A man destined to be a powerful weapon struggles with self-identity as powerful forces race to claim him for their side. BLACKCLOAK: A MAN OF HIS SWORD is a dream-like adventure through a shattered mind in a world filled with strange creatures and unusual magic.
In a land similar to ancient China, the humans live in fear of the Night and the horrific entities that only come out during full moons. In the strange realm of Kae’fre, two powerful women battle for control of the Blackcloak. One has the power to control dreams and the other can reshape reality. As the two battle, Blackcloak is broken into two personas and forms a third as a defense mechanism. The story follows the women’s dueling as Blackcloak struggles to choose a destiny apart from those forced upon him. Not knowing what is true or a dream, the Blackcloak battles through the nebulous dreams and misshapen reality to unlock his memories. From a battered childhood as Dog-Ears to a skilled assassin Char, in what can only be described as psychological interrogation, Blackcloak’s mind is broken and reassembled. While Blackcloak confronts the nature of his true self, the women prepare for a war in which he will be the deciding factor. This novel is the first in a series known as The Bloody Tapestry of Kae’fre.
BLACKCLOAK is a difficult novel to summarize. The entirety of the book is a purposeful jumble of dreams and half-truths. W. James Chan sculpted a twisting narrative that slithers through strange dreams and shifting realities, leaving the reader to discern what to believe. This may seem confusing, but it works really well in execution. While the reader rarely feels sure-footed, the story gradually begins to cohere into an incredible read. Blackcloak’s journey is a line that Chan stretches and twists into a spiral, condensing an epic into one book. The writing feels poetic at times, but always maintains that unusual edge of dream-like psychology. There are some editing and formatting issues that could be polished to increase clarity, such as a character’s unique dialect. All in all, BLACKCLOAK is a lyrical and haunting journey through a fractured psyche with a fascinating mythology and strong writing.
With beautiful prose and incredible world-building, BLACKCLOAK: A MAN OF HIS SWORD is a hell of a start to an unusual dark fantasy series that deftly combines psychology, magic, and philosophy into a disturbing character study.
What if you discovered that your memories—even the most intimate—were fictional? And what if that devastating epiphany were merely a continuation of that fiction? Epistemological impasse, the vertigo of an identity shattering into the plural, separate mirroring realities, the relativism that defines “heroism,” the illusion of free will—such themes seem more fitting in a philosophical discourse, not a fantasy novel. Yet W. James Chan’s recently released Blackcloak: A Man of His Sword manages to engage with such weighty conceits against the backdrop of a lush fantasy world called Kaefre, a realm whose gravity perhaps lightens such ponderous reflections. The result is an eminently readable novel that makes that fantastic seem possible while reminding us just how fantastic some of our prosaic possibilities really are. Still, Chan’s novel is not simply fantasy nor is it accidental that Chan’s Kaefra channels a sense of Sino-Japanese feudalism, for Blackcloak follows the basic conventions of Wuxia, a roughly “chivalric” fantasy genre with a venerable history in Chinese literature. Traditionally, Wuxia narratives focus on a warrior whose skill with the sword will shape the fate of his world. As much as Chan’s novel evokes comparison with Wuxia, the author, like one of his most powerful and elusive characters, Fa Shai-Yeh, deploys the complacency of assumption that convention encourages to present puzzles, not to resolve them. Part of the charm of this enjoyable novel lies in the way Blackcloak thrills its readers by tectonic shifts in the narrative, not complacent surveyorship of a docile landscape.
The tale begins with the twelve-year-old Wong Shah-Long, who resides in the village of Swimming Carp, one of the dozens of inconsequential backwaters that populate the ChangÅ Province of the Mifuné Empire. Tormented by villagers small and large, Shah-Long is branded with the contemptuous epithet “Dog Ears.” Though he suffers as a pariah, Shah-Long is secretly gifted with incomprehensible powers. He is by turns delighted and haunted by enigmatic dream sequences laced with acts of brutality and punctuated by mysterious symbols that seem at once familiar and incomprehensible. When, five years later, he returns to Swimming Carp after an unsuccessful betrothal, he finds the village eerily deserted. Swimming Carp’s end constitutes a symbolic beginning for Shah-Long, marking the start of his transformation from village idiot to a warrior, gifted with superhuman abilities and a grand destiny.
But Blackcloak is a story with many beginnings. In the slums of the imperial capital, Kaifeng, lives another twelve-year-old, Char An-Ran, a street-savvy bully and arrogant thug-in-training who vauntingly crowns himself the ”Greatest Thief of Kaifeng.” Ambition breeds recklessness, however, and Char’s misadventures bring him to Fa Shai-Yeh, an exotic (and, as Char continually notes, voluptuous) woman endowed with terrifying powers. With Shai’s intervention, Char is adopted by secret society, the Blood Peddlers. For the next five years Char lives within the walls of their lair, honing talents he didn’t know he had. Char and Shah-Long are merely two threads in the first installment of a series dubbed The Bloody Tapestry of Kaef’re. The narrative into which they are woven is far more complex, breaches a wider span of time, and sets itself at a pleasantly maddening remove from definitive answers. Indeed, Char and Shah-Long are incomplete, mere versions, epigonic and incomplete of the cipher at the heart of the novel, “The Scourge,” a man bound by destiny to become both his clan’s hero and a merciless murderer.
Much has been said of how Chan nimbly adds complexity to his narratives without rendering them turgid. The same cannot be said of the author’s prose, which repeatedly gives way to sloppy phraseology, awkward shifts in register, mixed metaphors, cliché gnomic statements, and semantically askew adjectives that seem chosen for their length rather than meaning. These intrude and break the cadence of the plot rather than speed it along. Perhaps this is merely a consequence of growing pains, of a first novel in a series that has not yet found its voice. Perhaps it is a function of a still undisciplined writer. Regardless of its continual abuses of prose, Blackcloak is no less than a thoroughly absorbing read and a thoughtful meditation on the dynamics of self, the illusion of free will, and the subjectivity that governs morality. Not just a fun read, Blackcloak might be the prelude for a new brand of sophistication in the fantasy genre
Blackcloak: A Man of his Sword is the first installment of the Bloody Tapestry of Kaef’re series. The book is set in the eponymous Kaef’re: a strange and exotic world reminiscent of, but not analogous to, ancient China, where the world is alive with the forces of nature, magic, and things far beyond true mortal comprehension. In this twisted realm, where dream and reality can uncomfortably intertwine, a young man sets out on a journey of self – against these forces, between mortal and immortal, and through the hands of the two who vie for his life and more. Observed by one who stole his memories, told by another who wishes to reshape him, the tale of the young man is split in two as the Mindwarp explores his path, and the Nightsong reveals her own recasting of events. Together, two halves form a whole, and destiny reveals itself in the details of its components – through the Scourge; through the sword; through Blackcloak.
Blackcloak is an incredibly unusual and unique read, falling into a seldom-explored psychological niche of traditional fantasy. Judging a book by its cover, one might mistake the tale for a run-of-the-mill sword-and-sorcery affair with an Eastern touch to its setting, but Blackcloak reveals itself as much, much more from even a very early start in its reading. The book reads like poetry from its very first line, presenting itself in vivid imagery and abstract concepts where a reader might otherwise expect a gentle introduction or explanation of affairs. The book does very little to explain itself more simply from here on, adding questions for every new answer, and asking a reader’s full engagement to be properly understood, all before the story begins to even properly branch out.
In short, this book is not simple, and it is not for everybody. But, anyone who finds themselves intrigued by the concept will be helplessly hooked from the first few pages until the bitter end. This is your warning.
Once you have a feel for it, Blackcloak is one of the most beautiful, interesting, riveting fantasy books that, personally, I have had the chance to lay eyes upon. The book is no less than poetry as it tells the dream-like tale of a young man’s coming of age through the inconceivable webs of the powerful, natural, and the willing. To discuss the details of the story devoid of its presented context is difficult, but to say that the book is a tale of battle and blood is to simplify something far more deep, lyrical, and even maddening. Blackcloak is a book that demands your attention while reading, and after you’ve given into its world and immersed yourself in its story, the urge to read it through again with discovered knowledge is overwhelming. The book is a journey, taking pages from Eastern storytelling throughout, and the right balance of concentration and simply opening your mind to what it has to say is necessary to fully appreciate it.
The book is reasonably long at just under 450 pages, with a simple but very fitting cover that leaves a prospective reader clueless until already submerged in its pages. Blackcloak is anything but a relaxing beach or pick-up read, but readers looking for an experience to fall into should give it their attention.
