I was having the damnedest time finding a book to suit my mood, so my husband offered me three of his own books to read. They all sounded appealing, but the one I chose to read first was Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman. The story takes place on a planet called Erna that was colonized by the people of Earth about a 1,200 years prior. On Erna, there is a power called “the fae,” essentially a magic that swirls around the world in currents of differing intensities. There are several types of fae. I don’t totally understand how they work, but they can manifest human emotions, particularly fear. That is, if you imagine something creepy coming out of the dark to kill you, that’s exactly what might happen. Similarly, if you don’t believe that a machine will continue functioning, then it won’t. The dark fae is the most dangerous. It is dispelled by light, and light can also kill creatures created from it, so daytime is relatively safe. At night, people stay inside, hunkering down in structures that have been magically warded to keep the dark fae away.
The story: dark creatures of the fae arrive from a distant part of the planet and steal the memories and powers of Ciani, an adept with an inborn ability to see the fae and manipulate it. Her friends believe that killing the creature will restore her powers, so they take her on a journey to do just that. They are Senzei, her apprentice, and Damien, a priest with whom she has a romantic relationship. Along the way, the party is joined by the dark sorcerer Tarrant, who is on his own mission that happens to align with theirs, and Hessen, whose people, the rakh, native to the planet, are in danger from the same evil forces that attacked Ciani.
After I finished the book, my husband asked, “Will I like it?” And I didn’t know what to tell him. You can’t judge this sort of book on the same scale as you would, say, a book by Mark Twain. You have to judge it within the context of its genre. I would say that it’s on the same level as Pern and Darkover. If you can like those, then you can probably like this. I feel like the fae’s ability to manifest human emotion could have been explored a lot more, and that it also should have been explained more, including the way that the planet’s particular moons, stars, and sun functioned together and affected the fae. Still, I liked the book enough to give it an A- grade. I’d be willing read the sequels, though I hesitate to do so, because I dislike committing to series of long books (Black Sun Rising has 586 pages, and presumably the two sequels are just as long, if not longer).
