I really enjoyed Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and it certainly created a plethora of other books using the mediaeval period as the setting for their various stories, but I found myself growing bored of that kind of fantasy. It seemed to me, and this is very much my own opinion, that very few of these books added anything new to the genre. For this reason, when I decided to write my own epic fantasy, I wanted to do something different. The Queen of the Mountain Kingdom is the result.

Another aspect I wanted to explore was racialism. In many fantasy stories people of colour appear to be just thrown into the mix for no other reason than to have a person of colour in the story. Eiji Tunshi is a black man in a white man’s world and has to fight to survive it. He has one good friend, Risdun Hak, a native of the Mountain Kingdom who, when they were both mercenaries, saved Eiji from a lynching on the grounds that the boisterous affair was disrupting his enjoyment of a nice piece of cheese and a good bottle of wine that he was having for supper. This incident placed an obligation of honour on Eiji, who claims to be a prince in his own country, that can only be settled by performing a similar deed for his friend. It is the only reason why Eiji accompanies Risdun to the Mountain Kingdom instead of returning home.

The main story is simple, the King is dying, and his only heir is the Princess, but women cannot hold authority over men in the Kingdom of Oroson. It is not a clear-cut tale of good versus evil. There are those who support the Princess and those who oppose her. There are also those who seek to reclaim the Kingdom of Oroson for themselves, the Old People, who originally ceded the Mountain Kingdom to the New People some 1,000 years ago. The Old People are the ones with the power of magic that, despite their pitiful numbers, also makes them terrifyingly powerful. Add to the mix a secret society of priestesses trying to reclaim their status in the kingdom after being exiled by the male dominated Church of Oroson, a devilishly handsome adventurer, a courtier known as the Silken Tigress for her appetite for destroying men, a golem like monster on the rampage, and a sorceress out to avenge her brother who was murdered by the Old People, a dash of foreign spies, and an invading army, and the simple tale starts to get rather complicated. As a garnish I added a huge Napoleonic style battle fought with cannons, muskets, cavalry charges, and magic! I believe that this is my longest book to date, which is typical of fantasy novels, but with all that going on inside the pages it is not surprising really!