Genre: Fantasy
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
Kershin’s attempts at a normal life have always been fruitless, but now he’s sure he’ll be cursed forever. After shunning his fire magic for years, he’s now forced to either tame it himself or be tamed by a persistent mage hunter. The harder he tries, the worse the situation gets, and as he’s hunted across the land, he leaves destruction in his wake.
Hessia has been scarred by a fire mage before, but she’s determined to never be helpless again. On her mission to tame the destructive fire mage, she faces trials that shake her to her core. Trials that test her mettle, threaten her beliefs, and decimate the villages she’s trying to protect. Will she fall prey to her own hunt?
The fire takes. The fire consumes. The fire kills.
These two know that very well. As they clash, they discover that the threats they face may be greater than either of them imagined.
The Review
Set in the fictional world of Conason, this fantasy (and sort-of-romance) is a really interesting twist on the trope of elemental magic (earth, fire, air, water) and its presence/influence in human life.
Divided into three parts—Severance, Conflagration, and Deliverance—the story takes place in a sort of vaguely iron-age culture, which somehow I kept thinking of as Roman era, but might be closer to early medieval. There’s a charming cultural confusion thrown in by the author, in that this feudal world also has amusement arcades and fancy restaurants, not to mention sofas and the concept of noshing.
Kershin is the fire mage of the title. A young man, he was thrown out of his childhood home when his fire powers emerged as a teenager. You see, this culture hates magic, and has essentially forbidden mages from existing (even though they exist). One can instantly make the connection with the reality of same-sex attraction in my own lifetime and earlier. Ironically, perhaps, Conason culture doesn’t even blink over same-sex relationships.
To monitor the presence of mages, there are the Truists (keepers of what is True), who literally hunt down mages who use their powers openly. It seems that, if you can keep your magic hidden from public awareness, you can live more or less peacefully. If caught, however, you can be “tamed,” an unpleasant thing about which I’ll say no more.
The tricky part is that, in different parts of Conason, mages are tolerated at different levels, and thus the Truists operate at varying degrees of zealousness. There are people who don’t really mind mages much, as long as it doesn’t negatively affect their own lives.
The flip side of this is that mages, marginalized and oppressed, either stay in hiding, or become outlaws. The outlaws can be pretty much as harmful as the worst prejudice against them assumes they already are. Bad mages simply fuel the Truists persecution.
Kershin tries to be good, but early in the book an accidental public display of his power at a town market triggers a series of increasingly dire events. Interestingly, the actual trigger is a handsome young man named Rosh, with whom Kershin ineptly flirts, startled by the sudden and strong attraction he feels.
This initial event brings Kershin to the attention of the local Truists, and specifically to Hessia, a particularly relentless follower of the faith. The entire book is presented alternating between Kershin’s and Hessia’s viewpoint.
This is not so much an epic as much as an endlessly meandering journey back and forth across Conason, as Kershin tries to get a grip on his power and find some sort of future; all the while pursued by Hessia, for whom he becomes an idee fixe. Hessia’s story is second only to Kershin’s, and their mutually dark backstories become the invisible driver for their intertwined lives.
A problem with Stephen Wolf’s ambitious, long novel is that Kershin is not an especially dynamic hero. He’s oddly passive, a personality trait that is only highlighted by the unhelpfulness of the few people he meets who actually seem to be in control of their powers and recognize him as something beyond the ordinary—even for a mage.
The other problem, for me, was Hessia, the central antagonist in the drama. Hessia is not much more than an ignorant zealot, driven by her prejudice against mages and without any sense of nuance or understanding of what she’s fighting. Of course, this echoes quite nicely the intended parallel to prejudice against LGBTQ folks in our own culture (something the author notes in his afterword). But Hessia’s humorlessness, and her grim determination to hunt Kershin to the end, don’t make her a very appealing character. Even when her own dark story is revealed about halfway through the book, it only helps a little. As I know from personal experience, childhood trauma is an explanation for bad behavior, but not necessarily an excuse.
Ignorance is also a touchstone of this small-scale epic. There is no Hogwarts to teach born mages how to deal with their power. There is no wise and good person who tries to educate both the mages and the Truists out of their bigoted ignorance. Instead, the main characters, often miserable (but both saved by love), blunder their way through their adventures until they finally figure it out for themselves.
The author creates a very satisfying ending, but the road to redemption is a rough one.
Four stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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