This week Nathan from the Fantasy Review Barn is taking us travelling through the tropes of fantasy and focusing on towers:

‘TOWERS stand alone in waste areas and almost always belong to Wizards. All are several storeys high, round, doorless, virtually windowless, and composed of smooth blocks of masonry that make them very hard to climb.’

Surprisingly I found this more difficult than I thought!  I’ll start off by chucking in Rapunzel – no doors so it counts – and it belongs to a witch.

This is a cheat – The Once and Future King by T H White – in which Merlin is banished to a remote and crumbly tower in Sir Ector’s castle.  This is only a cheat because I never finished the book – not because I wasn’t enjoying it but because it was a library book and I had to return it – I just need to go and get it out again!! Duh…

The Tower of Raven’s Reach – the setting of the grande finale from Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora. No witches or wizards and there are doors into the place – but it’s a very tall tower!  In fact I seem to remember the lovely Locke suffering from a fear of heights at one point!  Plus there are the Glass Towers where all the elite live.  Not really any magical connections though…so, grasping at straws at all!

The Two Towers – LoTR by Tolkien – if you chuck a stick anywhere in middle earth you pretty much hit a tower – this is definitely a bona fide entry – however it’s a very easy and rather obvious one.  Still, never miss an opportunity to get Lord of the Rings on a list seems to be my motto and therefore it would be folly not to include this!

Two cheats – although I do own both books I haven’t read them so I’m assuming that there are towers involved because it says so in the title!:

The Tower Lord by Anthony Ryan

The Dark Towers by Stephen King

And, finally – thinking outside the box…

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer – this is a bit of a twisted one really – four explorers are sent to explore zone ‘x’.  They find a circular staircase that goes down into the ground – for some reason throughout this is called a tower – given that this isn’t really a tower I could also mention that there is a lighthouse in area x – which also plays a very prominent part??  Trying to think along different lines here – not quite sure it’s working out for me though!  Anyway, much creepiness – stay away from area x is my general advice ! – although do read the book I hasten to add.