Wales is a contender for my favorite author. His sensibilities are very closely aligned with mine, so I will read anything from him.
Thresholder is an excuse to mash different genre fiction elements together, if you ignore the great worldbuilding and well-realized characters the plot is basically ‘a guy goes through a portal and fights vampires with a suit of power armor and a magic sword’. Even being the most action forward work of his I’ve read, the main thing that excited me was thoughtful comparative cultural analysis between the worlds. There’s genuine creativity in the worldbuilding and a constant sense that things are thought through, even the interface between physics and magic that weren’t ever supposed to come in contact interact. Perry is an easier character to dislike than Wales’ other protagonists -two of his primary traits are loving to argue on the internet and being kinda bloodthirsty- he’s still very relatable and constantly thinking about the stuff I would be curious about.
this particular story might struggle to find a place because it spends so much time being introspective about such a jamming-your-action-figures-together premise, and people who prefer either might roll their eyes at the other.
Thresholder does power fantasy well, following Sanderson’s rule of magic and having things break down in interesting ways as much as new tools are added. So instead of monotonically increasing numbers go up that eventually means nothing, Perry has a comprehensible and growing arsenal of tools that you can predict and understand how they could be used to get him out of situations often by the skin of his teeth.
I read the original online serialization and I think the format has been changed to add additional flashback chapters that change the flow of the story. I’m curious to see what a first time reader would think of this. I was really happy to see more of the characters and more of the previous worlds and was instantly gripped by the new content. my one complaint with it is that one flashback chapter felt a little too much like it was holding your hand and directly explaining some themes and character stuff I remember being parceled out over longer.
the narration is pretty good, with only a few acting choices that felt weird and a few places where emphasis was put on the wrong word in a sentence. there are even multiple people doing voices. I especially liked the woman who voiced the female characters.
if you’re curious, try it out.