‘You have an astonishing talent that could offer an incredible amount of good to the world.’
‘Then why do I feel like there’s something wrong with me?’

Quick Pitch:

If you were the only one immune to magic, would you fulfill a prophecy to raise a dead God? For our FMC, that answer is a flat no.
So much so, she’s willing to start a whole new life to escape being hunted by these holy fanatics.

But when she meets powerful strangers willing to protect, hide and house her – the questions arise around trust and the prophecy itself.

Overall Thoughts:

Honestly, I tend to be ehhhhh about religions zealots plots but this was easy to get hooked on.

If anything, I hope it goes harder on the character development and magic /and magic immunity benefits.

I see the potential. Some of the data dumping/pacing is maybe a little clunky, but I like the set up.

‘What happened to the sword’s owner?’
Ancier said, ‘What’s left of him is under the twisted tree. He died fighting. It’s not a bad way to go.’
‘I don’t want to die fighting.’
‘Then pay attention.’

 

From the jump, L. Lyons’s The Black Bane has a classic fantasy feel and is clearly in the tradition of many of the doorstoppers of the eighties and nineties. I grew up reading these kinds of books (Tad Williams was and is a favourite), so there was much I could appreciate about what Lyons is doing in Black Bane. Although this one is ultimately a cut, there’s a lot that works. The prose is accessible and clean and despite Black Bane not initially being in my pile I ended up finishing it in one day in what amounted to one sitting. Something kept pulling me back, and that says a lot about Lyons as an author. Much as I did for Justin Greer’s The Servant, I do recommend Black Bane to fans of chosen one-style fantasy, though Black Bane has a slightly lighter touch when it comes to its themes of Good versus Evil (it’s more of a struggle between good [?] versus evil[?]). There’s some politicking sprinkled in, and even a touch of much-appreciated humour. Although after reading the author’s note, I’m aware that roleplaying videogames are unlikely to have been a huge influence (Lyons started work on Black Bane in 1987), I did also get a sense that fans of recent games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and the Dragon Age series will appreciate both Lyons’s approach to character, as well as many of the plot points of the book.

Kailas, the protagonist of The Black Bane (no relation to Kahless, the Klingon messianic figure, though I confess to mentally pronouncing it the same), belongs to a maligned race and is both shunned and coveted based on her ability to nullify any magic she encounters. Seeing her power as a means to free their god, a death-worshipping cult sets its sights on her and she flees with the help of a suspicious stranger named Ancier. Ancier sends Kailas on ahead to a larger stronghold where she will be protected, and where much of the action takes place. I don’t want to give away too much of the story, but Kailas is joined by a ragtag group of allies who help both to defend and educate her on the mysteries surrounding her abilities and the nuances of what the death cult (and Ancier) really want.

Above anything else, Black Bane is ultimately a lot of fun. The group dynamics at work in its latter half drew me back to the best parts of my favourite epic fantasies from my young adulthood–Dragonlance in particular. The supporting cast is intriguing, and Lyons wisely depicts a variety of people with differing perspectives on the social fabrics of Avellion. You get a real sense of some of the tensions and beliefs undergirding the characters’ actions. Black Bane is told in third omniscient, which is a rare choice these days, but is done well here, and I especially appreciated that it allowed Lyons to “check in” with her larger cast. That said, one of the major issues with Black Bane is at the level of character, specifically Kailas herself. While there’s nothing off-putting about Kailas as a protagonist, she’s a bit of a blank slate, especially compared with her friends. I never felt especially invested in Kailas’s story and struggled to attribute much of a personality to her, which is problematic given how much of the plot seemingly revolves around her. I often find this to be the case with traditional chosen one characters, and it’s typically a tighter, deeper POV that allows the audience more of a sense of their chosen ones as fully-fleshed persons.

The Black Bane really takes off once the action shifts to the city where Kailas seeks shelter. Although there were sections and passages that impressed me in the earlier portion of the story, Kailas herself wasn’t enough to compel me, and her storyline is fairly standard for the genre. In reviews, I don’t typically make what feel like editorial suggestions, but I couldn’t help but feel that The Black Bane would have been a tighter, more focused book if the story had started in the city and Kailas had been a side, rather than the main, character. Many of the juiciest conflicts revolve around another character–a guard named Jerräk–whose love for an engaged noble woman and reckoning with racial prejudice feel much more tense and worth exploring than Kailas’s narrative. Plotlines such as the noble woman’s betrothal feature major turns and big moments that seem as though they were constructed to function like George R. R. Martin-level upheavals, but since they come fairly late in the book don’t have the build up or impact they ought to, and instead feel slightly random and a tad unearned. Focusing on Jerräk may have resolved this issue and lent a meatiness to those storylines that I found myself longing for.

Aside from these issues, I did also struggle with some of the implicit biases of the text–again, most likely unintended on the part of the author. As in The Servant, the depiction of Black Bane‘s villains came off as Islamophobic, and though Lyons clearly felt called to address and critique racial bias through the characters of Jerräk, Kailas, and an apostate of the death cult, the rhetorical coding of the villains undermined much of what I think she was getting at (especially in light of Kailas’s whiteness). There’s also quite a lot of ageism and fatphobia in the book and these felt mean-spirited (though, again, likely subconcious and unintentional on the part of the author). Some of the religious aspects of Black Bane may have worked better were there a greater sense of the broader context of religious belief in the world. With religion so central to Black Bane‘s premise, I was hungry for a clearer sense of what licit and majority religious praxis and belief look like in its primary setting. We get hints here and there, but so much is left vague or relies on stereotype and shorthand. For example, Kailas at one point compares a character’s physical appearance to that of an angel, and angels and demons are mentioned in passing, but I didn’t get much sense of what these concepts mean in this secondary-world fantasy context. The death cult’s form of prayer, which involves kneeling on a bare floor, is contrasted against the use of pews (and there are monks and seminaries), but these felt like hasty presumptions of what normate religion is rather than thought-out choices.

All the same, one of my absolute favourite parts of the novel was Lyons’s introduction of a more numinous religious storyline in the book’s last third. I don’t want to spoil the exact plot development, but here I got a taste of the weightiness and thoughtfulness I’d been longing for in terms of Lyons’s engagement with Black Bane‘s religious themes. There’s a decided creepiness to the sequence and its representation of myth, immortality, and godhood that works exceptionally well and that I expect will become a much larger feature of the series moving forward.

Despite The Black Bane‘s flaws, I felt drawn to it and I’m very glad SPFBO provided an opportunity for me to read Lyons’s work. I’ll certainly be checking out the next volume and I recommend the book to fans of classic fantasy tomes with strong ensemble casts.