I finally got around to Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf and I’ve got a bone to pick with the way this book was positioned when it hit the world. I’m listening on audio right now, and yes, the audiobook is wild in the best way, but the bigger thing is this.
Calling it “the African Game of Thrones” is not just lazy. It actively trains your brain to expect the wrong kind of story.
And this is not me making up a strawman. That tagline was a real part of the book’s early public framing, and multiple reviewers and write-ups mention it as a common label that followed the book around. Even Vox points out how strongly that comparison circulated in the publicity space, and notes that James himself later said the “African Game of Thrones” thing was originally a joke that got taken too literally, and that it oversimplified what the book actually is. In other words, the marketing discourse did what marketing often does. It grabbed the nearest famous reference point and duct-taped it on.
But Black Leopard, Red Wolf is not the experience people think they’re signing up for when they hear “Game of Thrones.” If you go in expecting sustained political maneuvering, dynastic chess moves, council-chamber whisper fights, and the kind of long-form faction warfare that defines that franchise, you might spend the first several hours thinking, wait, when does the “throne stuff” start.
Because this book is not about a throne. It’s about a quest.
A lot of reviews say it plainly: this story is built around a central quest to find a missing boy. That is the spine. That is the engine. And everything else, including power struggles and royal stakes, gets folded into that structure rather than replacing it .
So yeah. I’m going to argue that the better comparison is not “African Game of Thrones.” The better comparison is closer to an African Lord of the Rings, if Lord of the Rings were more brutal, more hallucinatory, more sexually explicit, more linguistically aggressive, and structured around testimony and contradiction instead of omniscient mythic distance.
Here’s why I’m willing to die on the Tolkien hill.
First, the story runs on a Fellowship structure, not an Iron Throne structure.
In Game of Thrones, characters are scattered across regions, chasing competing agendas, trying to secure power, protect houses, or survive institutional collapse. In Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the story centers on Tracker being pulled into a mission: find the boy, bring him back, alive or with proof of death . That “singular objective across dangerous geography” is classic quest architecture.
And the book does the other classic quest thing: it builds an ensemble, a messy fellowship of people who do not naturally belong together. You get Tracker, who is literally defined by his supernatural ability to track what is lost . You get the Leopard, a shapeshifter with complicated history and volatile loyalty. You get Sogolon, the witch, who becomes both antagonist and companion, and whose presence changes the whole temperature of the journey. You get a “gentle giant” named Sadogo and other figures who keep joining the party as the terrain and the danger intensify .
This is not “who is marrying into what house.” This is “who can survive traveling together when everybody is dangerous, everybody is traumatized, everybody lies, and the world wants you dead.”
Second, this is high fantasy in the most literal sense, not low fantasy with occasional magic.
One thing the publisher materials themselves highlight, through the critical blurbs they choose to display, is that the book is widely described as high fantasy, not subtle fantasy, not fantasy-adjacent literary fiction, but full-on “bloody, bawdy… deliriously overstuffed work of high fantasy” . That matches the reading experience. Magic is not decoration. Magic is atmosphere.
The world is crawling with creatures, spirits, monsters, witches, vampires, and entities that do not feel like “maybe people invented this as a superstition.” They feel present. They feel structural. They are part of the ecology.
Even in a sample excerpt, you see the book name-checking mythic beings like eloko, adze, and the lightning-bird vampire impundulu . Later, you get scenes with omoluzu, described as roof-walking demons that attack with blades of light. Reviews constantly emphasize that the novel is packed with vampires, witches, trickster figures, strange animals, monsters, and other fantastic beings, and that the story moves through forests, waterways, metropolises, and brutal landscapes where danger is not theoretical.
This is a world where “the weird” is normal. That is a major difference from the Game of Thrones experience, where magic is often treated as rare, feared, half-myth, or politically instrumental rather than omnipresent.
Third, the “Africa” here is not a skin, it’s research, language, and mythic architecture.
Another reason the Game of Thrones label feels cheap is that it implies “same thing, different continent” and this book is not that. James has talked, in interviews, about the research journey behind the book, including reading Yoruba-rooted fantasy classics like D.O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons and Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as part of building out the mythic logic of this world. He also describes researching and drawing from traditions that include Dogon history and mythology, among others .
And reviewers note that the book incorporates language texture from across the continent, including Yoruba, Hausa, Wolof, and Swahili . That matters, because it shows this is not just “fantasy in Africa as a vibe.” It’s a constructed mythos drawing from a broad web of histories, oral traditions, and storytelling systems, including monsters and legends James has said he felt denied growing up in the diaspora.
So if you come in looking for “African Westeros,” you might miss what it’s actually doing. It’s closer to building a mythic world the way Tolkien built Middle-earth, with deep time, creature lore, linguistic texture, and cultural scaffolding that makes the fantasy feel ancient and lived-in.
Fourth, and this is the biggest difference, the narrative style is not Tolkien’s god’s-eye chronicle. It’s testimony, interrogation, and contradiction.
Tolkien gives you the sense of a distant mythic record, almost like you’re reading a translated legend. James does something totally different. Tracker is telling his story under interrogation, as a confession or deposition to an Inquisitor. And what you get is not “objective truth,” it’s Tracker’s version of events, shaped by his grudges, desires, blind spots, and lies .
Reviews underline this constantly: the novel is built around competing versions of events, obfuscation, and a mystery that may not even be a mystery depending on who is talking. Even interviews and profiles highlight that James was drawn to the idea of multiple perspectives that do not line up, and explicitly frames the narrator as trickster-like, someone the listener cannot fully rely on, which forces you to actively assemble meaning instead of passively consuming plot.
That oral-testimony feel is why the “griot tradition” comparison keeps coming up in critical writing, because the story is not just the quest, it’s also the act of telling, shaping, bending, and performing the quest.
So when people say “it’s hard to follow,” I don’t think that’s always a flaw. I think it’s part of the design. This is a quest told by someone who wants control of the narrative, not clarity for the audience.
Which brings me back to the marketing problem.
When you tell readers “African Game of Thrones,” you are priming them for one kind of pleasure: political intricacy, dynastic logic, a sprawling cast where power is the central gravity. But a lot of critics describe the book as hallucinatory, brutal, mythic, and quest-driven, and they describe Tracker’s story as something you experience through disorientation as much as through plot comprehension.
Even reviewers who acknowledge that the “Game of Thrones” association exists tend to say, in some form, that it’s misleading, and that the book has epic fantasy depth that rivals the big mythic pillars, including Lord of the Rings.
So my take is simple.
Stop waiting for the Red Wedding.
Start treating this like a fever-dream Fellowship story moving through a mythologically dense, pre-colonial-inspired fantasy Africa, told through an unreliable narrator who might be lying to your face, and might be lying to himself.
If you read it that way, so much snaps into place.
If you read it expecting court politics and dynasty math, you might spend a long time mad at the book for not being the thing a marketing tagline promised you.
Has anyone else felt that disconnect between the hype framing and the actual structure of the story? And if you did, what com
by ebknightwrites