Black Leopard, Red Wolf

I went in with one specific worry, the kind of pre-read dread where you’ve heard a book sounds incredible on paper and you’re bracing for it to be a slog instead. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is genuinely closer to incredible than slog, but I won’t pretend the first hundred pages didn’t test me. Marlon James builds a version of pre-colonial Africa out of dozens of mythologies at once, shape shifters, witches, a mercenary named Tracker with a nose that can find anyone, and the density of invented names and factions in the opening stretch is a real barrier to entry.

Once it clicks, and for me that was somewhere past the first major set piece, the prose stops being an obstacle and becomes the whole appeal. James writes violence and desire with the same unflinching directness, nothing softened, nothing tidied up for comfort, and the structure, an interrogation where Tracker’s own reliability as a narrator is constantly in question, gives even the most brutal chapters a reason to exist beyond shock value.

Where it lost me a little was pacing in the back third, the same problem some ambitious epic fantasy runs into, where the scope keeps expanding right when I wanted the plot threads to start tightening instead. I finished satisfied but a little worn out, which might be exactly the reaction James is going for in a book this uncompromising.

Three stars feels almost unfair to how good individual scenes are, but as a whole read it asked more patience of me than it gave back in payoff. I’d still recommend it to anyone who wants fantasy that refuses to be comfortable.