Tales of New Stenchford, by Ben Rubin, is a sprawling comic fantasy built around a city that feels equal parts medieval kingdom, pop-culture junk drawer, political farce, and fever dream. The book follows a large cast, but Rizzle the Weasel serves as its scruffy gravitational center. He’s a homeless petty criminal who knows the city’s alleys, businesses, crooks, nobles, and monsters better than almost anyone. Early on, Rubin captures his relationship with New Stenchford nicely: while the citizens treat Rizzle as someone to avoid, “the streets themselves seemed to welcome him.” That idea ends up fitting the whole novel. Rizzle belongs to this filthy, dangerous, ridiculous place because he’s every bit as resourceful and morally flexible as the city itself.

The book’s biggest pleasure is its relentless world-building. New Stenchford is crowded with witches, orcs, trolls, vampires, talking spiders, cursed hybrids, corrupt officials, crime families, brothels, breweries, temples, sausage shops, and fountains nobody should drink from. Rubin keeps adding jokes at the level of names, businesses, creatures, historical references, and background details, so even a walk across town can become a string of comic discoveries. Characters named Janet Jackson, Sid the Vicious, Taylor the Swift, Colonel Mustard, and George R. R. Martin coexist with creations like snittens, crabbits, Sharkaroos, and Camoostapuses. The references are usually folded into the fantasy world, which gives the setting its peculiar personality. The result feels like a place that has been allowed to grow wildly in every direction.

Underneath all that silliness, there’s a surprisingly elaborate collection of intersecting stories. A doomed brewery, a forbidden romance between Ananas and Piña, Michael Jackson’s lycanthropy, Grimenail’s secret religious conspiracy, the Followers of Tim, a philosophical giant spider named Cilantro, Hernia’s curses, organized crime, political corruption, and an increasingly unstable monarchy all begin as separate threads and gradually crash into one another. The novel’s episodic structure gives Rubin room to wander, and that abundance is both part of its charm and occasionally a source of drag. Some side stories and extended bits temporarily bury the larger plot, but the payoff is that New Stenchford starts to feel populated. By the time the palace falls and Rizzle accidentally emerges from the rubble wearing the queen’s crown, the joke works because the book has spent so much time establishing how this society operates.

Rubin’s humor is broad, profane, pun-heavy, frequently grotesque, and committed to escalation. Deaths can be gruesome, sex jokes can get cheerfully tasteless, and philosophical quotations may turn up in the mouth of a thirty-foot spider that’s considering eating somebody. The political satire becomes especially funny once Rizzle is mistaken for a divinely appointed ruler. At his coronation, he offers the crowd a mangled bit of motivational rhetoric: “This’ll be one uh dem real win-win type deals fer all uh us.” It’s a good example of the book’s method. Lofty institutions keep colliding with characters who are venal, confused, horny, hungry, frightened, or simply trying to get through the day. Even when the jokes are absurd, the selfishness, incompetence, ambition, and accidental consequences underneath them are recognizable.

What I liked most about Tales of New Stenchford is the sense that the book genuinely enjoys its own world. It keeps finding another door to open, another resident to introduce, and another ridiculous consequence to set loose. The ending makes that especially clear. After revolutions, curses, magical disasters, political reshuffling, and a brief hope that things might settle down, Rizzle discovers that another enormous problem is literally stomping toward him, and his response is simply, “Oh no.” It’s an apt final note for a novel whose basic rhythm is order, chaos, temporary recovery, and fresh chaos. Tales of New Stenchford is a rowdy ensemble fantasy satire with an unusually dense comic world, and its strongest quality is the sheer enthusiasm with which it keeps that world moving.

Pages: 253 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0H7DGGBVP