Lord Tophet picks up right where Shadowbridge left off, with Leodora, the daughter of legendary shadow puppeteer Bardsham, touched by the mysterious gods of this watery world where civilization clings to a network of spiraling bridges. Transported in body or soul, or both, rather like Alice falling up a rabbit hole, Leodora finds herself in Edgeworld, a kind of higher reality. There she makes a choice and receives a gift—a golden charm in the shape of a lion's head that speaks to her from time to time with gruff and obscure wisdom—before being returned to Shadowbridge and the span of Colemaigne. There she is found by her musical accompanist, Diverus, a young man who previously visited Edgeworld himself and received preternatural musical abilities from its gods, and Soter, the old man who knew her father, taught her the arts of shadow puppetry and now serves her with jealous devotion as a kind of manager.

Armed with her Brazen Head, and with a phial of a strange liquid given to her by another god, or maybe a ghost, Leodora—who is still performing masked, under the name of Jax, ostensibly in order to avoid the sexist restrictions and prejudices of many of the spans, but really for another purpose altogether, one known (as yet) only to Soter—discovers a secret world underneath the bridge, a kind of mirror image of the heavenly world above it. This place, called Pons Asinorum, is redolent of Faerie, and Leodora and Diverus very nearly become trapped there, though what they learn during their captivity is perhaps worth the price.

Meanwhile, back on Colemaigne, the creepy—and deadly—servants of Lord Tophet are pursuing Jax for reasons that are not entirely clear. But whatever their reasons, or those of their terrible lord, the result is that Leodora is in dire jeopardy ... as are her companions. To protect them, and to enact the riskiest performance of her career, one that will end a story that began long before her own birth, Leodora must face her fears—and come face to face with the enigmatic Lord Tophet, who destroys all that he touches.

A dazzling display of virtuosity

Like Shadowbridge, Lord Tophet consists of nestled rings of story, stories within stories within stories, some of them enacted upon stage by Jax, others told to her, still others related out of her hearing, between supporting characters. Some are myths; some are true; most are a mixture of both. But where the first novel looped back upon itself to fill in the histories of Leodora and Diverus, yielding a narrative that was downright leisurely, even indolent, like waters of a river caught in slow and sometimes backward-spinning eddies, Lord Tophet is full steam ahead from start to finish. It's a bit of a shock at first to lose the lazy and meandering quality that was one of the most wonderful parts of Shadowbridge.

But there are many other wonders here. The world of Shadowbridge continues to charm and bedazzle, and Frost's imagination remains as capable as ever of delivering surprises. His pages bristle with the kind of lively energy I associate with Miyazaki films, and his delight in the stories his characters hear and transform and retell is palpable and contagious.

The developing romance between Diverus and Leodora is sensitively and believably drawn against the bizarre backdrop of Pons Asinorum, where nothing is what it seems. This Faerie-like realm, along with Edgeworld, is curious in that it is explainable as much or more by recourse to science-fictional tropes as to fantastical. As I read, I found myself wondering repeatedly, and never able to answer satisfactorily, whether these realms, and Shadowbridge itself, were to be thought of as artificial realities generated by some computer program, for some unknown purpose, or whether they were dimensions linked via magical doorways. Perhaps the distinction is meaningless, and at any rate it seems irrelevant to Frost. But I did feel that this was one area in which his embrace of ambiguity worked against him. I was captivated by the question; I merely wished to see it answered. In a Gene Wolfe story, which these novels resemble in many ways, there is generally an answer to questions the author raises, however subtly hidden, but Frost raises questions without seeming to feel any need to supply answers ... or perhaps I simply missed them.

The spans of Shadowbridge are often compared to the logarithmic spiral of a nautilus shell, and Frost's story can be thought of as following this pattern as well. It moves from a point of wide dispersion through progressively narrower coils, until it reaches its point of origin ... now its concluding point. "In my beginning is my end," wrote Eliot in the poem East Coker, and "in my end is my beginning." Thus do the roots of story feed upon themselves.