The Black Guard by AJ Smith

The Black Guard by AJ Smith
Book One of The Long War
Published by Head of Zeus, August 2013 (Review Copy received)
640 pages
ISBN: 978-1781852224

Review by Mark Yon

As I type this, we’re past the midpoint of 2013, which is shaping up to be a great year for Epic Fantasy. When I started at the beginning of the year, like 2012, I had great hopes for the genre. There were some debut writers who I hoped would set a standard, but was generally disappointed by what I read.

I’m pleased to type that The Black Guard is an entertaining debut from an author I want to read more from. From the publicity blurb:

The Duke of Canarn is dead, executed by the King’s decree. The city lies in chaos, its people starving, sickening, and tyrannized by the ongoing presence of the King’s mercenary army. But still hope remains: the Duke’s children, the Lord Bromvy and Lady Bronwyn, have escaped their father’s fate.

Separated by enemy territory, hunted by the warrior clerics of the One God, Bromvy undertakes to win back the city with the help of the secretive outcasts of the Darkwald forest, the Dokkalfar. The Lady Bronwyn makes for the sanctuary of the Grass Sea and the warriors of Ranen with the mass of the King’s forces at her heels. And in the mountainous region of Fjorlan, the High Thain Algenon Teardrop launches his Dragon Fleet against the Red Army. Brother wars against brother in this, the epic first volume of the long war.

So, from that plot description, we could resort to archetypes. Readers of Fantasy may recognise much of what is here. There’s an attempt at a coup, the return of an old God (or its descendants) in a medieval-esque world. We have sieges, catapults, battles on a large and small scale, longswords and beheadings a-plenty.

The author clearly knows his audience and fans of the genre will lap this up.

It must be said that are many similar debuts out there at the moment. In my opinion, The Black Guard is one of the better ones. What works here for me more than other recent debuts I’ve read is the characterisation. Generally the characters are recognisable and yet different enough to be entertaining. The reader will identify with the good guys and hiss mightily at the bad, though there’s a nice touch of greyness in there too. In particular, their dialogue is appropriate to the setting and worked for me, a problem I’ve had with many recent debuts. One warning: there is profanity and rather bloody mayhem here (it’s not really a Young Adult tale) but it was refreshing to find that, unlike some ‘Grimdark’ books of late, it doesn’t reduce the overall impact by overdoing the violence or the expletives.

It also helps the suspension of disbelief that the world-building seems logical as well. There’s a nice range of different groups here and whilst aspects are familiar, they are pleasingly different. The pantheon of otherworldly beings is quite striking too, and I liked the use of magic and Krakens in this novel. There’s a Lovecraftian touch too in that a blood sacrifice is made to the Dead God, which is part of a plan to rebirth Shub-Nillurath and so create more Gods and a new age of pain and chaos.

Some of the battle scenes are terrific and are surprisingly well written for a debut novel. Whilst they’re not always epic in scale, they’re crafted well enough to maintain pace without losing track of the characters or the plot. The battle at the end in particular is very well done.

Before I get too carried away, it must be said that the book isn’t entirely perfect. We could quibble about the huge dollops of set-up dialogue in conversations at the beginning of the novel, a slight lag in pace in the middle of the novel and the occasional over-the-top Conan-esque moment, but generally what happens works well and keeps the reader’s attention over a 600+ page book.

Perhaps the biggest complaint may be that there’s a lot of exposition here and by the end of the novel there are some major plot points that are unresolved, clearly to be continued in another book. Any reader expecting everything to be neatly solved by the end of this book will be disappointed.

Quite a few other reviewers have mentioned other authors as being ‘the debut of the year’. For me, The Black Guard is up there too as one of my favourites. Well done Head of Zeus for introducing me to another series I can’t wait to continue. Brilliant stuff. I await the next book, eagerly.

Mark Yon, July/August 2013