Fiction Reviews
The Red Winter
(2026) Cameron Sullivan, Tor, £22, hrdbk, 535pp, ISBN 978-1-035-04748-2
Some days you wait ages for a good historical-horror-fantasy featuring angels and demons stalking across pre-modern France with a not-so-saintly Jeanne d’Arc thrown into the mix and then two come along in the same batch of books (see the review of Between Two Fires)! Here, however, Joan/Jeanne is pushed to the side-lines and it is a gruesome relic, rather than the woman herself, that plays a crucial role in this story of The Beast, a monstrous shape-shifter reputed to have slaughtered its way through the farms and villages of the province of Géraudan (today’s Lozare and part of Haute-Loire). And of course, it is a truth universally acknowledged that any tale involving such a creature requires there to be a hunter obsessively committed to its destruction. Indeed, we are presented with several such individuals, at least some of whom are lifted more or less straight from the historical record. However, the chief protagonist and long-time nemesis of the monster is one Sebastian Grave, an unnaturally old ‘Professor’ who has the dubious advantage of being symbiotically entwined with an arcane and powerful entity named (among other things) Sarmodel. Presented in the form of a memoir written up centuries later by Grave himself, it immediately becomes clear that this is no ordinary hunt-and-kill-the-beast story, as not only does it also feature a succubus and a water-nymph but the Archangel Michael as well and, crucially, a certain (in)famous Greco-Roman god.
Onto this already crowded stage strides Jacques Avenel d’Ocerne, who has been seeking out Sebastian in order to persuade him to do what he and Jacques’ father, Antoine, the Baron, failed to do almost twenty years earlier – namely rid the area of this terrifying brute once and for all. As it turns out, of course, there is more to Jacques than meets the eye. And more to the earlier Beast hunt as well, involving as it does a passionate affair between Antoine and Sebastian that ends tragically for the lovers and horrifically for just about everyone else. All this is set out in a series of forward and backward jumps in time, mostly between 1766 and 1785 but also to and from 1431 and the horrific punishment meted out to Jeanne/Joan which is used to explain the Beast’s appearance in Gévaudan. This results in a temporally expansive but geographically constrained cycle of events, with the same territory ridden over repeatedly at different times, all liberally bespattered with blood and gore.
Fortunately, the magic-infused horror of it all is leavened with a good dose of humour, mostly in the form of snarky asides, many of which appear in the memoir’s footnotes (which some may feel interrupt the narrative flow but which personally I enjoyed). And although it does perhaps overstay its welcome a tad, the story does proceed at a brisk pace. I won’t, of course, give away the ending here but suffice to say that if you know your history of the French Revolution, you will know that the 1780s were a time of widespread social distress and, eventually, civil unrest. Against that backdrop, the denouement should come as no great surprise although, appropriately enough perhaps, an extremely violent and bloody one, even by the standards set earlier.
Steven French
[Up: Fiction Reviews Index | SF Author: Website Links | Home Page: Concatenation]
[One Page Futures Short Stories | Recent Site Additions | Most Recent Seasonal Science Fiction News]