Dark of the Moon by P. C. Hodgell
“Just once, why can’t we have a simple crisis?”
Jame from Dark of the Moon
P. C. Hodgell’s Dark of the Moon (1985), a swift-paced dual narrative of twins Jame and Tori Knorth, is the sequel to her awesomely-amazing-why-haven’t-you-read-it-yet first novel, God Stalk (see my Black Gate review here). Jame, heroine of the first book, is racing into the west to find her brother while Tori, High Lord of the Kencyrath, is racing south to bring his army to bear on a threat that could destroy the world.
Hodgell wrote God Stalk as an introduction for her heroine Jame and to be sure she could write a full-length novel. To ease readers into the complex and madly elaborate world of Rathilien, she set it in the deliberately Leiberesque city of Tai-Tastigon. Like Leiber’s S&S, Hodgell’s moves easily from the grim to the funny and back without dissonance in an intimately scaled, fantastical urban playground.
But Hodgell had already planned a story of vaster scope about Jame and the Kencyrath which is only hinted at in God Stalk. The Kencyrath were bound to their god in order to fight Perimal Darkness, the embodiment of evil and chaos, and had been waging that battle for millennia. The war and the consequential flight of the Kencyrath to the world of Rathilien is always lurking beneath the surface of the story, but it’s never the driving force, the focus being on Jame’s adventures and efforts to understand the true nature of the world’s gods.
With Dark of the Moon, Hodgell and Jame leap out of the familiar shallows of Tai-Tastigon and its plethora of cults, sects, and secret societies, into the depths of full-blown epic fantasy. The ages-long struggle against Perimal Darkness moves to center stage and Jame emerges as possibly the most important figure in the war.
I’ve read that some fans of God Stalk were put off by the epic scale of Jame’s new adventure. I admit that in 1985, when I first read DotM, I was a little disappointed when I realized that Tai-tastigon was fading behind her, but within a few pages Hodgell had me hooked. High in a snowy mountain pass, Jame and her companions are confronted by something like a nasty pack of wolverines, a shapechanging enemy out of legend, and wonderfully miscast magic. This book charges into motion and never lets up. This is my fifth or sixth reread of this book and it thrills every time.
There’s a suspicion common in genre circles when a writer or creator from ‘the mainstream’ uses genre conventions or plot points. It’s sometimes a justified suspicion, as the writer unfamiliar with genre falls into cliché or loses control of their material through inexperience with the form. But sometimes something else happens: fresh eyes can find new truths. And every so often somebody approaching a genre by starting at square one can show why the classic genre material works in the first place — and even twist that material a bit to find new life for it going forward.