The suspenseful second entry in Marlon James’ Dark Star fantasy trilogy outdoes the first
Moon Witch, Spider King covers the same events from Black Leopard, Red Wolf—this time from the perspective of a 177-year-old witch
Marlon James is taking a structural cue from Rashomon in his Dark Star trilogy, an epic fantasy set in a fictionalized version of ancient Africa filled with mythical creatures, witchcraft, and towering city-states. All three books circle around the same incident—the disappearance, search for, and death of an unnamed boy—but tell them from different points of view. “I’m leaving the burden of truth up to the reader,” James has said, “so it will be interesting when this trilogy is done, seeing whose story they count as true.”
The first book, 2019’s brilliant and challenging Black Leopard, Red Wolf, tells the story from the (unreliable) perspective of Tracker, a bounty hunter with a supernatural nose and a knack for verbal sparring. The second book, this year’s Moon Witch, Spider King, revisits some of the same events from the perspective of Sogolon, the 177-year-old witch with a will of tempered steel who was both a member of Tracker’s fellowship and an antagonist in the first book.
More than 1,200 pages into James’ trilogy, one thing is clear: Moon Witch, Spider King is even better than Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Unlike Tracker’s fragmentary and impressionistic narrative, Sogolon’s story is mostly linear and rich with detail, filling in many of the gaps introduced by Tracker in regards to the trilogy’s plot, settings, and characters. And while Black Leopard, Red Wolf’s confounding quest in the wilderness didn’t exactly live up to the billing of “an African Game of Thrones,” Moon Witch, Spider King’s palace intrigue certainly does.
Tracker doesn’t show up in Moon Witch, Spider King until page 500, when the first book’s Council of Elrond scene is replayed from Sogolon’s point of view. Nearly two centuries earlier, we meet Sogolon as a young orphan in the jungle, chained up like a dog by her brothers. “See the girl. The girl who live in the old termite hill,” she remembers, always speaking in a present-tense patois James says was inspired by the Wolof language of Senegal in an attempt to “make English sound not like English.” Sogolon escapes to become a mistress-in-training at a bordello, then a servant in the house of a noblewoman, and finally a handmaiden in the royal court of Kwash Kagar—the great-great-grandfather of the king we met in Black Leopard, Red Wolf.