Spiral Tower Review: Pure, Mundi, and the Suddenly: D.M. Ritzlin’s Against the Demon World



Pure, Mundi, and the Suddenly: D.M. Ritzlin’s Against the Demon World
Book: Against the Demon World (2026)
1365 words

Modern fantasy is suffering from a crisis of the map and the archive. For years, floundering in the wake of the epic, we have become a genre of surveyors and historians, obsessed with the slow-burn arc and the crushing weight of cause-and-effect. We demand to know the tax policy of the kingdom before we are permitted to see naked steel. We need to understand the "magical system" of the universe before we are permitted to see a sorcerer hurling fireballs. In this disenchanted, quasi-bureaucratic landscape, the narrative often feels like a slog through a digital simulation, or an alien planet with 1.5 Earth g's of atmosphere: heavy, flattened, predictable, slow-motion, devoid of the thrilling disorientation and forward momentum that once defined the pulp tradition.

Enter D.M. Ritzlin. In his latest foray, Against the Demon World (2026), Ritzlin performs a kind of narrative exorcism. He eschews the heavy, importunate worldbuilding of his contemporaries and instead leans into a structure that feels ancient, visceral, and, I dare say, sublimely fun.

To understand why Ritzlin’s work feels so charged, we must look backward, past the Inklings of the mid-century, to what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called the "adventure-time" of the Ancient Greek Romance. In those Hellenistic novels, time was not a matter of character growth or historical progression; it was a sequence of "suddenlys." A hero is walking; suddenly, pirates appear. He escapes; suddenly, a storm wrecks his ship. Bakhtin called this the "chronotope" of the adventure novel--a world where the characters are static, tested by a catch-and-release cycle of fate and chance.

Ritzlin understands, and leans into, this adventure chronotope better than almost anyone writing in sword and sorcery today. Against the Demon World does not ask us to contemplate the hero’s childhood trauma; it does not ask us to examine the hero's singular identity; it does not ask us to examine our lives. Instead, it asks us to survive the next ten pages. One of my favorite tongue-in-cheek moments is when the main character, Atok, has briefly paused to contemplate the destruction of a succubus, Heltorya, for whom he had complex feelings. He lingers for a heartbeat on the precipice of a modern character arc, a moment where a less confident writer might have surrendered to the bougee responsibility of psychological realism. But Ritzlin’s narrator quickly steers us back to the surface, with the narrative equivalent of a slap to the face and a dash of cold water: "There may have been other reasons, but he did not care to examine his personal feelings more closely." It is almost as if the narrator is letting the boundaries of the genre's chronotope show. Here is the boundary, it says; contemplate it, make your peace with it, before we move on to the next adventure.

Against the Demon World is a narrative of the Bakhtinian hiatus--that glorious gap of unresolved conflict between the beginning and the end where the world is governed by Tyche (Fate). In Ritzlin’s Demon World, space is abstract and alien. It is not a place to be mapped, but a series of thresholds to be crossed. The flight on an alien skyship from a demon moon to terra firma is treated as an ellipsis. From one chapter to the next, we are on earth and then we are dragged through a portal to hell. This is strategic spatial vertigo and distortion. This is the "low" comedy of the Menippean satire: a world of fleshy, grotesque encounters where the hero is a fixed point of grit against a shifting tide of contingency and chaos swirling around. This is catch-and-release, with a diabolical twist. The hero is caught in a nightmare, released into a fever dream, and caught again. There is one scene, subtle but pregnant with meaning, when the imp Scrotar sits in the throne room of the demon lord Nelgastrothos, toying with a soul. It is worth quoting at length:

He knelt beside his master's throne, wholly absorbed in toying with a glass cylinder which was two feet high and half again as wide. Contained within was the image of a long-haired Nilztiria maiden, paling in color yet luminescent. Scrotar tapped the glass with a stubby finger, and the cylinder momentarily filled with blue lightning. The maiden writhed in pain. Though her mouth opened to scream and cry, no sound could be heard beyond the confines of the glass. Scrotar gleefully touched the cylinder again. This time when the lightning vanished, the girl collapsed. The imp laughed like a child delighted by a new toy.

Here a sadistic imp takes pleasure in torturing an innocent soul. By analogy, what else does an author in this tradition do? They create a protagonist, a hero we become emotionally invested in; once our emotional entanglement with the character is established, they process them through the painful crucible of a conflict-rich environment. And in the comfort of our armchair, boards and leaves in hand, we cackle as they struggle for survival. This is a perfect allegory for legitimate adventure narrative shorn of all its superfluities and niceties.

But why is this aesthetic sadism so fun? Because it restores the immediacy of the encounter. By utilizing the sequential logic of the classical Greek novel, Ritzlin avoids the drab blur of triteness that plagues modern high fantasy and haunts contemporary sword and sorcery. His approach is a corrective, harmonizing with what aesthetic theorist Viktor Shklovsky argues is the main function of art: to restore strangeness to the world we have become dangerously habituated to. As Shklovsky famously wrote:

And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

Ritzlin gives our imaginations the widest possible room to swing, prioritizing the thrill of the "suddenly" over the boredom of the map, the dustiness of the archive, and the pedantry of the "magical system." (By the way: a "magical system" is a pernicious paradox, and its growing conceptual ubiquity is a discouraging symptom that our cognition has been shifting down from the heights of imagination to to the depths of mere calculation. For what else is magic but a refutation of the systematic?)

Reading Against the Demon World is a punk gesture--a deliberate act of genre-defiance that many, conditioned by the status-conscious prestige of the relevant and the relatable, will simply fail to grasp. Ritzlin writes in the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, who famously declared, Neither the ethics nor the aesthetics of the ant-hill have any attraction for me. To read a Ritzlin novel--like reading a Clark Ashton Smith story--is to refuse to be bored, to refuse to navel-gaze, and, most importantly, to refuse to be responsible. This type of story rejects the modern mandate that fantasy must labor to save, mirror, or justify the ordinary world. It is unapologetically puerile (read pure).
 
To demand that sword and sorcery tie itself to the real is to betray the core of the tradition. We read to be boyish, to be girlish--to deviate from the proper and reclaim the unmanageable weirdos within. We seek the spirit that sees a stick as a sword and a windmill as a giant; we seek the parts of ourselves the ordinary world has worked so hard to file away, forget, and finally, to kill. We seek the "suddenly" because it shatters the glass of the archive and the office. Because, in the best sword and sorcery, we are reminded: the ordinary is merely an ordered zone, governed by an order designed to keep you in order--and thus, it is a zone to be avoided, to be escaped, at all costs. Ritzlin doesn't offer a mirror; he offers an exit. And in a (not quite demonic) world obsessed with mundane (read mundi), that exit is the most radical gesture of all.

About the Reviewer: Jason Ray Carney is the Managing Editor of Spiral Tower and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English of Christopher Newport University. CNU Faculty Page

About Spiral Tower Reviews: The authors who maintain the pulp genres of sword and sorcery and cosmic horror merit support. Financial support is key but there are other ways the cash-strapped can show support: engaged reading and thoughtful analysis. Literary movements emerge through the interactions of editors, authors, publishers, and amateur literary journalists. Learn more about contributing your review here. We are happy to work with first time reviewers! No previous writing credits required!

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