It can be difficult to come into a fully realized series at the tail end, which is what I have done with Matthew Stover’s CAINE BLACK KNIFE. This book, which is the third written about Caine, but is also identified as the first book in the ACT OF ATONEMENT series, follows 1997’s HEROES DIE and 2001’s BLADE OF TYSHALLE, and is a prelude to the second ATONEMENT novel, HIS FATHER’S FIST, which is not scheduled to release until 2011.
Basically, KNIFE tells three separate stories. Caine is a hero in his world, a noted bad-ass who moves among the political entities swinging his testosterone and bad attitude, and generally ending up in big, bloody battles which he somehow manages to survive and emerge victorious. But he is also a hero in the other world, the place called Earth, where his every move is avidly rented and watched by people starved for entertainment.
For in reality, even though the battles in one world are real enough, Caine is an actor, an entertainer in service to the big entertainment corporations who allow him to run roughshod in this alternate world. And just to complicate things, there is a flashback narrative where we discover how Caine achieved fame and stardom in both of these worlds.
The discontinuities aren’t too bad between the stories, as Stover has an extremely rich and lush descriptive style boding well for the adventure side of the tale, but it’s a little sickly gruesome when the brutalities start to mount. Dialogue has a nice, realistic style, with the protagonist Caine using a darkly witty hard-bitten tone familiar to fantasy noir characters such as Glen Cook’s Croaker in SHADOW GAMES, or Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos, but Stover is much darker and trying for a deeper meaning about the ethics of character, story and entertainment.
This is thick and deep fantasy, but I would have liked to have known more of the entertainment aspect of Caine’s life. Some of this might have been better explained in the first two novels, and I would certainly suggest starting from the beginning, rather than with this complex tale. —Mark Rose
