Book Review: The Lords of Midnight

Drew Wagar’s marvellous official novelisation of Mike Singleton’s 1984 adventure strategy game that stands on its own as a fantasy epic. Do you want dawn?

The Lords of Midnight is an adventure strategy game that was released for the ZX Spectrum in 1984, written and created by Mike Singleton. This 2018 novel - the first in the Midnight Chronicles - by Drew Wagar is the official novelisation of that classic game. The story behind the creation of this book is a fascinating tale all on its own, but one I’ll leave to Drew (contained within the book’s Author’s Note). Now, I need to be clear here: I never played the game - it came out four years before I was born - in fact I hadn’t heard of it until relatively recently. I did give the mobile port a cursory play, and I have heard much about the game lately from Drew’s Twitch livestreams, but that’s about it. So for much of this review, I guess you could say the book’s status as a videogame novelisation is largely irrelevant, as I won’t be able to comment on how well it tells the game’s story or utilises Mike Singleton’s lore. I’ll be approaching it from the perspective of an epic fantasy reader and fan of Drew’s sci-fi work.

Blurb

The land of Midnight was cursed into eternal winter many thousands of moons ago. The survivors battle hardship, famine and war; having beaten back Doomdark, the Witchking, in a battle that lives on in legend. But now at the Winter Solstice, neither the Lords of Midnight, nor the Fey of the forests can resist his greatest weapon, the ice-fear. Their only hope rests in ancient lore, the myth of a long lost house and the legend of the Moonprince.

Review

First of all, this was a fantastic read. I was sucked right into the world immediately. Drew’s writing is wonderfully evocative and his character work is great - something I already knew from reading his Shadeward Saga, and I’m glad to say it persists here. The Lords of Midnight is a big ol’ slab of a book at over 530 pages, certainly earning the title “epic”. There’s huge worldbuilding, a ton of characters, multiple large-scale battles and sieges, fantasy races aplenty, and a plot that wears its influences on its sleeve while also holding its own. The pacing does a great job of keeping things moving; I binge-read the second half especially over the course of a couple of days, and that’s much faster than I would normally read a book of this length.

The book is written in a style that I can only really describe as… regal? Drew’s prose in this has that kind of a quality to it, hearkening back to classic fantasy epics, which fits very nicely. The dialogue of the characters largely follows this trend too, where everything has gravitas. I quite liked it.

Leading on from that, characters: There are a lot of characters in this, and I applaud Drew for taking on the mammoth task of dealing with so many. There are a great deal of viewpoint characters, more than I would normally expect to find. It’s something I can see working quite well in a strategy game, but threatens to become unwieldy in a book. Drew handles it very well, each viewpoint switch is clearly defined and you get oriented quickly to where you are. It helps as well that the major characters are distinct enough that you never really get confused as to who’s who.

There’s a huge influence from Tolkien in The Lords of Midnight, from the fantasy races present, to the character archetypes and central MacGuffins. The book is under no illusions about being a pastiche on The Lord of the Rings, and in fact, leans into it with absolute self awareness - I noticed a few Easter Eggs to that effect. So we’ve got the race of men, the typical stoic medieval nobility, here called the Free. Then there are the Fey of the forests, an elvish race, quick and nimble with an affinity for nature. We have the archetypal dark lord - here called Doomdark the Witchking, which is as marvelously on-the-nose as you’re ever going to get. His armies of minions are called the Foul, or the Doomguard, which share very basic similarities with Tolkien’s uruk-hai in terms of their single-minded brutality (though here I would argue it’s handled better - the Doomguard are actually humans bent and twisted by the powers of the Witchking into puppets, rather than being a potentially problematic “evil race”). Then we have the wizards, here called the Wise. There’s also the characters themselves that you can definitely point to and say “that one’s like Aragorn” or “there’s this book’s Gollum” etc…

I don’t think any of this works to the book’s detriment - quite the opposite. This is lore originally made back in the 1980s for a Lord of the Rings style videogame, after all. But this book takes those basic Tolkienesque building blocks and successfully creates something all its own in the same manner as the Wheel of Time or Shannara and others.

The worldbuilding is handled exceptionally well. Everything about the land of Midnight and the wider world is built upon smoothly and appropriately with no large infodumps, and the epic scale of it all is great. I love it when books have deep lore that peels back in layers and you see that there are older and wiser things in the world than what everyone thinks is the oldest and wisest thing. I think that’s one of my favourite SFF tropes. There’s a few different soft magic systems in the book, from the overt magic of the Wise, to the mysticism of the forests in which the Fey reside. None of it is explained, none of it needs to be, and it’s all used appropriately.

As for the characters themselves, I very much enjoyed how the burden of responsibility is shown to weigh heavily on Luxor in particular. Morkin was a breath of fresh air away from the stoicism of the Lords of the Free, keeping the book from becoming too dour. The personality of the dragon Farflame was absolutely brilliant, and made me laugh out loud a few times, cutting through the building tension in the second half of the book. He quickly became my favourite character.

The action is quick and pacey, with twists and turns that keep you on your toes. The overarching plot may be predictable in a general sense, but character deaths still stung and the emotional beats were well earned.

Two slight negatives that didn’t quite work for me: there’s a fair bit of repetition in the book, and by that I mean a lot of proclamations and pep-talks, a lot of rousing speeches around each major battle that are all very similar in content. The battles themselves were great, but perhaps a few too many instances of speeches that end with the Lords of the Free unsheathing their swords, holding them aloft and chanting “For Midnight!” The other thing is that there was a very, very under-the-radar romance subplot going on that I barely noticed, the resolution of which I felt was too quick.

Other than that, a very enjoyable read indeed. If you’re in the mood for a pacey, unashamedly Tolkienesque, epic quest fantasy then I absolutely recommend checking this out. I already have the sequel, Doomdark’s Revenge, sitting on my shelf. So I’ll definitely be reading that soon. Bravo!