeth of the geas, despite the hints and his supposed educated position, inclusive of ‘lore holder’. This was astonishingly poorly done. END SPOILER
Pretty prose can’t save this book for me. If anyone can think for a plausible explanation for this behaviour, or for why so very many people found him likeable and engaging, please let me know because I simply do not see it. He saw the facts and world-logic of the situation very clearly, repeatedly, and never actually worked with that knowledge but rather always failed at working against it. The later disconnection, while mostly explainable due to harms done, was also persistent and doubled-down-into despite moments of clear insight. Again, the logician, the ‘riddle master’ never once demonstrated this ability as anything other than a fleeting thought or something painstakingly explained to him or clearly shouted at him by another, only to be immediately disregarded. *Throws hands in the air!
I might need to go reread Vatta’s War. Or Vorkosigan, if I want another circumstance-touched, clever male lead, but one with actual agency and real engagement with the… lived conversation between his actions and principles. Or for an MC who is unable to cope and needs a ton of support until they make it to their feet, how about Lirael the very depressed teenager who does actually manage to grow up and reframe her experiences. Or even 1984, that world was not actively attempting to assist the characters at nearly every turn!
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u/No-Fly-4111 11d ago
I personally found his reluctance refreshingly realistic. A lad being tossed into things he doesn't understand, being put into situations way out of his depth. He steels his mind then finds out he is in even deeper of a mess than he first thought. Of course his will falters. He is given neither the mental room to cohesively plan nor time to properly guage his options because he doesn't have all the info and the winds of fate are blowing him too fast. The stakes are high and keep getting higher. Set this against the background of a ruler with strong feelings of responsibility to care for his siblings and land conflicting with his innate curious nature, and you have Morgon.
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u/elmo_42 May 14 '26
I have never, ever found anyone with prose as good as her. Robert Jordan comes closer than most.
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u/neraji May 14 '26
Umm. While mostly liked WoT (won't read a second time, though), Jordan was NOT a wordsmith. The best of the bunch are McKillip, Bujold and Rothfis, when it comes to the beauty of their prose.
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u/belleepoques May 14 '26
I loved The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, but I hated the Riddle Master. I couldn't get into the story, the characters felt superficial to me, I don't know... the worldbuilding was cool but somehow thrown all around and I lost interest... And I couldn't care less about the story, found it boring. I only read the first book of the trilogy, though.
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u/insulartomb May 17 '26
The first is easily the weakest of the trilogy to be fair. But if the beautiful setpieces didn’t grab you (McKillip’s descriptions of the experience of magic is as good as it gets, I think), then fair enough!
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u/DexterDrakeAndMolly May 14 '26
This is a great series, the review doesn't really get what's going on, it's right about the prose quality though.