After Arcady: The Haunted Cartography of Allamanda by Michael Williams

Michael Williams’ Allamanda continues what Arcady began, a meditation on dissolution not as cataclysm but as quiet erosion.

We return to the Arcady mansion seven years later. The ethereal regions known as "Absences" have begun to seep into the landscape, consuming familiar spaces and transforming hemp fields into strange, stony barrens. In Arcady, our lens was Solomon Hawken. In Allamanda, Solomon is away, out "touring" the lands, and it is Garrick, his nephew, who takes center stage as our reluctant guide through the unraveling world.

Allamanda is a perfect sequel in tone, structure, and intent. For readers like myself, who have a soft spot for fantasy novels with family trees and maps, perhaps a holdover from childhood readings of Tolkien, this book delivers on both fronts. The maps in particular become a subtle part of the story’s puzzle. I found myself studying them, trying to locate ruined cities, trying to place the geography in relation to the author’s own home. Once I learned where Michael Williams lived, certain map details clicked into place. Others, like the strangely located mountains, remained more enigmatic, adding to the story’s sense of disorientation and mystery.

Williams’ world doesn't rely on the usual medieval trappings of fantasy. Instead, his setting feels closer to the 18th or 19th century. The characters carry muskets. There are machines scattered through the narrative. It’s a strange and compelling blend, familiar yet dislocated, a kind of haunted Enlightenment era melancholy that deepens the sense of loss.

Williams’ prose remains as haunting as ever, like a baroque melody played on instruments slightly out of tune. He writes fantasy for those who suspect that the boundaries between worlds are less like walls and more like old scars—places where reality once tore and healed imperfectly. The magic in Allamanda doesn’t dazzle. It aches. It exists in the negative spaces between what characters remember and what they’ve been forced to forget.

Unlike more conventional fantasies where protagonists gain power throughout their journey, the Hawkens seem perpetually on the verge of losing what little they have left. Their magic isn’t accumulative but preservative. It’s not about conquest but conservation. Their struggle isn’t to rule worlds but to remember them clearly enough to keep them real. In this, Williams crafts fantasy that feels uniquely adult, concerned less with empowerment than with sustenance against inevitable loss.

Allamanda unsettles precisely because it refuses the comfort of epic scale. The true battle happens in quiet rooms, in half-forgotten libraries, in the spaces between words. The antagonist, the encroaching Absence works not through armies or assassins but through forgetting itself. It doesn’t kill. It erases. It doesn’t conquer. It dissolves. And perhaps most terrifying of all, it makes its victims complicit in their own unmaking.

The tone throughout remains elegiac, a funeral dirge for places that no longer exist and people who can no longer be remembered. Yet underneath this melancholy runs a stubborn current of resistance. The Hawkens fight not because they believe they can win in any conventional sense, but because remembering, even imperfectly, is itself an act of defiance against oblivion.

What Williams ultimately offers in Allamanda is fantasy as philosophical inquiry. If a place exists only in one family’s fading memory, does it exist at all? If magic is nothing more than the ability to insist that what was real remains real, is it still magic? The book’s power lies in refusing easy answers to these questions while making us care deeply about their implications.

For readers who found Arcady too subtle or too sorrowful, Allamanda will likely deepen rather than address those concerns. But for those who appreciate fantasy that trades bombast for nuance and spectacle for significance, Williams’ continuing chronicle of the Hawken family’s struggle against erasure remains a singular achievement—a fantasy not of conquest but of preservation, where victory means simply ensuring that something remains to be remembered.

In a genre often preoccupied with world building, Williams gives us instead a masterclass in world-sustaining. A reminder that sometimes the most powerful magic isn’t in creating something new, but in refusing to let go of what matters most as it slips, inevitably, into the abyss of forgetting.