I did not enjoy Pilgrim: A Medieval Horror. I came straight from the fantastic Between Two Fires, another book set in the Middle Ages and centered around the cosmic and existential horror of “what if religion was real”. 

Where Between Two Fires focused on a Catholic conception of God, the Devil, angels and demons, Pilgrim begins that way but turns, slowly at first then all at once, to an Islamic and pre-Islamic religious milieu. BTF has incredibly strong portrayals of battles between angelic hordes and demonic beings, as well as soft, introspective moments where the sharing of a meal in a plague-town softly breathes across the pages, giving substance to the lives that are being lost. Pilgrim has court intrigue, a cast of characters spanning a myriad faiths and political standpoints, a fascinating collection of locations and scenes, and TWO SEPARATE sets of violent pet monkeys!

Besides the religious setting, there were a handful of other parallels across the two texts - BTF’s plot revolves around the protagonists’ arduous journey, same as Pilgrim. Both journeys have the attendant tribulations and encounters with the supernatural, and both traveling parties contain members of the clergy implicated in buggery. So far, so good.

Where BTF culminates (spoilers ahead) in a fight with a fake Pope, an extended trip to actual literal Catholic Hell and a cameo by Trans Jesus, kind of, Pilgrim (spoilers ho) ends with a fight against… a mostly undefined demon/old god, while three mostly undefined statues (Al-Uzza, Al-Lat and Manat) give birth to more demonkind. Surviving this fight, our main character Razin (who, it need be noted, was not the main character we started with) escapes this scene (which may or may not have taken place in actual literal Islamic Hell) thanks to Apsasû, a girl-but-also-a-bird-lion-creature (who was called Tanit, which is the name of a Carthaginian deity) who was actually a separate incarnation (or avatar) of Lamassu, a Sumerian deity. This girl transforms and kills Hubal, who was possessing the original protagonist Dietmar, who was a normal German man whose name is not a reference to an ancient god. 

I frame Pilgrim’s climax in this way, as an explosion of proper nouns and references without context, because that’s the context the reader is provided. How did I know Apsasu was a sumerian deity? Because the text, through Razin, says “This savage girl couldn’t possibly be one of the aladlammû.”. What’s an aladlammû? Great question; Google it. Put the pages down and hie thee hence to a wiki. Does this pull you out of the tension in the scene, where an apparently normal young girl is tussling with the supernatural antagonist of the whole book, during the final showdown? Yes! And this is far from the first instance. 

My beef with the book is that it has the shape of a fine story, and shares a silhouette with a great story as I’ve mentioned, but through stumbling and slipping through the pages I came to resent the journey. It is, I think, badly written. Let me explain.

Initially, we follow Dietmar, a troubled medieval German as he travels with companions from pillar to post, from forest jungle to sprawling Sodom-by-the-sea, in his attempt to get a holy relic from Jerusalem to a chapel in Naples, thereby winning the favor of the Pope and redeeming his dead, unbaptized son’s soul from purgatory.

On his journey, he falls further and further into illness, becoming possessed by the spirit inhabiting this relic. Though strong, he eventually succumbs, overtaken completely by the spirit that reveals itself to not be a Catholic Saint, but something else entirely. This entity, Hubal, is obliquely referenced as being a pre-Islamic deity, but due to everyone’s fervor about their own team, such discussions are always shut down before the reader can learn more. This murkiness continues all the way up to the showdown mentioned above, where Hubal has taken control of our poor German, and Razin, his only surviving companion from Jerusalem and a well-educated if not exactly devout Muslim, is left to wrestle with what it might mean for his faith that a pre-islamic god very much did kill his friend while trying to summon other pre-islamic beings. (Presumably. I mean we don’t see Razin’s wrestling with this issue much, and the book ends abruptly after that big clash)

I’d like to draw attention to the passage that incited this polemic. We’re still with Dietmar, ill but still kicking. Through numerous injurious activities he is knocked out while attempting to sail across a sea. He is just coming-to when monsters attack! Here is what that looks like on the page. 

“But the quiet didn’t last long. 

A scream shattered the stillness, followed by the sound of a splash and a menacing roar. The raft beneath him swayed as frantic limbs scurried across its surface. There was a smell: salt and kelp and old fish, an effluvia that filled his nostrils and made him gag. A mellifluous susurration accompanied the stink, a singsong murmur that sounded like voices echoing from beneath the waves, keening and cooing as they approached the raft.”

It were a right melly sus! The fact the author knew to rephrase immediately after this 8 syllable deployment shows he knew the problem as soon as the words were out. As a reader as smug as I am verbose, I knew what mellifluous susurration meant; that I had to spend a couple cycles ensuring I knew what the phrase meant is the microcosm with which I’m beefing. With short stabbing sentences surrounding this purpling bruiser of a prose-piece I was left wondering, is the intent to confuse? Is my mini-bamboozlement a kind of forced empathic link to Dietmar as he lay, concussed and literally at sea in this scene?

But it kept happening. Phrases jutted out awkwardly, and terms only a medieval scholar could call to mind appear in energetic chase scenes. Crucial, deeply tense moments are tripped up by Proper Nouns of, no doubt, immense significance and zero explanation. Do you know what the Masjid Al Haram ought to look like in the Middle Ages? Do you know names of specific Islamic demons, or cities said to be, by some, already in Muslim hell? A lay reader has only the sparsest assistance in grokking these terms by listening, like Dietmar must, to Razin. He is the only lens we have through which to view, much less focus on, the rich Islamic lore hoving into view each chapter. Razin is a muslim scholar, though he has his faith tested through the course of their adventure. It is to both Dietmar and the reader’s detriment that Razin is both laconic and circumspect, leaving Dietmar, the rest of the gang and us in the dark about what becomes the most important aspect in the book: Islamic and pre-Islamic lore. 

Here’s an incomplete list of undefined words, to pull you out of the flow of this text as a nice little symbolic reflection of what the book does: 

Lutiya, 

balhut, 

bahamut

The me-anesi

Lamassu, 

Jellaba

Al-kufr

Mount Qasioum

Ahl al-nar

Al-haqq

Mushrik

Tathir

Maqads 

Tiraz

Pishtaq

Bay'ah

Anak

Qirada

Quraysh

Ridā

Mataf

Qasr Julad

Tawaf and sa'ee

Aladlammû

To quote my least favourite philosopher: And sho on.

Dig, if you will, a version of this that worked. The scene where Legolas speaks to Aragorn of Helm's Deep's zero-shot chance at surviving the upcoming fight, where clearly a kind of sincere appreciation for the beauty of a language is presented to the viewer without the context of meaning - we intuit, broadly, what Legolas means when he says

 "Boe a hyn neled herain… dan caer menig! Aragorn, men i ndagor. Hýn ú ortheri. Natha daged aen!"
And Aragorn says "then I shall die as one of them!".
We might be shocked to hear such a response to what sounded relatively soft and poetical. Or, we might understand through context that Legolas, hiding his doubt of the strength of Men even as he speaks among them, is a little shitter who's whining about a battle that must now take place. We are given enough context to parse the meaning, if not the message. 

Here’s a section from Pilgrim.

She wore a simple yellow jellaba, its sleeves reaching just above her wrist.

“Razi!” she cried, foregoing etiquette for a hug. She smelled of jasmine and myrrh, of flowers in bloom.

Razin followed.

He found himself within a vaulted, three-sided hall decorated with glazed tiles and more bands of Kufic script.

He ignored the calligraphy, fearing the discombobulation from before, and stood beside his uncle, gazing out from the pishtaq.

Flat roofed dwellings stretched out before them, coloured in the grey and brown hues of coral stone and silt clay. High-windowed maqads overlooked the narrow roads of the city, streets that ran like the threads of a tiraz, each corner embellished by mashrabiyas and colourful screened windows.

While not conveying important information on the plot, nor character development in the scene, this passage feels like driving through a neglected country road for me; Bumpy. I, a white British boy who had one course in Arabic close to 2 decades ago, am lost among these terms. I stop at each pothole of ignorance, hoping to fill it with the asphalt of new knowledge and the smooth tarmac of comprehension. I do this 6 times. I am now more learned in garments most commonly worn in North Africa, the preferred scripts for Quranic transcription, garments and textiles worn by high ranking leaders in the Caliphate, and architectural elements first found in 12th Century Baghdad. I am also overstimulated with new information and pulled completely out of the scene where these words were found (a dream sequence in which Razin’s lost love, his uncle and a dead friend each attempt to coax him into apostasy.) I am no longer concerned with why they want him to either wake from this dream or touch the Ka’aba (luckily I knew what that was, since again the author takes no pains to elucidate); I am benumbed.

Here’s another example, building towards the aforementioned climactic battle:

“Carved into the face of the ravine were three colossal stone figures. They covered the entire surface of the rock, standing as tall as the ’Amud El-Sawari, the giant Corinthian he had seen in Egypt, or perhaps even as tall as Tancred’s Temple, the Qasr Julad in Jerusalem.”

Those colossal stone figures are the ‘gods’ that spring to life and birth literal rivers of demons mere moments after this section. Might I be forgiven for losing the thread of this foreboding exposition as I tear my eyes from two separate stat sheets for big buildings?

I know you don’t have to get every reference in order to enjoy a scene. While I’m rarely happy to let new words fly past me, I understand you can be carried by the prose and led to vistas where blank spaces blend with the rest of the set dressing. However, I think Pilgrim uses what might amount to scholarly jargon too much, and the scene gets lost in the verbiage. 

It’s not just in the set dressing, though. The antagonist demon-or-maybe-god Hubal is never set among a pantheon. Tiamat, Bahamut, Neruk, Nergal and Marduk are all invoked but never given form or weight. It is as if every ancient deity is equally real but their presence is barely registered, much less remarked upon. There is a section where a great sea creature is uncovered, said to be Falak, the sea creature that resides beneath Bahamut, and the creature itself is genuinely engaging and enjoyable to behold. The only reason I know it resides beneath Bahamut is because I googled it in medias res just in case I ought to know its power level and special moves. 

To return to the Two Towers for a moment, if Aragorn had just grunted at Legolas, the beauty of the mysterious language the elf used may well have been stunted. The meaning and according value we might place on that tintinnabulation of Sindarin requires context strong enough to bear those assignments; These terms, both religious and mundane as used by the author are, to the unaware eye of a non-muslim or non-Arab reader, fragile and tenebrous - that means murky, from the Latin tenebrosus. 

Would we benefit from a clarification at each of these specifically chosen terms?

Like Paarthunax explaining the language of the Dovah to the player mid-sentence, if the author said "jellaba - a long loose robe" would the book read substantially better? Probably not. Contextual cues combined with a kind of softening of the imagination can muddle us through the brackish word choices. But it's hard to appreciate a painting when so many colours are hidden in shadow. We could stop trying to make out the composition in its entirety, and I’m certain many Western readers did just that. The book seems to have been received positively, and when the textual road was smooth, it was enjoyable to be carried from Jerusalem to not-quite-Naples via Islamic Hell (maybe). Those smooth patches were too sparse, though, and the obstacles to enjoyment too numerous for this reader.

What pushed beyond the pale for me though is the lack of consistency with the author’s expectations of the reader. I can accept a book when it expects me to adapt or perish with new ideas, new terms, new idioms, even entirely new conlangs, so long as that expectation is maintained. If I’m then treated like a child, hand-held through a scene lest I don’t fully understand what’s occurring, it throws the momentum of that work to keep up fully out of whack. Check this out:

"The occupants of the village announced themselves with a soft buzzing sound and the rank stink of unwashed bodies.

—death, whispered the voice a moment before Dietmar saw the corpses. They hung from trees like rotten fruit on both sides of the road—a foetid orchard.

“Christ’s teeth,” Dietmar murmured, crossing himself as he gazed up at the dirty feet dangling from the branches. He counted a dozen bodies before he stopped counting.

It was an entire village’s worth."

When did you realise the villagers were dead? Did you appreciate being told 4 times after that? I didn't! 

Pilgrim: A Medieval Horror tells a story of men searching without success for a greater meaning, battling through unkind terrain and confusing scenarios while concepts beyond understanding are presented and endured. If the goal was to get the reader to empathize with that experience, I cannot fault the work.