The Standalone / Single Volume Epic Fantasy novel…one of the rarer breeds of the Speculative Fiction genre. For as popular as ongoing series are, many readers still seek out a story that can be contained within the covers of one novel. Sarah Beth Durst’s The Bone Maker is one of those rare breeds, a self-contained, single-volume Epic story. In addition to being single-volume Epic, it also starts after the battle of good vs. evil.
From award-winning author Sarah Beth Durst, a stand-alone epic fantasy set in a brand-new world of towering mountains and sparkling cities, in which a band of aging warriors has a second chance to defeat dark magic and avenge a haunting loss.
Twenty-five years ago, five heroes risked their lives to defeat the bone maker Eklor — a corrupt magician who created an inhuman army using animal bones. But victory came at a tragic price. Only four of the heroes survived.
Since then, Kreya, the group’s leader, has exiled herself to a remote tower and devoted herself to one purpose: resurrecting her dead husband. But such a task requires both a cache of human bones and a sacrifice — for each day he lives, she will live one less.
She’d rather live one year with her husband than a hundred without him, but using human bones for magic is illegal in Vos. The dead are burned — as are any bone workers who violate the law. Yet Kreya knows where she can find the bones she needs: the battlefield where her husband and countless others lost their lives.
But defying the laws of the land exposes a terrible possibility. Maybe the dead don’t rest in peace after all.
Five warriors — one broken, one gone soft, one pursuing a simple life, one stuck in the past, and one who should be dead. Their story should have been finished. But evil doesn’t stop just because someone once said, “the end.”
Getting the gang back together is a popular motif in many stories, fantasy stories included. One of the most popular (and one of the foundational fantasy sagas in this vein for me) is the DragonLance Chronicles, so I suppose I’m pre-disposed to liking stories that begin in this fashion. In The Bone Maker, the evil sorcerer was defeated 25 years ago, but at no small cost to the heroes who took him down. The heroes have gone their separate ways, with Kreya at the center of the story. She was the leader of the heroes, but in defeating the necromancer Eklor, her husband Jentt was killed. Sort of. Kreya has been watching over his body, reviving him for short periods of time over the course of two and a half decades. Reviving the dead is not exactly legal in their world, and is a small fraction of the evil Eklor committed. When she runs out of bones critical to reviving the dead, Kreya seeks out one of her heroic colleagues, Zera. After vanquishing Eklor, Zera’s life took a path opposite of Kreya’s, she ascended in society and prominence whereas Kreya drew inward. The other two members of their heroic group followed equally divergent paths. Stran married and grew a family, completely putting the battle behind him while the seer-like character, Marso took a darker turn than Kreya. His post “final battle” life makes Kreya’s look rather calm by comparison. As the heroes reunite, they can’t shake the feeling that maybe the Bone Maker Eklor may not have been completely vanquished.
Much of what I wrote above, barely comprises the first half of the novel. Durst is not hesitant to pack a lot into her characters, the world, and the story, clearly. So much of Epic Fantasy is the build up to a Final Battle, so to deconstruct that and tell the story of what happened after and the after affects is a bold move. Granted, there have been some very strong stories/novels that take this approach, but Durst does many things to set her work apart from even those novels/stories. Kreya is a middle-aged woman in mourning, a widow. Not exactly the standard fantasy protagonist. About half of the main characters have lived lives and are identified by more than their role in the “Final Battle.” Sure, it was an important part of their life, and may have informed how they lived their lives after the conflict with Eklor, but that final conflict isn’t the only thing by which they are identified. Of course, with our heroes together realizing the Evil is still alive, and the story being in the vein of an Epic Fantasy, the story builds to another conflict. But The Bone Maker is less about the final conflict itself and more about the characters and their coming to grips with who they are.
This isn’t just a group of heroes coming back together to throw around clichéd phrases and complain about being too old for this stuff. Durst examines some deep things here, grief, forgiveness moving on (or not) from a powerful traumatic experience, faith/belief in ideals, and life being more than just one event. She does so this all while weaving a wonderful story and a fascinating, potent magic system in the back drop. The characters a mature, fully rounded, breathing, emotive people whose experiences so completely inform every action they take. Small things in the background of Durst’s writing, storytelling, and world-building make the story and characters on the page come across very elegantly.
In her Queens of Renthia trilogy (The Queen of the Blood, The Reluctant Queen, The Queen of Sorrow), Sarah Beth Durst gave readers some of the most wonderfully constructed, well-realized and living female characters She takes that same approach with Kreya and Zera here.
The Bone Maker is an early contender for my favorite fantasy novel of the year. In a shelf-filled with multi-volume fantasies it is not only refreshing to see and enjoy a single-volume Epic Fantasy novel, but truly something special for the book to be this amazing. I can probably count on one hand other single volume Epics that have enthralled me as much and that have been as high quality as this novel.
Highly, highly recommended.
© 2021 Rob H. Bedford
Trade Paperback | 496 Pages
March 2021 | HarperVoyager Books
Excerpt: https://preview.aer.io/The_Bone_Maker-Mjg0ODYz?social=1&retail=1&emailcap=0
http://www.sarahbethdurst.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher HarperVoyager
