2024 read #107: Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant.

Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant

244 pages

Published 1970

Read from September 8 to September 11

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything that so perfectly distills the early 1970s “adult fantasy” movement as this book. Three English children, lured off the path in the Essex countryside, find themselves transported to a world of swords and sorcery, noble mounted warriors and antiquated gender norms, martial eagles and a war of darkness against light. It’s Narnia meets the Hyborian Age.

The best part of this book is Chant’s prose, which would still be solid for a fantasy novel today, and would’ve seemed astonishing in 1970. In Chant’s hands, the rote phrases typical of Seventies fantasy — your “grim sable crags,” your “shimmering silver aureole,” and so forth — mostly add charm rather than gumming up the works. It’s a tricky balancing act, one not even Patricia A. McKillip landed on her first try. I’m impressed.

Charming in a different way, the worldbuilding, which Chant refined over the years from a childhood game of make-believe, feels like true outsider art, a dash of Henry Darger to season the mash of Tolkien and Howard. The world of Vanderei feels lived in, its corners well-thumbed, despite its reliance on archetypes. There’s even a very 1970 attempt to ground the setting’s gratuitous misogyny in something like anthropology, which — while I didn’t care much for it — is very in keeping with the spirit of the enterprise.

The plot is less interesting. It’s the kind of book where one of the siblings is already proclaimed the Chosen One by page 38. Generously, one could say it’s the junior reader prototype of the Fionavar Tapestry, complete with climactic human sacrifice. If it had been published ten years earlier, or ten years later, it would have been marketed as juvenile fiction, but Ballantine was determined to create “adult fantasy” as a genre, and if the main characters are kids who’ve gone through a portal into a fantasy world to meet princesses and unicorns, well, that’s just what adult fantasy is in 1970, and it’s all very grown up, thank you.

Altogether, I felt this was more of a curiosity than a lost classic. And as the story went on, Chant’s female characters — even the badass princess skilled in star magic, who gives up her powers for her man — became much too meek and submissive. Still, if you’re interested in the evolution of modern fantasy as a genre, this one’s worth a read.