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Against the Demon World
- GenresSword and SorceryFantasy
204 pages, Paperback
Published February 1, 2026
4 people are currently reading
9 people want to read
About the author
D.M. Ritzlin
40 books59 followersD.M. Ritzlin founded DMR Books in 2015 with the aim of revitalizing sword-and-sorcery literature. DMR’s publications include reprints of classic material by authors such as Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as brand-new collections and anthologies by some of the finest fantasy writers active today.
A collection of his own stories, Necromancy in Nilztiria, was released in October 2020.
Nilztiria is a world of adventure and strangeness, peopled by lusty heroes and callous villains. The thirteen sword-and-sorcery stories presented in Necromancy in Nilztiria place the emphasis on sorcery and mix in a touch of gallows humor.
For more information on all of his projects, visit dmrbooks.com.
A collection of his own stories, Necromancy in Nilztiria, was released in October 2020.
Nilztiria is a world of adventure and strangeness, peopled by lusty heroes and callous villains. The thirteen sword-and-sorcery stories presented in Necromancy in Nilztiria place the emphasis on sorcery and mix in a touch of gallows humor.
For more information on all of his projects, visit dmrbooks.com.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 8, 2026
I really enjoy when Ritzlin writes stories from Nilztiria- the fantastic world of his creation. And what a world it is! This particular novel brings in a character from some of the Nilztiria short stories- a Northern fighting man known as Avok Kur Storn. Through foul sorcery and a demonic cult, Avok is sent to one of Nilztiria’s moons called Uzz. This is the realm of demons. Most of the book takes place here, and Avok encounters a plethora of fantastic sword and sorcery and strange fantasy themes on a wild and extremely fun ride. This book harkens back to the 70’s style age of high adventure and wonder. Any fan of sword and sorcery, Jack Vance, Lin Carter, Tannith Lee other DMR publications etc. should have a great time with this. Highly recommend.
March 1, 2026
I also published this review on the website of my amateur press. The url is here.
https://spiraltowerpress.blogspot.com...
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.
https://spiraltowerpress.blogspot.com...
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.
February 3, 2026
Against the Demon World by D M Ritzlin
Cover art by Bebeto Daroz
DMR Books
2026
Avok Kur Storn returns in his own full length novel! This is Ritzlin’s second novel set in the Nilztiria universe.
Avok is the son of a northern chieftain. His liberty is taken from him when demon worshippers murder his sister and send him away to the moon, Uzz. This moon is inhabited by a fever dream cavalcade of monstrous denizens. Powerless, Avok must do the bidding of others; at least until he makes his bid for freedom.
It is easy to see some of the influences within this work of fiction. Clark Ashton Smith stands foremost, alongside Jack Vance. I would be remiss if I forget to mention Abraham Merritt.
Avok himself is a contemporary of many heroes from the pulp era. To my mind, he hews pretty close to Swain Olaf’s son from Swain’s Vengeance written by Arthur D Howden Smith (another great read from DMR).
In short, if you like pulp era fiction or DMR Books back catalogue, then this will be a home run for you.
Cover art by Bebeto Daroz
DMR Books
2026
Avok Kur Storn returns in his own full length novel! This is Ritzlin’s second novel set in the Nilztiria universe.
Avok is the son of a northern chieftain. His liberty is taken from him when demon worshippers murder his sister and send him away to the moon, Uzz. This moon is inhabited by a fever dream cavalcade of monstrous denizens. Powerless, Avok must do the bidding of others; at least until he makes his bid for freedom.
It is easy to see some of the influences within this work of fiction. Clark Ashton Smith stands foremost, alongside Jack Vance. I would be remiss if I forget to mention Abraham Merritt.
Avok himself is a contemporary of many heroes from the pulp era. To my mind, he hews pretty close to Swain Olaf’s son from Swain’s Vengeance written by Arthur D Howden Smith (another great read from DMR).
In short, if you like pulp era fiction or DMR Books back catalogue, then this will be a home run for you.
Read
April 9, 2026This was a quick and enjoyable read, a sword and sorcery story with just a touch of body horror and weird elements. The warrior son of a northern chief finds himself kidnapped and taken to the demon moon of Uzz, where he finds himself a pawn in struggle between a faceless demon king with a spikey spherical head and a sexy lady demon queen who gets turned on by violence. Good stuff.
On a side note, if I were a human living on Nilztiria (the planet in this book), and it was common knowledge that the moon in the sky was inhabited by volatile kingdoms of demonkind, with at least two different ways to get to my planet, I'd probably be living in a constant state of existential panic.
On a side note, if I were a human living on Nilztiria (the planet in this book), and it was common knowledge that the moon in the sky was inhabited by volatile kingdoms of demonkind, with at least two different ways to get to my planet, I'd probably be living in a constant state of existential panic.
February 19, 2026
A fun sword & sorcery adventure by D.M. Ritzlin (probably one of the best contemporary S & S authors out there), this was a fast page turner. While I’d argue this was likely a man’s book (as with a lot of S & S I can fairly feel the feminist spirit turning poltergeist at the reading) and I had a few minor criticisms (*spoilers on these *I.e. how did the prot go from being unable to defeat mere cultists to becoming some battle god in such a short time? Other than some late book content was the demoness truly evil evil or more reality tv star, pop culture figure evil? What use was the prot’s promise to save and guide a certain people to safety when he did such an epically poor job on it? Um, that ending…I don’t know … seemed a bit off and awkward but maybe that was the point *end spoilers*) overall it was an awesome fast read. I’d recommend it for fans of S & S that like a dose of dour humor and mad merry murder with their swords & sorcery — while I’d be tempted to grade it higher I think it is a strong 3 out of 5 crazed cultists — totally fun and enjoyable, but the aforementioned points drop it a bit. Carry plenty of suspension of disbelief on your adventure, noble reader! Still better than most of my writing, and honestly 3 is a good rating, so yeah …
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews