As much as we yearn to know ourselves and our loved ones as profoundly as possible, divining the depths of the human soul is a dangerous and oftentimes scarring experience. For down in that abysmal chasm churns the darkness of our grim nightmares, our secret desires, and our raw emotions, none of which should ever be allowed to rise up into the light of day. For these are the antecedents of our animalistic heritage, the leftovers of our primal urges that have been tamed by both the strictures and the structures of civilization. They are the ghostly shadows of who we might have been had we been born a million years ago, when there existed nothing other than the law of the jungle.
What if they were brought into the light? What if all of our worst thoughts and fears, needs and passions, were given form, made reality by nothing more than the wishing of it? What kind of world would result from such unleashed animae? Ms. Friedman speculates in her sprawling trilogy.
On a world thousands of lightyears from Earth, life has evolved along profoundly different lines. For while some conventional animals prowl the surface of Erna, these are but offspring of an immense, unknowable force that emanates from the very heart of this enigmatic world. In ways unfathomable to anyone else, Erna is alive, its eminently malleable power distributed along spiritual and physical faultlines that cover the planet's surface, ever changing to perfectly reflect the wishes and the needs of the creatures that call Erna home.
e Having known only tranquility for millennia, this power is profoundly disturbed when human colonists first descend upon this strange new world. Refugees from thousands of years of cold sleep, this small band of men and women were lead to Erna by the judgement of their ship's AI which, having been designed to comb the galaxy for worlds habitable to humans, decided that Erna was hospitable to human life. But the AI could have never imagined the threat into which it sold its creators. For Erna's lifeforce can now learn the patterns of the nightmares fostered by human fears, turning once peaceful Erna into a dangerous world of darkness and despair.
In Black Sun Rising, the trilogy's opening salvo, more than a thousand years have elapsed since humanity's disastrous arrival on Erna and, though humans have lost the knowledge and the use of the advanced technology that delivered them to this exotic world, life has stabilized. For not only has humanity managed, to a limited degree, to work these energies unique to Erna, a powerful church has also risen to impose order upon the chaos of human civilization, teaching its followers to control their emotions and their dreams, to redirect those energies to a benevolent divine. It's clear that this divine does not exist, not initially, but if sufficient numbers believe in him, then he too shall be conjured into being by Erna in the same way the vampires and ghosts, demons and ghouls, have been.
A ranking member of this church, Rev. Damien Vryce is one of the sorcerous few who can influence the native Fae, a fact which earns him nothing but suspicion and standoffishness from the notoriously anti-Fae church. Still, the church will require Damien's specialized talents if they are to discover just what kind of nightmare is stalking the streets of its capital and devouring the memories of some of its citizens' brightest minds. Taking on the duty to find and kill this nightmare, Vryce initially sets his sights on the legendary Hunter, a vampire-like nobleman who has fed off of the fears of young, impressionable women to stay alive for centuries. But when the answer to this mystery proves to be far more profound, Damien is forced to make unpleasant alliances in order to cross half the world to find and uproot the source of this destructive evil.
In When True Night Falls, the trilogy's second instalment, Rev. Vryce finds himself at the heart of an even more insidious web. For his most recent mission has revealed that a deeper game is afoot, one that will require he and the Hunter to leave everything they know to travel east, into an empire from which no westerner has returned in living memory. Received warmly by the empire's matriarchal version of the Church, Vryce is initially taken by the peace and the cohesion the Church has managed to exert over the notoriously fickle subconsciousnesses of its human subjects. But when a series of shocking revelations expose the truth of this place, Vryce embarks upon a dangerous journey south, into the very lair of a demon, in hopes of averting a war that will drench his world in blood.
In Crown of Shadows, the trilogy's concluding work, events come to a climactic head when Rev. Vryce discovers that a class of powerful demons has been ruthlessly manipulating recent disasters, conjuring threats that have not only cost Vryce his friends but the support of his Church. Left isolated by his enemy's maneuverings, Vryce is forced to once again draw upon the knowledge and the power of the hated Hunter to try to steer the world from the demonic vision of the future his enemies are trying to bring about, one in which everything he knows and cares for is sold into slavery to a dark power made manifest by their own dark desires. What hope have two almost men have against a thing that can draw power from the pain of millions?
Though troubled, at times, by poor pacing and burdened, throughout, by an over-reliance on quests, The Coldfire Trilogy is imaginative work that withstands the test of time. In her attempt to externalize, to make real, the fears of mankind, Ms. Friedman has conceived of a darkly fascinating world with the atmosphere of Gothic, Victorian England married to the tropes of the classic, questing high-fantasy novel, the union of which has produced a series that is as readable as it is chilling. The Fae as manifestation of human emotion is not precisely novel, but the vigor with which it is applied here causes the work to rise well above the fray, confronting, head-on, the profound costs, to our environment and our fellows, of the arrogance of the human-centric worldview.
Ms. Friedman is, here, positively ruthless. Whereas many authors of fantasy shield their heroes from not only the worst of what their evil enemies have to offer, but the consequences of their own actions, she is willing to pervert what is pure, to defile what is holy, to end what is innocent. She compels her characters to compromise themselves in every imaginable way and then she demands they surrender yet more of their humanity in a kind of cosmic test of their endurance, to see how much they can take before they break under her remorseless hands. In this, she is well ahead of her time. For this work, initially published in the early 1990s, calls to mind trends from much later in that decade, and the next, in which authors and television-show creators tested their heroes on the wrack of their wills, pushing them beyond their stress limits, demanding that they take more, more, more, until they, and the illusions they were responsible for, give way. We are meant to love what is unclean and rebel against what is pure, not as an exercise in simple, dumb hedonism, but in order to shed our prejudices and our blinders, to embrace ourselves in all our flawed glory.
But whereas Ms. Friedman excels at dark storytelling, each work in this trilogy is troubled by lethargic pacing and relentless questing. Each novel is easily a hundred pages too long, bloated by repetitive details that do nothing to deepen the already rich mythology, or advance the already elaborate story. They serve only to hammer away at the grimness of the reality which has been already thoroughly established. Moreover, the high-fantasy conceit of a quest to save the world seems decidedly out of place in a story this dark. Yes, they are handled well in each volume, but Ms. Friedman is a talented enough storyteller to leave aside this tired structure that, anyway, poorly fits her world. The against-all-odds questing merely serves to re-enforce the specialness of her characters, none of whom require such gilding.
The Coldfire Trilogy is engrossing work. It establishes a challenging world and sticks to it with enviable consistency. Moreover, its characters are as flawed as its environment is Gothic, a fact which should please anyone who appreciates darkly flavored fantasy. Well ahead of its time... (4/5 Stars)
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