Book Review: The Toll Of Fortune

A literary masterpiece that mirrors much of society today.

Twilight Patriot | July 22, 2026

For a little more than a year, I have been in the habit of reviewing works of fiction by right-leaning authors who are sympathetic to the worldview of Twilight Patriot. It was my friend Alexander Macris, from Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, who helped me get this started: Alex has always admired right-wingers who push back on left-wing cultural dominance by creating art of their own.

Today’s entry is The Toll of Fortune: An Indo-European Origin Saga, by A. J. R. Klopp, who was kind enough to send me a free copy last month.

The Toll of Fortune is a hard book to put into a category. Is it historical fiction? Not really. It’s set in 3309 BC, well before the invention of writing, and the cultures that appear in it are known only through archaeology and comparative linguistics. Is it fantasy? Sort of: Klopp’s characters believe in a lot of things that we would call supernatural, but they don’t live in an invented world with its own languages and races and geography — Klopp is writing about our actual ancestors.

The author of The Toll of Fortune is a man of diverse interests and experiences. He studied physics and astronomy in college, then spent a few years doing radio astronomy near the summit of Mauna Kea, where he studied star formation rates in distant galaxies. Then he decided to move on to something more human, and went to law school. After three years practicing corporate law (he specialized in acquisitions, mergers, and debt financing) he ended up working as a bond trader for BlackRock. But now, he’s finally found the time for his “real passion,” which “is history, especially retracing the steps of our ancestors to the remote past.”

The Toll of Fortune is an adventure story in the mould of the great epics, and the main action begins when a group of Proto-Indo-European youths (the Danger-Runner band, away from home on the rite-of-passage that will make them into men) are massacred by primeval monsters long thought to be extinct. (Neanderthals, perhaps? Here is Alexander Macris’s article about the possibility that Homo neanderthalensis used to eat H. sapiens.)

After a few survivors limp back to the Great Tent, bearing horrid wounds, the Clan-Father Ever-Wheel gathers a “special warband, whose purpose will be to avenge the Danger-Runner band and end the race of whichever miscreants committed this heinous act!” Thus begins our adventure – but it’s not just a battle between the heroes and the fallen elder race that they sometimes call “the Titans” or “the Gods’ First Born Children.” This warband will also encounter a strange society ruled from the Broad-Eave Hall, a literal longhouse whose Kin-Lord and Maven preside over a way of life very different from their own.

And it is through the foil of the Maven’s people that the reader is able to see Ever-Wheel’s people as the heroes, even though (like any group of copper-age warriors) they do a lot of things that seem barbaric to us. Barbarism is a good thing, Klopp seems to be saying, when you compare it to civilization gone wrong.

The heroes of The Toll of Fortune are........

© American Thinker