In 1785, Professor Sebastian Grave receives the news he fears most: the terrible Beast of Gévaudan has returned, and the French countryside runs red in its wake. Sebastian knows the Beast. A monster-slayer with centuries of experience, he joined the hunt for the creature twenty years ago and watched it slaughter its way through a long and bloody winter. Even with the help of his indwelling demon, Sarmodel – who takes payment in living hearts – it nearly cost him his life to bring the monster down. Now, two decades later, Sebastian has been recalled to the hunt by Antoine Avenel d’Ocerne, an estranged lover who shares a dark history with the Beast and a terrible secret with Sebastian. Drawn by both the chance to finish the Beast for good and the promise of a reconciliation with Antoine, Sebastian cannot refuse. But Gévaudan is not as he remembers it, and Sebastian’s unfinished business is everywhere he looks. Years of misery have driven the people to desperation, and France teeters on the edge of revolution.
“Hope. Of all my deceptions, it is always the worst.”
Cameron Sullivan's The Red Winter is an achillean historical fantasy about the cost of war and the first seeds of the French Revolution. Following three different timelines, the story depicts an immortal sorcerer's brush against a celestial threat who even takes on the form of a werewolf to lay waste on the countryside. With him are two servants; an ancient demon who is bound to him and lives inside him, and a succubus hailing from the Roman Empire.
Sebastian is a caustic narrator, world-weary and competent. The book is littered with footnotes where he jabs at the reader, sometimes with contempt, and some of his descriptions are pretty crude. This is a dark novel, a bit hopeless, and pretty abrupt in its resolution. Countering him are two young humans, father and son; the first is his love interest in the middle timeline, the latter is in need of Sebastian's help in the last. The first timeline follows instead the story of the Maiden of Orleans, through a crueller lens than legend's.
The worldbuilding is fascinating. Despite this book being initially marketed as a standalone, the author seems intent on writing other adventures, and so we don't get much explanation about who or what Sebastian is exactly, or his background and how he came to meet his companions. The novel still works well, giving bits and pieces of information to tantalise the reader. This is a world filled with the occult, with demons and angels and ancient deities who have no intention to bow to the Christian god.
The powerful love story at the center of the novel gets the more intense and excruciating as we leave the middle timeline to witness what came of it, and the story careens towards an heart-wrenching ending that couldn't have gone any other way. We get the sense that, for all of Sebastian's other dalliances and even his strange, codependent and sometimes carnal relationship with the mouthy and cruel demon living inside him, this was the most defining love story of his entire life.
The Red Winter is not just another werewolf story.
✨ 4 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment