SOLOMON’S RING (BOOK REVIEW)

Fiction is at its most effective when it transports my consciousness to a realm of concepts and images that manage to be relatable while also taking me someplace new.

Solomon’s Ring accomplishes that feat remarkably. The author, Tony Galloway, has a top-tier imagination and a well-refined ability to articulate abstract concepts in digestible terms.

This is a complex story, which works both for and against the experience of reading it. A massive catalogue of characters and factions drive the story’s intricate set of central tensions, and there were times when it was hard to keep everything straight in my head.

However, the degree of thought and care that went into the lore here is truly impressive and generally the most important players in the story stay somewhere near top-of-mind.

The plot is pretty great overall, meticulously thought out and executed, with twists that I didn’t really see coming but they felt natural and properly foreshadowed.

One of my favorite aspects of Solomon’s Ring would have to be the mechanics of demon possession, which are perhaps the most profound example of Galloway’s rip-roaring imaginative capacities. The demon stuff straight up rocks and makes 99% of established stories (including movies) involving demons seem like amateur hour.

Galloway’s prose is solid if somewhat inconsistent, sometimes ultra-elegant, sometimes a bit too thick in spots.

Once in a while I felt temporarily demagnetized from tale due to spots with syntax redundancies and segments that could have used finer editing, but the quality of ideas here kept bringing me back.

And I was glad I stayed because sometimes the wordsmithing here is about as good as it gets!

Solomon’s Ring is an epic accomplishment, and I’ll look forward to further installments in this series.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again about Tony Galloway: This is an author to look up to and learn from.