For a variety of reasons, I’ve been finding it difficult to get through the books I pick up recently. That’s not to say the books I’ve been picking up are bad. Far from it. But my attention span just… hasn’t quite been there.
Enter Black Stone Heart by Michael R. Fletcher.
This book gripped me from the start, and I finished it in a couple of frantic sittings. That’s the first time a print book has done that for me in years. The story is intensely readable and nearly impossible to put down.
We open with Khraen crawling his way out of the earth, with no memories of his past life. He’s little more than a feral animal, and only slowly comes to his senses as he recovers the shattered pieces of his obsidian heart. With each new fragment, he comes closer to regaining his former power.
But his power comes at a steep cost. Can he become the man he once was? And more importantly… should he?
There are some fantasy tropes I will always love, especially when done well. Villains vs villains, progression fantasy, and amnesia where the current personality fears becoming their old self are among those, and Fletcher delivers on these in spades.
That said, I think this will be a book where your enjoyment hinges on how much you like grimdark. This book is grim. It’s dark. And it’s really fucking grimdark.
I loved some of the driving themes in this book. What does it mean to be evil? Can we trust history when it’s written by the victors? And are we permanently defined by our past?
However, the grimdark nature of the story overpowered the themes.
There’s a significant amount of tension centering around whether Khraen will give in to the monster he once was or become his own person. In this reader’s humble opinion, Khraen is already far beyond redemption. He’s leapt over the line between morally grey and unforgivable so many times, he might as well be playing hopscotch on his descent through the circles of hell. Even Sauron wasn’t encouraging the brutal flaying of innocent people just because he was horny. (I’ve only read the main four Lord of the Rings books, so if this occurs in the Silmarillion… sorry?)
This made Khraen an unforgivable villain and completely unlikable for me. And yet, I still couldn’t put the book down.
Overall, Black Stone Heart was incredibly fun yet relentlessly dark. There’s a lot to love for hardcore fans of the grimdark genre, but many readers will understandably want to steer clear of this series.
Oh come now, we’ve all overlooked a bit of flaying for some nookie.