The Dragon Has Some Complaints, by John Wiswell, is a premise that is absolutely packed with clever ideas and promising concepts. Our main character is a once four, now three, headed hydra-esk dragon named Garrodigh, the Great Terror. I am assuming he takes inspiration from King Ghidorah, of Godzilla fame, from the name and design, but I am not familiar enough with Ghidorah to make the comparison. Garrodigh is a creature at war with himself ever since a tragic war wound took out one of his heads. Now the remaining three–Center, Bottom, and Upper–can’t agree on a decision to save their life. Food is getting scarce, and the war he escaped is getting closer; Garrodigh needs to make a plan for survival. It is then that Garrodigh’s Centerhead has a spark of inspiration. Nearby is a famous elite dragonriding unit that is slowly being drawn into the vague war that Garrodigh escaped. Perhaps, he can pretend to be a wounded dragon in a recent conflict and join the rehabilitation program where he will score free food.
The plan works, but Garrodigh finds himself wrapped up in the complicated politics of the human riders of the various dragons. He is assigned to the runt of the dragonriding core, Rania. Rania is carrying a lot of baggage, much like Garrodigh, but by working together they might find a way to move forward as a unit. Can these two broken halves pull together to create a new wholesome whole?
This book is certainly different and memorable, in many good and a few bad ways. Garrodigh is a fascinating lens by which to view the story. Shown to be a deeply unreliable narrator thanks to his war trauma right off the bat, Garrodigh’s description of all events is constantly confusing and contradictory. Instead of making the story harder to follow, it adds a layer of mystery and intrigue to things as they unravel, and it recolors even the simplest of interactions into subtext around trauma and the various forms it manifests in life’s quiet moments. Most of the human side characters in the story are very loudly queer and repressed by their societies. Garrodigh’s warring internal (and external) voices often become a powerful vehicle to represent the internal damage all the characters undergo. His three heads all have very fun personalities, with Upper experiencing some sort of out-of-body amnesia that has convinced him he’s human, Bottom reverting to base lizard brain, and Center like a stressed oldest child trying to get the family to a dinner reservation on time. I wasn’t as thrilled with Rania, our deuteragonist, as she feels like she lacks the agency and flare of Garrodigh. However, she does make a good foil for his draconic ways with her sweet nature and firm belief that there is good in everyone.
The world is interesting, with a lot of political set pieces for a story that mostly focuses on a dragon rehabilitation training montage. The complicated political elements of the story mostly serve as the driving force to keep pressure on our characters and, as a result, often feel like it doesn’t have as much depth and substance as I wanted. The “bad” empires feel like mostly caricatures, and their over-the-top shitty representatives feel like they detract from the generally earnest tone of other parts of the book. Tone inconsistency as a whole was probably the book’s biggest problem. The book will often get up to a solid pace and then seem to slow it down without clear reason. Oftentimes it would feel like the narrative diverged into ‘cozy’ sections in order to make the story feel more light and airy, but it would hurt my investment in the current stakes. On the other side of things, the back third of the story is mostly a large action sequence that feels pretty at odds with the rest of the narrative. I was already very bought in to the personal stories of the characters, making them feel completely unnecessary. I didn’t dislike the action scenes, but it does feel like it abandons the elements of the book (the smaller personal stories of Garrodigh and Rania) that were working best.
The end result is that The Dragon Has Some Complaints is a bit of a jumbled mess, but I say that with deep affection and love in my heart. It is a lot of fun and certainly very unique, both in the wider fantasy genre and in the cozy fantasy subtype. John Wiswell continues to bless us with weird standalone stories I read in a single sitting, and I hope this pattern continues for the foreseeable future.
Rating: The Dragon Has Some Complaints – 8.0/10
-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.
