Emily Tesh is back on the scene with a highly anticipated standalone story about warlocks who teach at a British boarding school called The Incandescent. Tesh really made an impact with her novel Some Desperate Glory back in 2023. It was one of my favorite reads of that year and made me forever curious about all of her other projects. The Incandescent has a very different vibe, but the core of who Tesh is as a writer is definitely still on display.
Doctor Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood Academy and one of the most powerful warlocks in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers, more meetings, and securing the school’s boundaries from their resident archdemon, who is sitting like a crocodile in a river just waiting to disembowel any teenager dumb enough to get close. When someone accidentally causes an enormous demonic incursion onto campus, Walden is the one who must repel it. However, every interaction with demons leaves a caster altered, and no one is sure how Walden was marked by her time with Chetwood’s resident archdemon.
Tesh is a phenomenal writer, and this can be clearly seen by how polished and direct her literary agendas are in her stories. Tesh has found the mathematical horizon where she can tell the smallest amount of story and worldbuilding in order to make her story feel real, but then stuff the entire rest of the real estate of the book with thematic execution and payoff. Her stories are engrossing and have deeply relatable and richly defined characters–but they are there to ferry you to her endings, and her endings hit home with the force of a cannon.
Walden has a lot going on in the book. You will spend time walking through all the painful things she does as a school administrator. You will get to see her through the lens of one of the world’s greatest magicians. And you will get to spend some personal time with Walden, looking at how her other obligations have crushed her chances for relationships and close human connections. Yet all of these are in service to the payoff with the themes around trauma, emotional baggage, the cyclical nature of our past, and more. The ending of this book, just like Some Desperate Glory, was perfect. Like a beautiful domino display falling to reveal a stunning tapestry, it left me impressed, satisfied, and also wanting more. It is a powerful, contentious way to leave a book that gives her writing a very clear authorial voice and has impressed me both times I have read her stories.
Yet, I do think there was a minor gripe that kept me from loving The Incandescent as much as I did Glory. Tesh gets really, really, in the weeds of Walden’s role as a school administrator, and it can completely overwhelm the pacing at times. It is absolutely worth sitting through, and does in part serve the plot and the themes, but I could have used a couple fewer bricks of exposition about all of the paperwork that Walden needed to fill out. These passages could really arrest my momentum during my read, and at a certain point felt slightly excessive. Otherwise, no additional notes.
The Incandescent is great, and Tesh is absolutely a modern master that people should be following. This is the second standalone story in two years that Tesh has put out that knocked me off my socks. Her work is incandescent, shining brightly in the night like a torch that draws you near.
Rating: The Incandescent – 9.0/10
-Andrew
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
I decided to read Some Desperate Glory following this post, and I’m finding it engrossing. I’m really happy to see some authors still write standalones, I’m very much looking forward world-hoping with her other novels.