In the grisly aftermath of a war of apocalyptic proportions, fallen knight Jacobus, of author Kyle Fox’s GRIMDARK: Tales of Exile, traverses a burning landscape and battles gruesome creatures he calls ghouls, among others, as he struggles to understand his place in this new, desolate world without the king he had pledged to serve. The Kingdom of Korigane has fallen to demons, wholly unique Frankenstein-like monsters who steal corpses’ body parts for their own and consume the rest—”morbid compilations of mankind in appalling miscellanea”—and half-women/half-spiders who destroy men. Jacobus has narrowly escaped enslavement but knows there’s nothing left here for him; he plans to go down swinging. In the 50 pages of this short novella, Jacobus evades demonic creatures, loses all hope, and finally sees that perhaps there is some hope for the Kingdom of Korigane after all.
The novella’s fierce and brutal landscape is wrought through vividly morbid language that illuminates the horrors of the hellishness of a world destroyed in a war with demons. Dynamic prose elevates the imagery of the setting and the actions of the monsters, as well as those of Jacobus, to literary heights, though not for the faint of heart. Rich, complex sentences and vibrant, though barbarous, imagery are only part of what makes the writing brutally beautiful. Hints at what the Kingdom of Korigane looked like before the war, its impeccable architecture and valiant heroes, make the desolation and destruction, through Jacobus’s eyes, all the more devastating.
Jacobus is a bold and relentless figure, fighting tooth and nail, often literally, to push himself through a problem he knows is unsolvable. His tenacity is the backbone of the story, propelling him through the broken-down world to his eventual greater understanding. Because the book is so short, the ending feels as though it comes too soon, but Jacobus’s development as a worthy hero is not stifled by the story’s brevity; his strength is the book’s strength. The complex, musical sentences, too, slow the pace of the book to its benefit; while it is gory and gruesome, it shows the terrors of the world and the human strength to overcome them. The monsters are metaphors for human monstrosities, the horrors humans are capable of, and Jacobus is the complicated hero who shows that there are layers to the human spirit.
Best read as a supplement to Kyle Fox’s fantasy series of which GRIMDARK: Tales of Exile is a spin-off, this short novella shows that gritty relentlessness despite indomitable circumstances can sometimes pay off.
~Aimee Jodoin for IndieReader