Scotland’s fantasy scene has a bad habit of polishing itself for visitors. Edinburgh turns into a gothic theme park, the slang gets filed down, the rough edges get turned into “atmosphere,” and the magic arrives pre-approved—witches you can buy on a candle, folklore you can consume without being challenged. T. L. Huchu doesn’t do that kind of comfort. He writes Edinburgh like a city with its gloves off, then threads Zimbabwean myth and spiritual practice straight through the tenements and closes, refusing to translate it into something cosy or vaguely “Celtic” for British taste.
That refusal matters because Huchu isn’t playing dress-up with culture. He grew up in Zimbabwe and has lived in Edinburgh for most of his adult life, and the work reads like someone who understands what it means to live between places without being allowed to pretend the gap is painless. His earlier novels—The Hairdresser of Harare and The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician—already showed he’s interested in people negotiating systems: desire, class, reputation, authority. Then the Edinburgh Nights books take that same instinct and light it up with genre electricity.
The Library of the Dead is the moment he makes the mash-up undeniable. You’ve got a near-future Edinburgh where the city’s inequalities haven’t evaporated into “speculative fun,” they’ve calcified. You’ve got Ropa Moyo, a teenager making money by talking to the dead—work, not whimsy—using Zimbabwean-rooted magic in Scottish streets that don’t care about her personal journey. The premise is sharp because it refuses the genre’s favourite lie: that magic frees you from the material world. Here, magic is another hustle. Another risk. Another way the desperate try to survive.
Huchu’s greatest insult to polite fantasy is that he treats magic like labour—useful, dangerous, ethically messy, and never a substitute for rent.
The brilliance is how the mash-up never collapses into novelty. He doesn’t use Zimbabwean myth as exotic seasoning on a Scottish base. He lets the two rub against each other until sparks fly. The dead aren’t quaint. The occult isn’t a vibe. It’s a practice tied to community, to obligation, to the costs of contact. And Edinburgh isn’t a gothic backdrop; it’s a living power structure—who gets access, who gets exploited, who gets laughed at, who gets flattened by institutions that claim neutrality while serving the same old masters.
By the time you get to Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, the series has sharpened its target: not just spooky secrets but the social theatre around them. Secret societies, gatekeeping, unpaid work dressed up as opportunity—the magical world mirrors the real one too cleanly to be accidental. Huchu knows how “prestige” operates: it’s not about talent, it’s about permission. And he’s cruelly good at showing how a young person’s hunger to matter can be used against them.
Then The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle proves the point isn’t just Edinburgh as a playground. The series stretches outward without losing its centre: this is still about a kid navigating a rigged world where adults hoard resources, where belief can be weaponised, where “community” can mean protection or punishment depending on who you are. Huchu refuses to make the protagonist’s toughness a cute personality trait. It’s defensive equipment.
This is why the mash-up feels uneasy in the best way: it won’t give you a single cultural lane to settle into. Readers who want Scotland to be tartan and ghosts will squirm. Readers who want African myth framed politely for Western consumption will squirm. Good. The book doesn’t exist to make anyone feel at home. It exists to show what home costs when you’re carrying more than one history in your body.
The point of the mash-up isn’t “diversity,” it’s friction: two story-worlds grinding together until the reader can’t hide behind the comfort of one tradition.
Huchu’s work also lands a punch Scottish publishing culture needs. Scotland loves to celebrate itself as a “storytelling nation” while still acting shocked when the stories aren’t quaint, aren’t white, aren’t politely explained. He doesn’t ask to be included in a heritage narrative; he writes a new one that makes the old one look small. He makes Edinburgh bigger, stranger, less obedient—more like a real city, less like a branded skyline.
If you want fantasy that behaves, that reassures you with familiar myths and tidy morals, look elsewhere. If you want a writer who drags Zimbabwean myth into Scottish streets and refuses to sand down either side for your comfort, read Huchu and sit with the unease. Don’t ask it to soften. Don’t ask it to translate. Keep the friction.
