Imagine Francis Bacon did the concept art for a version of Tolkein’s Minas Tirith that had been squashed from its long-climbing spiral into a chaotic network of neighborhoods, squares, alleys, zones, warrens and castles. Imagine if it was contained by a wall that was too short to keep out any real invaders, and imagine if no one knew how the wall got there. Imagine if that city was filled with both humans and strange beasts, some relatively familiar such as dragons, vampyrs and manticores and others are, as far as I know, unique to this world like – such as living street lights, the Indigo King and the professor without a head who speaks through a snake hosted in the body of a grad student. Imagine pairs of stone spires could snap together like jaws, that the walls move in the night, that there are neighborhoods that have vanished yet can be visited if you know the right place to go. This is “Wickhills,” the setting for Premee Mohamed’s new novel and one of the most compelling fictional worlds I’ve ever read.
No one knows Wickhills better than our protagonist, Vycol Ferec. Ferec is an agent of Seaborn, Wickhills’s version of the CIA, and he is a damn good spy. So good that he is assigned to recover a refugee from St. Barothain, one of the other six cities and a strict authoritarian regime, who carries a tool with the potential to destroy the city completely. But not everyone in the powers that be of Wickhills have the same goal for this mysterious tool or its creator, and Ferec and his team find themselves on the wrong side of a conspiracy that might go all the way to the top of Wickhills and St. Barothain.
What follows is a thrilling race for the truth that has all the twists, double-crosses, contests of wits, clever gadgets, shady associates and daring escapes you’d expect from the best spy thrillers. Mohamed is even able to deploy a plucky band of misfits without it feeling like a trope. We have our world-wise and world-weary Ferec, his ancient manticore handler, a young thief, a vampyr, an agent more at home in the archives than the field and, of course, a young man just trying to do the right thing who finds himself way way way over his head, all working together to protect an extremely grumpy scientist and his dangerous discovery.
For all that it confronts questions of identity, power and political intrigue, Wickhills is, in some ways, a love story – because so much of it is driven by Ferec’s love for his city. From the castles to the mysterious monoliths and statues to the baffling alleyways to the collapsing structures in neglected neighborhoods to the mahogany-auraed dining clubs to the vast city beneath the sewers to the sewers themselves to the botanical gardens to the trick doors, the living street lights, the very cobblestones, Ferec loves it all. He risks everything and loses much to protect the only thing in his life that has always been with him, the city of Wickhills. See, a love story.
As compelling as the characters are, as thrilling as the plot is, as intriguing as the science behind the potential weapon is, ultimately this is a story about place. It’s a story that asks questions about how cities and communities are truly created, what it takes to protect them, and what happens when the people who live in them disagree on the answers to those questions with the people in charge. Mohamed could write a hundred books set in Wickhills and not nearly exhaust the potential she creates in this one. Perhaps this is the most (maybe only) sympathetic aspect of Ferec. Of course he loves his city. How could he not? After all, as we read Mohamed’s brilliant novel, we fall in love with Wickhills too.
A version of this story appeared originally on the Porter Square Review of Books. Buy “Wickhills” from Porter Square Books.
