Listened to the audiobook with the author as the narrator – very well narrated!

I’ve recently read some of Tchaikovsky’s sci-fi books, so when my audiobook app recommended a fantasy novel with his name on the cover, I was curious to see how he would hold up in another niche of the speculative genre.

(And also, this one also had spiders – which makes you wonder if Tchaikovsky was practicing for Children of Time…)

Spiderlight is a rare sight in the high fantasy landscape: a relatively short, self-contained fantasy book. It helps that it feels like it has a different objective from most fantasy out there.

Where many fantasy books are as much exercises in imagination and worldbuilding as they are narratives, Spiderlight is very lean. It borrows heavily from the ‘standard’ D&D high fantasy world, offering a comfortable exposition-light read for readers with more experience in the genre.

The world of Spiderlight never quite comes to life in the same way that other fantasy worlds do, but that leaves more room to focus on the interpersonal relationships between the members of the party and playing with the expectations of the reader.

Which brings us to what Spiderlight is really about: it feels like Spiderlight consciously sets up the tropes to subvert them, taking slightly unexpected turns without the book turning into outright satire.

I will not claim that Spiderlight is particularly ground-breaking; perhaps the tropes that the ‘standard’ high fantasy D&D-world is built on are so well-worn that even their subversions have become common place.

But Spiderlight does the subversions well. It presents a nice philosophical take on ‘othering’ persons who are not like you, and presents the outsider’s view by including such an ‘other’ as one of the point of view-characters.

Don’t get me wrong, Spiderlight is not high literature, but the commentary without pretention is at the very least more conscious of the dogmatic good-versus-evil than the average high fantasy world.

Overall, Tchaikovsky wrote an eminently readable, nicely paced and well structured high fantasy book, that is comfortable in its set up but also brings enough subversion to the table to feel refreshing.