Since my reading of The Hobbit at age eleven, I have had an uneasy relationship with fantasy literature of all sorts, a part of me refusing to be drawn into worlds which are overtly unsubstantiated, blithely preferring the seen and the tangible, the lies of fiction amiably set in the real world with which we are familiar. As Nora, the protagonist of Robert G. Penner’s The Dark King Swallows the World points out early on, an empiricist “only believes what there’s evidence for. Things you can see with your own eyes,” and for much of my reading and writing life this has held true for me as both a consumer and a practitioner of fiction. Then out of the mists, along comes Penner’s latest book, seemingly out of the same void.
This same Nora also tells us she cannot help but imagine another character, a no-nonsense matronly figure, as “a freshly laundered pillowcase full of croquet mallets.” Well, it doesn’t take much more than a stiffly starched phrase like that to hook me. Penner’s writing is full of crafty phrases such as this, shining like sharkskin and penny nails in the darkness, but the story he tells tends towards subtlety rather than bite. The whisper world that Nora inhabits is easily recognizable but delightfully and darkly twisted. Picking up the book is like gazing into the back of C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe to find a box of brand-new shoes someone has forgotten to open, there is both a sense of old-world charm and a freshness to be discovered. Nora’s problem, well, her multiple problems, as plucky young heroines in dystopian fantasy books seldom limit themselves to just one cataclysmic threat, is that both her mother and everyone else in her sphere have fallen under the influence of a necromancer, and she must travel to the land of the dead to rescue her deceased brother (as will sometimes be required when one messes with this sort of thing).
This same Nora also tells us she cannot help but imagine another character, a no-nonsense matronly figure, as “a freshly laundered pillowcase full of croquet mallets”.
Penner’s prose is sharp and nuanced. Aurelius Gauss, an itinerant preacher who joins Nora on her quest, “leaning forward over the handlebars, elbows up around his ears, a pilot’s leather helmet jammed onto his small head, goggles down, his sharp nose cutting through the wind like the prow of a ship through the ocean,” is a welcome but rather heart-breaking companion we can’t help but care for, and our heroine, though precocious to a fault, manages to carefully sidestep the trap of surpassing “wise beyond her years,” into the all too common minefield of “wise beyond all believability.” The reader is propelled rather than repelled by her knowledge and audacity, and charmed rather than put off by a statement such as “twelve-year-old girls shouldn’t murder people.” Penner has crafted a world in which one might beg to differ.
The reader is propelled rather than repelled by her knowledge and audacity, and charmed rather than put off by a statement such as “twelve-year-old girls shouldn’t murder people.” Penner has crafted a world in which one might beg to differ.
It is the author’s invention of the damp, cloying world of the long and recently dead that lingers longest in one’s imagination: “he sat there calmly enough, holding his knees to his thin, corrugated chest and staring out, sockets empty, across the dark, uneasy swell, and right into the snapping teeth of the wind.” One can well imagine the character perched upon Dante’s island-mountain Purgatory. And we haven’t even got to the giant yet, or the fox, or is it a fox? (Spoiler alert: it’s not.)
This arty puzzle box of a novel spins and sways its way towards a satisfying culmination holding one of the best lines I’ve read recently (but some secrets must and will be withheld), a climax that refuses to compromise and finds flourish in a finish with a surprise of an epilogue as satisfying as a home-cooked meal after a walk in the rain, though Penner’s characters remain entangled, in a dream world no longer, but in the enigmas and dilemmas of our shared reality.
“They know exactly where to go for a shared laugh, for a fight, for mutual tenderness, but there is no longer a way out. No trail of breadcrumbs through the forest. No silver thread in the labyrinth.”
But not to worry – Penner knows the way out.
Robert G. Penner lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of Strange Labour, one of Publishers Weekly‘s Best Science Fiction Books of 2020. He has published numerous short stories in a wide range of speculative and literary journals under both his name and various pseudonyms. He was also the founding editor of the online science fiction zine Big Echo.
Publisher: Radiant Press (October 8, 2024)
Paperback 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 294 pages
ISBN: 9781998926152
Michael Blouin has been a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, the bpNichol Award, and the CBC Literary Award. He has been the recipient of the Lilian I. Found Award, the Diana Brebner Award and the Archibald Lampman Award. His novel Chase and Haven won the ReLit Award for Best Novel, an award he received again for his novel Skin House. He is an Instructor at the University of Toronto, a guest lecturer for Carleton University, and serves as an adjudicator for both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Two of his novels are now in a permanent archive on the Moon, having landed with NASA/Firefly in 2025.
