Blackwing Offers an Intense Blend of Epic Fantasy and Horror

Ryhalt Galharrow is a legend: a war hero, a skilled fighter, and, for two decades, the one person who could get anyone in or out of the Misery, a vast, blighted scar left on the world after a war between the godlike wizards the Nameless Ones and their flesh-crafting adversaries, the Deep Kings. He serves as one of the Blackwings, men chosen by the Nameless Crowfoot to do his bidding, marked by magical tattoos of a bloody raven that allow Crowfoot to communicate his often obscure demands. When Crowfoot diverts latest Galharrow’s bounty hunting mission to a nearby fort under siege, the Blackwing uncovers a deadly conspiracy surrounding the Engine, a massive weapon protecting the fort’s human population from a legion of twisted soldiers outside the walls. As the Deep Kings mass on the borders and Ryhalt dodges enemies from within and without, it’s clear he’s just a pawn in a much larger game, one the Nameless are playing with mortal lives.
The true horror of Blackwing is conveyed by what the characters—and readers—don’t know. The conspiracy stems from the fact that no one knows how the Engine works, save the wizard who created, before promptly disappearing. No one really even knows if the thing is still working correctly. The Nameless and the Deep Kings are themselves wizards with inscrutable motives and power beyond comprehension, and navigating the vast deserts of the Misery is a tricky business involving the use of an astrolabe and the phases of the moon in a place where the orientation of heavenly bodies in the sky is never constant. The sense of unknowing also translates into the text itself, with the descriptions of monsters and calamitous events left in shadow, allowing the imagination to fill in the terrible gaps. In one skin-crawling passage, Crowfoot punishes one of his men with something that “takes a week,” forcing Galharrow to watch for a day—long enough to chill him into doing what the wizard asks, without question. It’s a horrifying world made all the more so by McDonald’s restraint.
The magic system, too, conveys genuine menace. The only true wielders of magic are the Nameless and the Deep Kings, powers so far beyond the scope of the setting, they are as gods, operating by their own morality. Even the lesser magicians, like the back-alley surgeon to whom Galharrow ends up indebted, or the terribly childlike Drudge battlemages known as “Darlings,” exhibit an air of eldritch menace—the Darlings resemble cruel children, another prefers to appear as an impossibly tall, gaunt figure with more rows of teeth in his mouth than a human should have. On a lesser level are the Spinners, mages who weild what amounts to weaponized neon lights, who are hopelessly addicted to their apparatus and in danger of burning themselves to vapor. The Engine at the heart of the story is an arcane device that might be more dangerous to the people it purportedly protects when it is switched on.
McDonald plunges us into a world that’s far from hospitable, and while the grotesque body horror, the severe trauma inflicted upon just about every character, and the bleak weirdness might be a turnoff for more delicate readers, Blackwing earns its place in the dark fantasy genre by fighting for it tooth and nail. It’s a fantastic, fatalistic debut, and if you can stomach it, is serves at the gateway to what promises to be a singular series.
Blackwing is available now.