Recently, I finished a book that is entirely too hard to describe. Not that I can't, just that it won't make much sense because for a majority of the book nothing made sense.

Which is why I loved it.

We have been craving something inventive and new in fantasy. Something that isn't brooding shadow daddies and chosen ones and grimdark and dragon Europe. A deviation from stories of magic and wizards and court intrigue that makes us think, gives us something to chew on, forces us to change what we conceive of as fantasy.

Benjamin Liar gave us that in The Failures. Tenfold, he gave us something that actually feels new in fantasy. Nothing makes sense, he explains very little, but in a way where it doesn't matter and the inventiveness of his world is enough to string along my curiosity for over 500 pages. We have a desolate mountain world, automata, immortal gods, superpowered beings called Behemoths, world-ending giants, portals, sorcerers that vanished, a sun covered in buildings, a universe bereft of sky.

Liar demands a lot of his readers in this book, but he rewards you with beautiful prose and fun, unique characters that I fell in love with. He leans into their failures, the things they get wrong, they ways their human nature interferes with them doing the right thing. We get a woven story that is stretched between timelines and characters, slowly converging and revealing to us that there is a quest we are going to learn about and it failed spectacularly. Now, the ghosts of that quest are coming back to haunt everyone. The worst part?

Nobody knows what the right move is next.

I want to talk about the characters, but I feel to do so is to betray some special moments in the book that you really have to be there to understand. Suffice it to say, you will be meeting a lot of people and people-adjacent characters. I loved The Killers' POVs. I love how he has this gritty, complicated cast of characters that slowly converge and when you realize who they all are, you will actually gasp. His use of portals and this peculiar arcane mystery of lost knowledge and dead Ages is fascinating. We learn about Dirt Magic and Silver Magic and Old Gold and this entire lexicon of terms that is unique to his world, a language that is special to these characters and people that I don't see anywhere else.

I think my favorite thing about this book is the intensity of the world building. If you love a layered, complex, dreamlike world with tons of lore you will only start to pull apart in book 1? This is for you. Liar created this gigantic space all contained within the fabled Mountain that blocks out the sky. He gives you pieces without betraying the whole because part of the journey in The Wanderlands series is the story of the world. To explain hierarchy and location and kingdoms and portals would be to give away the plot and the story, which he is allowing to unfold as he teaches you about the quest our... characters... must go on.

I don't care to say "heroes" because all of them are anything but. West and Candle and Winter and Bear and all of them are flawed with a history that isn't exactly heroic and where nobody knows who is making the "right choice". Liar does an excellent job of showing you right and wrong are, often, dependent on your perspective about a problem. That is one of my favorite themes - the flexibility of morality and human nature. His characters are all spectacularly gray. Even the character we consider a villain or villain-adjacent is one I found myself rooting for several times. He twists you and turns you until it's very difficult to articulate why one person is "right" and another is "wrong".

The Failures sets up something so unique to fantasy that it has to be read to be understood. I cannot go into a lot of detail because the detail is the story. This book is ambitious as hell and very well written. Though I found Liar repeating themes and details and moments a lot, I can see why the choice was made to do it. I have a memory like a steel trap and I read fast, but if you're a slower reader and things get tangled? I can see losing track of the details that are so critical to his tale. Still, it never muted the beautiful, lyrical writing style of Liar, which was something I deeply loved. It called back Tamsyn Muir or Hiron Ennes for me, two authors I adore. He writes in such a sing-song way that fits the story fantastically. Everything in this tale is familiar, yet alien. Ours, yet not ours. Like looking at a TV remote underwater. The things we anticipate or think we understand bend just slightly until they become something new and foreign, demanding we consider what is "normal" in this world versus our own. The way Liar writes is so well suit for this task that it made the experience of trying to hold onto everything he says... charming? I think that's the right word.

The Failures is a story that's all its own. It's demanding, but it rewards you with a delightfully complicated world, characters that really shine and test your morality and patience, and sets you off on an adventure where you truly don't know what the correct answer is - or if there even is one at all.