Book #44 of 2024:
Dark Heir by C. S. Pacat (Dark Rise #2)
I loved the twist at the end of the first Dark Rise novel, but felt like the majority of the book leading up to it was too slow-paced and generic for my tastes (shadowy riders chasing a young farmboy from his home into a wider world of danger, and so on). Luckily, this sequel dives right back into the action, with ramifications for that big revelation that considerably reshape the plot ahead. I still want more clarity / distinctiveness from the worldbuilding — it’s distracting to hear references to Italy and France alongside commonplace magic and worries that the ancient evil king is resurfacing — and the large cast of supporting characters with mostly modern English names like Elizabeth and Violet remains a bit unwieldy. But the core of the story surrounding the protagonist is incredibly sound.
It’s the tale of that hero Will recognizing and repudiating a certain capability for cruelty within himself, while scrambling to keep it a secret from his closest friends. It’s in the slow-burn romantic pull he feels towards his companion James, complicated by his concern that such a relationship could never truly be consensual given particular elements of their half-remembered previous lives. And it’s in his dedication to be better than his history, with a definite narrative tension in the question of whether the tragedy he’s caught up in will ever ultimately allow that.
Via flashback, we also learn more about Sarcean and Anharion — much stronger fantasy genre names, I must say — and their own doomed romance, and a new character in the present turns out to be a warrior of that same distant era resurrected to inhabit a fresh corpse. To author C. S. Pacat’s credit, all of this business of mind/body dissociation — distinct prior incarnations of souls that have left a legacy for their future selves, personalities from the past walking around in the forms of random dead folks now, and a magical ability some people can wield to temporarily possess their sworn servants — is never confusing or hard to follow, and given his/her genderqueer identity, there’s ample subtext for trans readings of such forces as well. Overall, it’s exactly the step forward for the series that I was hoping to find.
[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]
★★★★☆
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