Gods of the Wyrdwood by R.J. Barker

Review by Jordan S.

Gods of the Wyrdwood is my second R.J. Barker book. I read the first book of the Tide Child series, The Bone Ships, earlier this year and enjoyed it a lot. It is rightly considered a masterpiece and I was immediately drawn into the world that Barker was crafting. However, my local library didn’t have the next book in the series so I moved on to this, the first book in his current trilogy, The Forsaken.

This book follows Cahan, the forester. He’s a man who lives on the periphery of his community, in an isolation both self-enforced and maintained by the leadership of the nearby village. However, when a long-standing conflict between Cahan and the community results in him being tasked with guarding a shipment of goods to the nearest city in the planet-wide forest that is the setting of this book, he finds himself having to deal with his mysterious past and the powerful forces that are hunting down anyone who doesn’t worship the god Tarl-an-Gig.

If Barker’s worldbuilding was immense in the Tide Child books, this book blows it out of the water (pun not intended). I immediately felt like I needed to create my own glossary of the various terms that Barker threw out with little immediate explanation for most. Some are words that mean something different in Cahan’s world than ours, such as “Cowl.” Others are completely alien words such as garaurs, marants, and leorics. It’s a lot to keep track of but once you get a hang for the vocabulary of the world the book really begins to flow in a fantastic way.

The action is thrilling and there’s a brilliant magic system buried in this book, underneath the dense vocabulary. The first battle scene in the book is one that was shocking and provided a glimpse into the world that thankfully made the pace of the book increase significantly. The book really flowed after that and I was grabbed by the tale of how Cahan’s long-buried past was beginning to impact his carefully cultivated isolation.

This book ultimately feels like just a prelude to what I imagine is coming in the subsequent two books of the trilogy. There are hints throughout the book of something dark stirring in this world and I can only imagine what that will look like in the follow-up, Warlords of Wyrdwood. If you are looking for a complex fantasy novel, probably best described as the complexity of Malazan in an even more alien world, then I think you’d probably enjoy this book a lot. However, it is a book that at times demands patience and the ability to continue reading even if you don’t necessarily understand all the vocabulary that the author is throwing at you. If that’s not what you are looking for, I might suggest looking elsewhere for your next fantasy read.