A broken man, Khraen awakens alone and lost. His stone heart has been shattered, littered across the world. With each piece, he regains some small shard of the man he once was.
He follows the trail, fragment by fragment, remembering his terrible past.
There was a woman.
There was a sword.
There was an end to sorrow.
Khraen walks the obsidian path.
Hiu’s thoughts:
This book, more than anything else I’ve read during this year’s SPFBO, really captured my attention. I’ve read a couple books from Michael Fletcher before, one that I enjoyed and one that I didn’t so much, but I think that I’d put Black Stone Heart above either of them. But with that said… There were parts of it that I really, really didn’t like.
Black Stone Heart has a premise that I found really cool. Khraen is a man who pulls himself out from the ground one day, all blood and dirt, with very few memories of who he actually is. He soon learns that there are others like him — and I mean very like him, to the extent that they actually are him — and that if he kills them, he can absorb a small piece of obsidian from their hearts and regain some of his lost memories.
The thing is, Khraen basically used to be a Dark Lord. He could summon demons, use magical artifacts, and create some of his own through the mass sacrifice of thousands of people. He was a bit of a bastard, to put it mildly. But that was Old Khraen. And New Khraen doesn’t want to be that guy any more. And so he’s caught in a bit of a catch-22. He wants to gain enough power to destroy the wizards that brought him down and scattered his heart across the world, but he doesn’t want to be thought of as a bad guy. And with every piece of obsidian that he absorbs, every other version of himself he kills, he becomes more like his old self.
It’s a premise that I found really engaging, and it reminded me a bit of Steve Thomas’ Mid-Lich Crisis. Is evil something you are, or is it something you do? And is there any way that Khraen can gather back his old power without becoming the monster he used to be?
I really appreciated the narrative voice in Black Stone Heart, which has a first-person perspective. I thought it was very effective at conveying the main character’s personality, and it added a touch of colour to the way that the story was told. The prose was very easily digestible, and it only took me a couple of days to read. It was the kind of book that I’d make excuses to pick back up.
The story of a broken character trying to do better is one that is so often one of my favourites. There’s a little bit of BoJack Horseman buried in the themes of Black Stone Heart, with whole idea of a character doing something awful for immediate personal gain, but with the intention of becoming a “good person” sometime later. Black Stone Heart, however, takes it to personal extremes, and one of my main problems with it is that it so often seems to undercut its own message.
One example of this concerns the existence of racism in the story. Khraen often wonders why people are being hostile to him as a result of his darker skin-colour, and why they assume he is “evil” when he has done nothing wrong to them. But the point that the book is trying to make here rings a little hollow when Khraen starts committing multiple atrocities for personal gain. And while, yes, no one culture can be judged by the actions of one homicidal lunatic, the few characters who are introduced with darker skin defer to said homicidal lunatic. This may change as the characters move into a different area of the world in the sequel, but it fell a little flat for me here.
I also thought that the core theme of the novel — the exploration of whether a person is “evil” based on their past and their actions — was likewise undercut. Khraen spends a lot of his time hand-wringing over whether or not he’s a good person, but commits countless numbers of truly horrendous acts over the course of the book to the extent that it’s hardly in doubt. If his ramp-up from misguided dude to homicidal nutcase had been a little less steep, or if he’d had to answer big moral questions to “justify” his actions, then I think the book would have been stronger for it. Or even if the hand-wringing had stopped after he had clearly passed the point of no return. But instead, Khraen’s most burning question essentially becomes… Is it okay to kill a bunch of people if you’re really, really horny?
Which ties into another aspect of the book I’m not a fan of. It leans heavily into the jealous psychotic girlfriend trope, which I feel is more than a little played-out at this point and does more to detract from the story than add to it. The story is also very male-gazey and has a good six fade-to-black sex scenes that I can remember off the top of my head, with the reasoning for this being that the main character has to inhabit the body of a horny teenager. Which, y’know. Fair. I guess. But immortal horny teenage mass murderers aren’t really my thing.
So in the end… Black Stone Heart is a really frustrating book for me. I really loved the highs, but I really loathed the lows. I can understand why the author has made the decisions that he has, but some of those decisions had an impact on my enjoyment. There is a lot here to like for the reader who likes dark/grimdark fantasy, and I want to reiterate that I did really enjoy the narrative voice and the questions that were posed (before it went overboard).
In terms of the SPFBO score… this could very easily have been an 8.5 for me, but for the frustrations I’ve outlined. In the end, though, I’ve got to dock it a bunch of half-points for those aspects.
For SPFBO my final rating is 7/10.
Travis’s thoughts:
This is not an easy book to review, but hot damn was it an easy book to read. It’s been the most compelling SPFBO finalist for me so far, with me tearing through the book in a few sittings. That kind of thing has always been rare for me, but it’s exceptionally uncommon for a book to do that in the last year. For… reasons. However, I also found myself sticking on a few major issues I had with the story, which have only grown the longer I reflect on the book.
Many of my thoughts mirror Hiu’s, so I’ll do my best to highlight where we differ or I feel more strongly about a particular point rather than rehashing what he’s already said.
I found the initial stages of Khraen’s journey to be incredibly compelling. He starts with no memory of who he is, just a burning desire to survive at all costs. We quickly watch him learn more about his past as he hunts down and kills other versions of himself to collect the obsidian shards of their hearts. As ruthless and violent as this may be, it’s necessary. Kill or be killed, and worry about the moral complexities later.
And make no mistake, moral complexities are the heart of the story. The central question driving Khraen is always the same: How can I regain my power without becoming the monster I used to be?
This kind of moral dilemma is one of the main draws of the grimdark genre for me. It’s not a question of whether the protagonist will step over the line in the pursuit of their goals, but where the line is in the first place.
Unfortunately, Black Stone Heart continues to explore this question long after it’s been answered. Khraen worries he’ll become a monster, casually murders innocents because he wants to get laid, then continues to hope that he can avoid becoming a monster. This shattered the tension and nuance of the central theme for me beyond repair.
There were also a couple potential plot twists that I felt would have been blindingly obvious to Khraen if he’d been thinking with the traditional organ. Which is not to say that these plot points weren’t still interesting, but I found them predictable.
To add to Hiu’s point about the in-world racism against Khraen due to his darken skin, I found myself wondering what my takeaway was supposed to be. The story seems to imply that Khraen is unfairly persecuted for his skin, but the in-world prejudice originated from darker-skinned people being demonstrably evil. So while I empathized with Khraen here and bristled against the racism, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the racism itself was presented as justified due to the world’s lore.
Despite these gripes, I always found Black Stone Heart hard to put down. Something about Fletcher’s writing just demands you keep turning pages, regardless of whether you’re conflicted on the content. This book could easily have been an 8/10 for me, but I lowered my score in response to my the issues I had with the story.
For SPFBO my final rating is 5/10.
Taking both scores into account, The Fantasy Inn’s final SPFBO rating is 6/10.
6 thoughts on “Black Stone Heart by Michael R. Fletcher [SPFBO]”