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Metropolis: The King of Rhye
Living in a new world ... with shadows from the past.
Mustapha never imagined that ruling as the King of Rhye would be easy. Building a world from nothing, uniting a wildly diverse populace, and doing it all while looking fabulous proved challenging enough … but perhaps dubbing his reign ‘The Age of Harmony’ was a teensy bit too ambitious.
Ten years later, ‘harmony’ is elusive. Harold, Meadow and Dique have moved on to new pursuits. Mustapha still grieves the loss of his father, having known him for fleeting but precious moments. Discontent becomes On the eve of a grandiose Ball, mysterious visitors arrive from a place that should not exist. They bring a foreboding gift and warn of an ancient peril, somehow far older than the land in which it lies buried.
New adventure beckons … it’s time to get the band back together.
Mustapha’s new quest takes him across uncharted frontiers. A sea of discovery, disillusionment and death awaits. Can he save the land that he created before all is lost, forever?
The saga of ‘The King of Rhye’ continues, with ‘Metropolis’ – a tale that is not merely explosive; it’s guaranteed to blow your mind.
Mustapha never imagined that ruling as the King of Rhye would be easy. Building a world from nothing, uniting a wildly diverse populace, and doing it all while looking fabulous proved challenging enough … but perhaps dubbing his reign ‘The Age of Harmony’ was a teensy bit too ambitious.
Ten years later, ‘harmony’ is elusive. Harold, Meadow and Dique have moved on to new pursuits. Mustapha still grieves the loss of his father, having known him for fleeting but precious moments. Discontent becomes On the eve of a grandiose Ball, mysterious visitors arrive from a place that should not exist. They bring a foreboding gift and warn of an ancient peril, somehow far older than the land in which it lies buried.
New adventure beckons … it’s time to get the band back together.
Mustapha’s new quest takes him across uncharted frontiers. A sea of discovery, disillusionment and death awaits. Can he save the land that he created before all is lost, forever?
The saga of ‘The King of Rhye’ continues, with ‘Metropolis’ – a tale that is not merely explosive; it’s guaranteed to blow your mind.
512 pages, Paperback
Published July 25, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 18, 2025
This is the real life. This is not just fantasy.
Okay, that's the ONLY Queen reference I'm making in this review because I already played that card when discussing The King of Rhye and, in the spirit of this hefty follow-up, I feel the time for such frivolity has passed. If the first book was a triumphant global prog rock tour, The King of Rhye: Metropolis is the inevitable reality check: "So we saved the day, vanquished the bad guys, and now we rule a world of our own making -- so, what next?"
The King of Rhye could have been a perfectly fine stand-alone novel. I do not feel that Metropolis is essential reading after it...but that's only true if we are content with an arbitrary cutting-off point, a happy ending that overlooks the cyclical nature of mythological creation and destruction -- a cycle that can wrack a legendary rock band just as easily as it can a nascent world of presumed unlimited possibility.
The allure of reading Metropolis might be something as simple as wanting to spend more time with The King of Rhye's diverse and loveable cast, or to enjoy page after page of Mulhall's graceful prose...but what impels us to the novel's cataclysmic resolution is something bordering on the horrific. Granted a divine mandate to remake the entire world and bestowed the potency of seraphic splendour, Mustapha, ten years now The King of (New) Rhye, discovers he did not, in fact, remake all of Rhye after all...and those he missed in his grand restructuring are less than pleased at their exclusion from his perfect world. Impressively, this premise is built on an easily-missed detail from The King of Rhye's prologue so specific it seems like it was planted purely for this purpose -- a masterstroke of multi-volume foreshadowing which comfortably undercuts my sentiment that The King of Rhye works just fine a stand-alone novel. Mulhall has much bigger plans for his world and its players that goes well beyond Queen and looks to other rulers of rock and roll, and Metropolis advances those plans confidently. By its conclusion, we are left with no choice but to wait to see how the next book resolves thematic and narrative questions raised throughout Metropolis but, upon revisitation, are seeded throughout The King of Rhye's entire timeline.
Thankfully, at no point does Metropolis get lost in these loftier machinations. True to its name, The King of Rhye as a series thrives on the grounded characterisation of its mercurial monarch. Mulhall picks through the benevolent ruler's conundrum with an organic series of escalations that involve all of Mustapha's friends and supporters, and for the most part he manages the well-rounded cast in a way that leaves no one behind. But this is a novel replete with complex characters and it almost certainly can't give everyone their due. One in particular I found left out at times when I felt he should have been acknowledged, but his dour role is contrapuntal to pretty much everyone else's optimistic approach to the adventure, and to highlight him too much would probably give the story some unwelcome lag. As is, I found the middle third flirted a little too close to that lag, as it indulged in an Odyssean episode involving a Circe-alike with the almost-on-the-nose name of Lady Antoinette. I would have preferred less of that tired pleasure dome and more of the book's third act set in its genre-shattering namesake, a seedy, dyamic nest of Bauhaus towers straight out of a certain other creative monolith bearing the name Metropolis. (Its place here is, as with everything else, far from random: Freddie Mercury contributed a song to an attempted restoration of the original Fritz Lang movie -- and almost won himself a Golden Raspberry for the effort.)
Mulhall's signature deployment of Queen legendarium generally plays well and I delighted in finishing a chapter to check the revelatory appendix, but occasionally the homage jarred. Queen's own inspirations ranged wide and deep, and not all of them sit well in a fantasy epic ostensibly original in its details. Some place names would have done well with a considered revision. The more egregious examples of slavish Queen nods are where characters are suddenly mouthpieces for contextually clunky lyrical quotation, but these moments are few enough not to warrant more than a cluck of the tongue.
A common risk with weighty follows-up is the emergence of unusual pet words, and amid the plethora of rich description one or two will likely stand out. These could have been addressed in rewrites, but I am skewing nitpicky here to avoid what would otherwise be reams of effusive praise. Metropolis has more typographical errors than The King of Rhye, but I empathise with this: we have all the time in the world to polish that first book, but feel a certain haste to get the next one out. If only in minutiae, Metropolis displays some of that impatience.
In my last review I failed to mention an appealing pillar of Mulhall's style: original lyrics for the various songs performed by his characters. I am supremely ill-equipped to judge their merit but as poetic compositions they scan nicely -- and, if one is so inclined to listen, they have been recorded by an actual band with the excellent name of 'The Fat-Bottomed Boys'. Some day I will do just that, but for now I want my reception of Mulhall's work to remain strictly that of a reader now fully invested in the man's literary output.
And here is another woe I understand: Metropolis is a perfect sequel that demands one read its less sophisticated forebear first. It pains me that I cannot recommend Metropolis in and of itself but I suppose I already more-than-recommended that first book as an excellent fantasy epic, so my endorsement of The King of Rhye only strengthens itself in the wake of its devastating evolution.
The King of Rhye: Metropolis is daring, ambitious, and almost entirely immune to its own foibles. Mulhall's trajectory as a superior speculative fiction author is now assured.
Okay, that's the ONLY Queen reference I'm making in this review because I already played that card when discussing The King of Rhye and, in the spirit of this hefty follow-up, I feel the time for such frivolity has passed. If the first book was a triumphant global prog rock tour, The King of Rhye: Metropolis is the inevitable reality check: "So we saved the day, vanquished the bad guys, and now we rule a world of our own making -- so, what next?"
The King of Rhye could have been a perfectly fine stand-alone novel. I do not feel that Metropolis is essential reading after it...but that's only true if we are content with an arbitrary cutting-off point, a happy ending that overlooks the cyclical nature of mythological creation and destruction -- a cycle that can wrack a legendary rock band just as easily as it can a nascent world of presumed unlimited possibility.
The allure of reading Metropolis might be something as simple as wanting to spend more time with The King of Rhye's diverse and loveable cast, or to enjoy page after page of Mulhall's graceful prose...but what impels us to the novel's cataclysmic resolution is something bordering on the horrific. Granted a divine mandate to remake the entire world and bestowed the potency of seraphic splendour, Mustapha, ten years now The King of (New) Rhye, discovers he did not, in fact, remake all of Rhye after all...and those he missed in his grand restructuring are less than pleased at their exclusion from his perfect world. Impressively, this premise is built on an easily-missed detail from The King of Rhye's prologue so specific it seems like it was planted purely for this purpose -- a masterstroke of multi-volume foreshadowing which comfortably undercuts my sentiment that The King of Rhye works just fine a stand-alone novel. Mulhall has much bigger plans for his world and its players that goes well beyond Queen and looks to other rulers of rock and roll, and Metropolis advances those plans confidently. By its conclusion, we are left with no choice but to wait to see how the next book resolves thematic and narrative questions raised throughout Metropolis but, upon revisitation, are seeded throughout The King of Rhye's entire timeline.
Thankfully, at no point does Metropolis get lost in these loftier machinations. True to its name, The King of Rhye as a series thrives on the grounded characterisation of its mercurial monarch. Mulhall picks through the benevolent ruler's conundrum with an organic series of escalations that involve all of Mustapha's friends and supporters, and for the most part he manages the well-rounded cast in a way that leaves no one behind. But this is a novel replete with complex characters and it almost certainly can't give everyone their due. One in particular I found left out at times when I felt he should have been acknowledged, but his dour role is contrapuntal to pretty much everyone else's optimistic approach to the adventure, and to highlight him too much would probably give the story some unwelcome lag. As is, I found the middle third flirted a little too close to that lag, as it indulged in an Odyssean episode involving a Circe-alike with the almost-on-the-nose name of Lady Antoinette. I would have preferred less of that tired pleasure dome and more of the book's third act set in its genre-shattering namesake, a seedy, dyamic nest of Bauhaus towers straight out of a certain other creative monolith bearing the name Metropolis. (Its place here is, as with everything else, far from random: Freddie Mercury contributed a song to an attempted restoration of the original Fritz Lang movie -- and almost won himself a Golden Raspberry for the effort.)
Mulhall's signature deployment of Queen legendarium generally plays well and I delighted in finishing a chapter to check the revelatory appendix, but occasionally the homage jarred. Queen's own inspirations ranged wide and deep, and not all of them sit well in a fantasy epic ostensibly original in its details. Some place names would have done well with a considered revision. The more egregious examples of slavish Queen nods are where characters are suddenly mouthpieces for contextually clunky lyrical quotation, but these moments are few enough not to warrant more than a cluck of the tongue.
A common risk with weighty follows-up is the emergence of unusual pet words, and amid the plethora of rich description one or two will likely stand out. These could have been addressed in rewrites, but I am skewing nitpicky here to avoid what would otherwise be reams of effusive praise. Metropolis has more typographical errors than The King of Rhye, but I empathise with this: we have all the time in the world to polish that first book, but feel a certain haste to get the next one out. If only in minutiae, Metropolis displays some of that impatience.
In my last review I failed to mention an appealing pillar of Mulhall's style: original lyrics for the various songs performed by his characters. I am supremely ill-equipped to judge their merit but as poetic compositions they scan nicely -- and, if one is so inclined to listen, they have been recorded by an actual band with the excellent name of 'The Fat-Bottomed Boys'. Some day I will do just that, but for now I want my reception of Mulhall's work to remain strictly that of a reader now fully invested in the man's literary output.
And here is another woe I understand: Metropolis is a perfect sequel that demands one read its less sophisticated forebear first. It pains me that I cannot recommend Metropolis in and of itself but I suppose I already more-than-recommended that first book as an excellent fantasy epic, so my endorsement of The King of Rhye only strengthens itself in the wake of its devastating evolution.
The King of Rhye: Metropolis is daring, ambitious, and almost entirely immune to its own foibles. Mulhall's trajectory as a superior speculative fiction author is now assured.
March 28, 2026
This is not going to be the review this book deserves.
In the past, up until only a few weeks ago, I would have spent hours curating my thoughts: making notes, wording my various impressions and then editing them into something that I'd hope encouraged others to learn what I already know - this book is worth your time. And yet now… now I find my thoughts too wild to pen. Too scattered to round up into any reasonable formation. Too skittish to approach, let alone bridle.
I don't know why I'm using horse metaphors; horses terrify me. Oh. Maybe there's something to that.
Anyway. I had tried to wait to write this review. I didn't want to make this about me, or the worldly problems we're all already anxious about, or anything except how good the book is, because it is better than good. But I can't wait indefinitely, and I don't know when I'll be able to coerce the volatile neigh-neighs into doing what I want.
So. Let's see if I can't encourage you a little now.
Reading Metropolis was a highlight of my year, and a crutch during my long, uneasy days. It was that first cup of coffee, priming me for the hours ahead. It was the pain killer I took when the stress-headaches got too much. It was the bag of lollies I kept in the pocket of my work jacket, for when I needed… just something that didn't suck. Pun not intended. I flew through the pages, taking up the book every free second — sometimes, admittedly, during unintentionally extended tea breaks, but who the hell could blame me for getting sidetracked on a well-crafted romp through New Rhye? Who wouldn't be desperate to find out exactly why things in this young utopia were not as harmonious as they were meant to be?
For those few weeks in which I read Metropolis and its predecessor, I was so, so much happier, even as I watched Mustapha and his gang face insurmountable odds. Even as I watched favourite characters suffer and mourn, and I mourned with them. Because even in a book series with wicked, selfish gods, and sometimes worryingly flawed heroes, and entire worlds at stake, good triumphs more often than it fails. Optimism! This beautifully-written book is just so optimistic, exuding this persistent sense that life will find its feet after every stumble, and that is exactly what I needed. Friendships that were tested but did not fade. Heroes who wavered but did not surrender. Songs that give me hope.
Songs like those that inspired the books' creation. I listened to Queen only recently, the first time in years. The music's uplifting frivolity, which Mulhall has so deliciously captured in his book series, is definitely a kind of magic.
We could all use a little magic right now.
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