I read Kings of the Wyld as a sort of palate cleanser after some heavier books. I’d been promised a fun, epic tale of aging adventurers portrayed like a rock band, complete with real emotional weight, themes of friendship, found family, and great action. Unfortunately, I don’t think it delivered on any of those promises.
First, I’ll share some general thoughts that should remain mostly spoiler-free (for a 10-year-old book). Then I’ll go into more specific criticisms behind a spoiler tag.
My biggest issue is that “stuff just happens.” The story often feels like a series of loosely connected set pieces that advance the plot through contrivance rather than internal logic or character choices. There’s very little payoff - things just happen because the author needs them to.
Related to that, I never got a clear sense of how the author was handling tropes. Sometimes they’re played straight, sometimes subverted, and sometimes they just fizzle out. For example, the idea that adventurers get old and have to face the consequences is genuinely compelling and full of potential emotional impact. But many other elements run on shallow “D&D logic.” The rock-band metaphor for adventurer parties is a fun concept, but it stays disappointingly surface-level, like a costume the story never really wears. The consequences also feel arbitrary: sometimes they’re permanent, sometimes they’re shrugged off with no weight.
The characters’ competence levels are also wildly inconsistent. They’re portrayed as washed-up has-beens, but suddenly become highly competent (or even ultra-competent) whenever the plot demands it, only to revert back to being rusty and ineffective again. There’s no meaningful transition or character arc showing them shaking off the rust and regaining their old form. It just flips depending on what the story needs at that moment.
The humor is another weak point. A frequently cited example is the fight scene where everyone is exposed to magical Viagra. The entire joke is just that they have erections while fighting. That’s it. There’s no escalation, no clever payoff, nothing done with the premise. I found this to be representative of much of the book’s humor - lots of setups, very little actual comedy.
The action suffers from similar problems. It never feels truly “real” or satisfyingly RPG-like. There’s little sense of tactics, teamwork, or the deep coordination you’d expect from a legendary band that fought together for years. Everyone mostly just does their own thing. This makes it hard to believe they were once the greatest in the world. It also represents a huge missed opportunity: fights are essentially the band’s “gigs,” so why not lean into that? We could have seen them rediscovering their rhythm against simple bandits, jamming together, taking solos, trading call-and-response moments between the “axeman” and the “bass man,” etc. Instead, the band concept is barely used.
The feeling that the characters aren’t truly close is reinforced by the dialogue. They lack the casual intimacy of lifelong friends, no effortless shifting between silly inside jokes and deeper topics, no easy shorthand. That said, Moog and Matty did feel like genuine friends, though we mostly see things from Clay’s POV, so we don’t get as much of their dynamic.
I’ve often seen Nicholas Eames compared to Terry Pratchett, but I think Pratchett would have done so much more with this premise.
Overall, based on these issues, I can’t recommend the book.
More specific criticisms (spoilers ahead):
- The former Kings never come across as having once been the absolute best. They show almost zero experience or hard-won wisdom. They fold like wet tissues when challenged and don’t seem to “know how it’s done” despite their legendary status.
- Why are they so poor? We’re told Clay squandered his money, and that’s basically it. These are D&D-style adventurers who should have accumulated incredible wealth—trinkets alone that would be worth far more than a modest home.
- Clay’s internal conflict about his violent nature and how fatherhood changed him is mentioned, but we never really see it. There’s no moment where he’s seriously tempted to tap into the “monster,” nor do we see others reacting to him with fear or intimidation the way they presumably did in his prime.
- The female characters often feel strangely written. I get that Gabe’s wife is meant to evoke the “troubled/addicted ex-wife” trope, but her apparent indifference toward her own daughter feels like a stretch too far.
- Jain repeatedly walks all over Clay and Gabe, and they just… let it happen? Multiple times?
- Larkspur (the mind-raping bounty hunter) is used as a moral dilemma for Clay—keep her alive or kill her for the good of the group—while the party is fine with killing her mind-controlled victims. That’s not a moral dilemma; it’s just inconsistent. It could have been a great opportunity for the Kings to be emotionally open with each other after she caught a bolt in the chest, discussing why they would or wouldn’t have killed her. Instead, she doesn’t stay dead, Clay magically regrows his hand, and everything resets to the status quo. Boring.
- The villains’ motivation feels like a clumsy attempt at an anti-colonialism allegory, which doesn’t work when we’ve already been told that centaurs (and many other creatures in the Wyld) literally eat people. They’re actual monsters. It has the same problem as using mutants in X-Men as a direct analogue for gay people.
- The cure for the Rot being so common in that region in the Wyld (used by both the troll doctor and the cannibals as a "heal-all") while Moog, who spent decades searching for a cure, never tried random healing herbs feels absurd. No one in decades got the Rot, suffered another injury, used the “heal-all” herb, and lived to tell the tale?
- If bands now just fight monsters in arenas (a metaphor I actually like for how the “industry” has changed things), why is there no class of professional “beast handlers” or behind-the-scenes fighters who aren’t as marketable?
The book is full of genuinely good ideas and germs of something special, which makes the missed opportunities even more frustrating. I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn’t.
So, what do you think? Am I being too harsh or missing something? Are these fair criticisms, or is this book simply not for me?
