Gideon, a tall, strong young man who works on a farm, sees his village destroyed by pain-worshipping, supernatural soldiers. His adoptive mother is pregnant, and the leader of the army punches her in the belly with fingers stiffened into a claw, leaving her bleeding on the ground. He’s able to enjoy not only her pain, but Gideon’s. When a nearby mountain erupts—another supernatural intervention, perhaps—both Gideon and the enemy leader survive the devastation. Gideon is eventually trained by the dark sorcerer Ashkelon, who, although ruthless, promises to make Gideon the hero he wants to be. When Gideon disappoints him, Ashkelon kills him and then revives him to start again. Anya, a warrior princess who despairs of her father’s attempts to protect his court (the Vulfen, or the Wolves, a group reminiscent of the Vikings) at the expense of his subject people who beg for his help, rides out with her grandfather to fight and encounters Gideon and Ashkelon. When they all make their way back to her home, they and the Vulfen face an army of cannibals, giant spiders, and other horrors that attack the Vulfen fortress. Each time a threat is defeated, a greater threat arises to challenge Gideon and the others. There are hints of romantic feelings developing between Anya and Gideon, but their relationship mainly consists of admiring glances and a few tart verbal exchanges.
The writing in Jonathan Shuerger’s SHADES OF BLACK I: In Darkness Cast suffers from the lack of the past perfect tense to define actions that occurred before the simple past tense actions of the main narrative. For example, the sentence “A few weeks past, Ashkelon began to cheat in their duels” makes little sense; it should read, “A few weeks past, Ashkelon had begun to cheat in their duels.” And there is this grammar error: “Ursus slang his sword around,” which should be “Ursus slung his sword around.” These errors aside, the writing is vivid in its descriptions of horrors and the battles against them. Shuerger’s story explores what it means to be a hero and asks whether Ashkelon, a killer and a symbol of dark evil, can be redeemed in some way. Ashkelon wants Gideon to succeed, but by the end of this first chapter of SHADES OF BLACK I, it’s still unclear what success will look like and what Ashkelon ultimately wants to happen.
SHADES OF BLACK I: In Darkness Cast is a sweeping fantasy adventure, but despite some interesting ideas being explored, the nearly constant level of horrific violence will not be to every reader’s taste.
~Elizabeth Jewell for IndieReader