An actual, proper, redemptive, light-and-darkness romantic plot? In MY young adult genre? (Could it be? Lord, I can only hope).

Darklina but make it gay.

***

This…this is some good shit.

The first half or so seemed so hackneyed that it had me tugging my hair in frustration. The opening chapters are a real greatest-hits parade of the mid-late 20th century fantasy I grew up on: Orphaned protagonist, mysterious mother who went to the grave with a secret (my personal favourite cliche, but still), plucky girl co-protagonist dressed in boy’s clothes, the resurrection of dastardly ancient evils, a savagely destructive sword that is totally-not-Stormbringer...

None of it bad, per se, but just…lacking a certain spark.

Dramatic Proper Nouns abound (The Dark King; The Lions; The Remnants; The Reborn) as though this were some kind of off-brand “Build Your Own Fantasy Epic” kit, rather than a passion project from an individual creative mind. An ancient language of magic does exist in the setting, so more inspired titles for the major players would have added some welcome flavour.

In fact, a great deal of the basic plot is derived from Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, which Pacat has stated was the reference for the title (in an act of deliberate iconoclasm), (and there are quite a few jabs at Cooper's genre descendants, including Rowling and Bardugo). To my eventual delight, just about every moment that seemed like inconsistent characterisation, foreshadowing with the subtlety of a blackjack in the face, or some other kind of slip that should have been caught by the editing, turned out to be red herrings or deliberate misdirection which makes delightful sense once the plot (finally) accelerates into convoluted, manic intensity in the second half.

Maybe my favourite, there’s a decent amount of foreshadowing that the apparent main villain is the protagonist’s father (yawn), but by the end, Will is begging to be told that the villain is his father, because that’d be a much easier pill to swallow than the actual truth.

My worst criticism is that the prose is very bland and unmemorable for the most part, which is a great shame when the imagery is dominated by light and darkness, flames and stars. (I’ve not read Pacat’s other adult novels, so I don’t know whether this is her usual style, or whether she’s tried to make it easy on a younger audience).

The idea that “epic” fantasy requires an outsized cast is a nonsense and a trap for writers, I think – a couple of the characters or subplots might’ve been trimmed without too great a loss; Violet in particular seems to exist mostly for the sake of diversity, being the primary female and mixed-race character, but unfortunately her storyline (at least in this book) is the least original, least compelling, and seemingly least important with regard to the grand scope of events that happened in ancient times.

The only thing I’d heard about this heading into it was that it had a queer romance, and that wasn’t well established early on either; it had me worried that it was going to hastily tacked-on, or else wholly relegated to subtext (that being said, it was some fucking glorious subtext, but still); happily, it did pull together very nicely in the end, and the novel finishes on a brutal cliffhanger which made me scream out loud with frustration and thwarted catharsis when I turned over to the acknowledgements page, and now I’m slavering for book 2.

Edit: upgraded from 4 to 5 stars because I am still buzzed about this a week later. <3