City of Others

• Author: Jared Poon
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: January 13, 2026
• Publisher: Orbit
• Series: The DEUS Files #1

Thank you to Orbit for sending me an ARC of this book (and audiobook) in exchange for an honest review.

In the sunny city of Singapore, the government takes care of everything – even the weird stuff. Benjamin Toh is a middle manager in the Department for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders (DEUS), tasked with taking care of the supernatural occurrences and people no one else wants to deal with, from restless ghosts to immortal gods to conniving jinn. Overworked and under-resourced, he has to juggle the demands of senior management, an elderly father, and a new boyfriend, all while trying to keep his team out of trouble.

When an entire block of flats goes missing in the town of Clementi, drowned in an otherworldly wave, the information he needs to prevent another catastrophe lies in the pasar bayang – the shadow markets. But the demigod protector of the markets has neither forgotten nor forgiven their humiliation by the Singapore authorities decades ago. Ben will need to wrestle with the legacy of his government and the whispers of his own insecurities, navigating landscapes both urban and fantastical, both inside the soul and outside the real world, all so he can just do his goddamn job.

This sounded like such a wonderfully unique premise for a story. I was kind of picturing something like the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch, but with more of an Asian basis for the mythology and society. I had started reading this in print format, but then switched to the audiobook version to get a better feel for the foreign words and how they are supposed to be pronounced.

Initially, we are introduced to Benjamin Toh, middle manager for a company with a Department for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders (DEUS). He’s busy trying to stay ahead of the unrealistically high demands that his boss sets for him, managing the employees in his department, his father’s calls checking on him, grief, a potential boyfriend, and handling the threats to the humans and ‘Others’ of Singapore that no other department wants to tackle. 

This chaotic environment gets worse when a whole block of flats disappears in a paranormal wave, and he quickly finds himself heading up a ragtag team of employees and an unruly intern, all of whom I really liked. The side characters are wonderfully quirky and fun, and they worked together in a way that quickly became a found family dynamic. Another addition to the story is a potential partner of Ben’s, Adam. These two have another really great dynamic—mildly flirty, funny banter, and they work together to save Singapore, making it a pleasure to read about these two, and I was hoping for them to get together since they make a cute couple.

The book reads like a love letter to the melting pot of Singapore, with many different types of Southeast and East Asians coming together as a society. Ben is a Chinese Singaporean having a romance with a Malay-Muslim man, and I thought it was done beautifully—the connection between them is tangible from the start.and radiates off the page.

There were a few things that I didn’t love about the story. The pacing was inconsistent, with most of the book moving at a moderate pace, and the end felt a little rushed. I also would have liked to see a city as vibrant and alive as Singapore painted a bit more vividly, but it fell into the common issue I find with urban fantasy where the paranormal elements of the story are described a lot more than the location itself. 

Another thing that I had an issue with was a little more upsetting to me. At a point in the last 10% of the story, beings appear that come across as a cross between ghosts and zombies, but the author specifically chose the term ‘golem.’ The golem was a being made of clay that has life breathed into it in a specific way and a word carved onto its forehead that can be altered to ‘deactivate’ the golem. Since the Jewish aspect of the golem was completely ignored, the beings in this book are total misrepresentations of what a golem actually is.

A second problem with seeing this mythical being appear in a Singaporean fantasy novel is that the golem is a Jewish folkloric creation, and there isn’t any acknowledgement of that. Additionally, Judaism is a closed practice: Judaism means being a member of a tribe, and we don’t proselytize. The only way to become Jewish is to be born into it or to go through a lengthy conversion process. Our practices and beliefs have been thoroughly debated and explored by scholars for millennia, leading to a complex closed practice that it is impossible to fully understand by searching on Google. We all know that appropriation from closed practices is harmful, yet somehow this knowledge is disregarded when it is the Jewish people who are being appropriated from or harmed, yet again.

Overall, this was a fun read, but there were some things that I would have liked to be a little different. The first 90% of the book was enjoyable and heading towards a higher star rating, but a few things got to me. Ben’s relationship with his father felt so dismissive and distant that it wasn’t like they lived together at all. This made him a little less likable to me than some of the other characters, while the faster pacing at the end felt rushed. Additionally, having appropriated creatures from a closed practice and misrepresenting them as evil (when the golem was originally created to be a protective being for the oppressed Jewish minority in Prague). For more information about it, you can learn more about the Golem of Prague here. Yet seeing this appropriation in the last 10% of the story left a bad taste in my mouth, especially for such a wonderful diverse story based in South-East Asia and Singaporean culture. My reading of this series ends here.

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