Synopsis:
Blacktail is a half-breed wolf, born to hunt. When he finds love beyond a garden wall, he dares to imagine a peaceful life – until men butcher his mate and unborn pups in a surgical act of cruelty. His grief ignites a rampage of torn throats and shattered bone, a slaughter so absolute it draws the gaze of an ancient feline witch. She sends him south to wake the sleeping Forest God and end the age of reason.
Fuelled by a rage that frightens Hell itself, Blacktail wages war against men and the beasts who dare defend them. From a gore-soaked wilderness to a burning confrontation with Heaven, Blacktail is a feral odyssey of vengeance.
Review:
11 years after “The Library At Mount Char,” I was beginning to lose hope that the lyrical and magical dark fantasy of Scott Hawkins would grace my bookshelf again, Hawkins henceforth spoken about in the same breath as forgotten gods and impossible creatures. Nope! “Blacktail,” his latest, is a different beast completely from its predecessor, which felt like discovering a new religion- but it’s equally mythical, bizarre and triumphant, written with poetic savagery and proof that lightning does indeed strike twice. A bloody fairytale, a travelogue across familiar and distant lands, an unclassifiable blend of genres, an odyssey, and an epic revenge story, Hawkins’ sophomore novel is a gory, misanthropic zinger. Told purely through animal perspectives, chiefly through the vengeful eyes of our titular Blacktail, and condemning of the self-aggrandizing hierarchy the human race seems to have plonked itself atop of, “Blacktail,” is a brutal, raging, haunting adventure that you can embark upon yourself when it’s unleashed September 3rd in the UK by Tor Nightfire and September 1st in the US by Crown Publishing. This book will maul you.
It’s not an easy story to condense, I have to tell you. We follow Blacktail, a half-breed wolf who is determined to avenge the death of his house-dog mate and unborn pups. It’s the ancient and powerful witch Old Kitty Mother who embarks him on his quest to find and awaken the forest God. It’s an epic and strange adventure in which he befriends a clever fox named Slipper, has a run-in with a disciple of the God of Lost Things, and tries to trigger an uprising against She Who Brings Bacon In The Night- and that’s barely a sniff of it.
Now, in case I hadn’t already made it clear, you and I, humans, don’t come out of this particularly well. I don’t simply mean that quite a few of us meet a bloody end between Blacktail’s teeth, although Hawkins most certainly isn’t stingy in that regard, I mean that we are unequivocally the antagonists. Very much to its credit, this novel refuses to grant humanity the heroism we often assume is ours by default- we instead occupy a role we reserve for sharks and bears and vultures.
Yes, “Blacktail,” is thematically a profound and humbling slap to human egoism and exceptionalism. Hawkins forces us to see ourselves as the rest of creation no doubt does- loud, violent, self-important primates and polluters. We and our cars, which may just crush you if you get too close, are the subject of cautionary tales and campfire stories. We are the strange creatures glimpsed where the forest meets the highway, the cruel predators who flatten homes, poison rivers and end lives to fill our stomachs and line our pockets, not as the pinnacle of evolution or wise stewards, but as an invasive parasite that should, for the good of the natural world, be exterminated.
“Blacktail,” is on one level, a righteous smiting of the human race by its main character, vengeance having become the compass by which he navigates the world- that of course is not just savagery, but a thematically loaded response to our trespasses. As gnarly as it is, for all the ripping and tearing, snapping and spraying, this is a novel enthralled not just by domination and our narcissistic claim to it, but by mythology, mentorship, kinship, power, religion and justice. It is, in many ways, an old-fashioned fable.
I’ll call it Tolkien meets Kira Jane Buxton’s “Hollow Kingdom,” meets something akin to a revenge slasher, and I’m somewhere in the vicinity of this fantastical and bloody crusade. A darkly humorous, relentlessly furious follow-up to what I’d presumed was impossible to follow-up, I can’t wait to see what Scott Hawkins conjures up next.
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