Joy Chant’s Red Moon and Black Mountain is a book I wanted to like more than I actually did. I’ve a notion that timing is a factor. Had I read it, oh, 40 years ago, I might have thoroughly enjoyed it. It is, after all, an ambitious piece of fantasy, the language skillfully and often beautifully written. Just the sort of thing for teenaged me. For the reader I am today, however, it didn’t completely land.
The culminating showdown and the battle between the Chosen One and the Dark Lord should provide a tremendous payoff. The sacrifices and the deaths of heroic supporting characters should freight the reader with an emotional payload of loss. Unfortunately, in Red Moon, this does not happen. This is due, I think, in part to word count. That is, to length. The paperback weighs in at a relatively svelte 268 pages. That is sufficient to provide world building for a smaller scale story. But for what is clearly intended to be an epic, with world altering stakes, 268 pages simply isn’t enough.
The book begins as a portal fantasy (à la C.S. Lewis), with a teenage boy and his two younger siblings crossing a gate and finding themselves in a world of magic, warriors, unicorns, enchanters, evil sorcerers, etc. These POV characters are our introduction to the fantasy world and we receive much of our information through them. I think the book would have benefited from a subplot featuring a POV character or two from the fantasy world; a hundred additional pages or so with some essential quest tying into the main story, allowing the writer time to introduce the cultures, races, religions, and history. As it is, the reader is given a paucity of details, often sketchy, and those sometimes come rather too late in the story to allow for any connection or emotional investment in the fate of any particular character or group other than the three kids from Earth.
Joy Chant, I can’t help but assume, wrote the book while in the thrall of the spell cast by The Lord of the Rings. The 1970 copyright year is suggestive. The internal evidence seems to support this conjecture as well. (Frodo Lives! Gandalf for President!) While Red Moon is no slavish, Iron Tower trilogy scene-for-scene rewrite, it is replete with analogous aspects, tropes, characters, and events that evoke elements of LOTR. The tragic Starborn echo Tolkien’s elves. There is even a Tom Bombadill-esque character. Chant seems to have several favorite scenes or bits of imagery that she wishes to pay homage to. The muster and roll call before Minas Tirith, the fateful romance between Aragorn and Arwen, Frodo’s willing self-sacrifice, etc. There’s nothing wrong with any of this. I just couldn’t avoid noticing them as they cropped up (and there are possibly some I missed.)
I want to highlight at least one positive aspect. The final, bittersweet chapters, extending far beyond what might be considered the normal endpoint (more LOTR comparisons) work very well. Focused on an individual POV character, with whom we’ve spent at least half the story, the emotional payoff feels earned. I only wish I could have felt the same way about the rest of the book.
I want to reiterate that this isn’t a bad book. On the contrary, it is quite decent. I just feel it could have been better. I don’t like writing less than glowing reviews. Who am I, after all, to criticize popular, successful authors? I wanted Red Moon to live up to the review on the back cover: “A strong and beautiful and perfect book.” Perhaps, some decades ago, hungry for more LOTR, I would have thought the same. Maybe it will still reach that height for you. Give it a try.
If you are looking for something shorter than an epic fantasy with the fate of the world at stake (and don’t we all need a break from time to time?), I do have short stories available in two recent publications. (And no — for those with occasional lapses in reading comprehension — I’m not inviting comparison or making any claim of superiority to the item just reviewed. I almost always end these posts with a sales pitch, and here we are at the end.)