By Demons Possessed – P.C. Hodgell

Tai-tastigon is where this series began, in the brilliant “God Stalk”. You’ve read “God Stalk”, right? (If you haven’t, seek it out!) Its protagonist is Jame, who cannot walk past an apple cart without upsetting it. (If she turns to avoid it, turning will cause the cart horse to spook, and set off an apple-cart armageddon. It’s a combination of personal and mystical propensities.)

Tai-tastigon is a city with numerous Gods. That’s not “people worship many Gods”, but “there are many actual Gods and they are accessible.” Jame’s people are obligate monotheists - they don’t particularly like their God, but they weren’t give a choice in the matter - which makes the demonstrable existence of other Gods in Tai-tastigon a problem for her.

“God Stalk” also introduces us to a much-larger problem: There is a being known as “Perimal Darkling” who destroys worlds - or perhaps universes. Jame’s people, the Kencyrath, got drafted by their God millenia ago to stop Perimal Darkling, and they’ve been losing ever since, retreating and leaving behind a chain of unmade worlds.

In “By Demons Possessed”, Jame returns to Tai-tastigon. The city is - literally - falling apart and Jame, who has urgent responsibilities elsewhere, has been coerced to come and help.

“By Demons Possessed” was not written to be accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with the earlier books. The reader is expected to understand statements like “the Builders were destroyed by rathorns whose screams were amplified by imus”. So the target audience consists of readers following the entire story.

This is the wrong book to advance that story. From the perspective of the overall plot, the book starts with Jame being about to go south to establish her status. She has a side-adventure in Tai-tastigon. She returns late, and will have to hurry (or pull a mystical rabbit out of her hat) to get south in time. From the perspective of that larger plot, it’s the wrong side-adventure. Much of Jame’s growth in the earlier books comes from acquiring connections to the larger Kencyr society. She has friends and allies. She has responsibilities. She has (Gods help her) relatives. This book is a reversion to the young Jame who dashes about alone trying to put out more fires than she starts.

The elements of this book that do advance the overall story are contained in three conversations - perhaps two conversations and an audience - about the nature of the Gods. The conversations are extremely important, because they raise doubt about the war for which the Kencyrath were drafted, but it feels as if this book was written just to provide scaffolding for those conversations.