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language: English
country: USA
year: 1997
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Nightrunner, #2
dates read: 13.7.25-20.7.25
(cw: rape)
Lynn Flewelling’s Stalking Darkness, the sequel to Luck in the Shadows, is a more consistent book, in the sense that it has a single continuous plot rather than suddenly veering away from what seemed like its main plot halfway through the way Luck in the Shadows did.
here Seregil, Alec, and their friends find themselves caught up in the resolution of the prophecy we got a glimpse of in the first book, battling spies, traitors in their midst, evil necromancers, and an army of ordinary soldiers as they race to prevent the necromancers from reassembling an evil artifact that could functionally destroy the world. the pacing is better than book one, the characterization and dialogue remain solid, the writing is again serviceable if not standout, and we get some chapters from a female character’s perspective for the first time, which is a refreshing change. the climax is wild and features an extremely compelling death scene that I loved. taken in isolation, it is a solid book, and better constructed than Luck in the Shadows.
it is also, though, bluntly, a book with a lot more ideological problems.
the biggest problem with book is, broadly, the egregiously bad handling of class. for starters, while this is not the heart of the problem, it’s clear Flewelling still doesn’t appear to understand the economics or practice of banditry: why would a gang of “back alley toughs” — even a large gang of “back alley toughs” — choose to try to mug three armed men rather than literally any easier, unarmed target? why would even a relatively large gang of bandits attack a company of professional soldiers in a highly trained standing army? hello? only the third bit of banditry (two adult bandits vs. one teenager) actually makes any sense, except for the part where one of the bandits gets in a fight to the death with the teenager instead of high-tailing it with the extremely valuable commodity they stole (horse). in all cases, bandits are treated as freely murderable rather than desperate people with no other viable economic options.
second, there is the treatment of servants, other laborers, and the various unhoused people Seregil uses as informants, who typically seem not to be involved in wage labor.
for servants (i.e., domestic laborers) the problem is narrative: the narrative accepts the in-world metonymic linking of servants with their employers. of course Seregil, a Good Hereditary Aristocrat, is beloved by his Loyal Servants — and of course when the villains want to Get To Him they do so by brutally murdering his Loyal Servants(-cum-tenants!). the one upside here is that at least nobody tries to console Seregil by telling him it isn’t his fault (though there were several moments when it seemed like someone might), because objectively he did put them in mortal danger by working as a spy and thief for the past several decades and using them as his cover.
for non-domestic laborers, the problem is simply a profound disinterest, apart from one corrupt blacksmith who’s implied to be a fallen aristocrat. the volume of labor required to sustain this society is almost entirely elided apart from military supply chains. Micum and his family administer an estate outside the city, producing…what? who works their land? are they wage laborers or serfs attached to the estate or something else? it doesn’t matter, because what matters is Sir Micum Cavish, the heroic lord, and his dutiful wife, Kari, who could be a compelling character except that she’s a tradwife. with the revelation that Alec is a not-elf the result is a book where not only are the four great Chosen Heroes coincidentally (“”) all men but also they’re all either de jure or de facto aristocrats (and decidedly bourgeois, in Seregil’s case). “laborer” is, at best, a disguise for our heroes to put on — never a subject position with agency in its own right.
for Seregil’s unhoused informants, the problem is the fundamental tension of the “Nightrunner” series. Seregil is a thief-spy who, though he’s an aristocrat, is also familiar with all the back alleys and the sewer routes and so on; we’re supposed to see him as someone who’s just as comfortable among “beggars” as at a high society party. but “beggar” is, for Seregil, only ever a costume. the unhoused man Seregil employs to observe a suspected enemy spy is only ever a tool. the unhoused child Seregil extracts information from (under threat of bodily harm) is only ever a tool — perhaps, at best, a tool to be cultivated (we might even say “groomed”) for more use in the future.
Seregil’s response to the realization that street people have been disappearing is a political concern — what threat does this imply to the power of the queen? — but never a concern for the street people themselves. when he’s caught in disguise by a group of Skalan soldiers — notionally the “good guys” — who are clearing all the Undesirables out of the capital once war is declared, either to serve as conscript soldiers or to fend for themselves in open country, his only thought is how he specifically can get away, because, of course, he’s not like them. he is supposed to be here — he’s not a “societal parasite” (verbatim description!). generously, Flewelling allows that “[c]ripples and mothers with young children” are allowed to stay, as if that makes this any less morally repugnant — especially for a country that we are, seemingly, meant to view as “good”.
if the book didn’t spend so much time pointing us towards servants and the unhoused and using them as props for Seregil and Alec’s character development it probably wouldn’t bother me so much — it is, at the end of the day, par for the fantasy course. but it does, and so it does.
the next biggest problem is just that where in the first book it seemed like the villainous Mardus and his necromancer associate were evil of their own accord, while their home country, Plenimar, was simply a particularly militaristic state with imperial ambitions, in Stalking Darkness we learn that while Mardus has his own evil plot, Plenimarans are — as far as we can tell — all fanatical devotees of a classic Evil God who wants to destroy the world. we could perhaps read this as an allegory for the United States, if we were inclined to read it reparatively, but that’s obviously not the intention; it’s just the laziest, most tedious, classic Good Vs. Evil fantasy of a just war. (of course the Plenimarans are extra-sexist, too, in contrast to the (ostensibly / more) egalitarian Skalans.)
the treatment of sex and sexuality is also frustrating. it’s clear that some form of homophobia exists, though it’s of relatively limited geographic/cultural scope (Alec of course happens to be from a homophobic area), which is interesting but underexplored. sex work appears to be normal / normalized, except that characters are constantly throwing around “whore” as a pejorative — perhaps because sex workers are laborers and we’re not supposed to care about those unless they are Loyal Servants. we’re also not touching the reproductive politics of Micum and Kari’s relationship. Nerilka vibes (derogatory).
the book subjects Alec to sexual (or sexualized) violence twice: first, he’s “seduced” (read: raped) by the sorceress Ylinestra who uses some kind of mind control spell on him; second, he’s psychically “raped” by a female lich in a scene that mixes magical assault and sexualized physical assault (as part of an extended period of torture). in the latter case the word “rape” is actually used; in the former, despite everyone recognizing that Ylinestra exerted some amount of magical control over Alec, the incident is largely played off as a joke. Alec explicitly has some weird feelings about it, but these are never substantively engaged with. it has a certain saveur à “men can’t be raped”, and I hate it profoundly. even if Flewelling didn’t want to engage with it fully as rape, the least she could have done would be to have someone — anyone — acknowledge that it was a fucked-up thing and that it’s okay for Alec to have negative feelings about it. or, indeed, show anyone else having negative feelings about it — for example, the wizard who finds Ylinestra bent over a sleeping Alec doing magic to him. hello?
with all of that said. I probably will still continue with the series, primarily because the climax did absolutely govern, and the subsequent emotional payoff was also very good. I wish more characters had died, and there was another plot angle I’d been hoping for that didn’t pan out, but still. yes. I don’t know if I’ll read past book three, but we’ll see how book three goes.
moods: adventurous, dark, sad, tense