The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson
213 pages
Published 2015
Read from January 12 to January 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Way back in October, in my review of Erika Johansen's The Queen of the Tearling, I described the sort of book I hankered after: "What I wanted was a book of old school high fantasy, a fun, pulpy
adventure through what-the-fuck that would make me feel like I was
inside a Roger Dean painting. But I wanted it packaged with adequate
prose and some semblance of modern progressive ethics and values." Queen was not that book, but as it turns out, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps totally is. Wilson's prose is a fascinating stylistic mix, mingling the epic, thesaurus-heavy deliberation of classic sword 'n' sorcery with dialogue Daniel José Older, in his cover blurb, likens to Ghostface Killah -- a bit forced as a point of reference, but the juxtaposition flows well and just works. Well, the dialogue more so than the prose, which at times suffers from what I would call first novel syndrome: making a bold leap but stumbling upon the landing, straining so hard for fluency that it in places strays into opacity. Which isn't a criticism, really. I can only hope my own first published novel will be this fresh-voiced and memorable. Goodness knows I've written reviews that I can barely make sense of months later.
The adventure sections of this novel are so old-school that they feature swamp-dwelling sauropods straight out of the 1950s, sabretoothed wizard-cats, and demigods that turn out to be the offspring of extraterrestrials -- one of the oldest (or at least most ubiquitous) twists in modern heroic fantasy. Structurally, I enjoyed the way Wilson mixed memories into conversations and chopped certain sections into non-sequentiality. Sorcerer overall stands as a sturdy new variant of the sword 'n' sorcery formula, fun and full of fresh new life, though the limitations of the subgenre prove hard for it to surmount.
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