SFINCS3 Review: A Light for the Dead to Follow, by Rebecca Crunden
- Angela Boord
- 3 minutes ago
- 5 min read
“The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS, pronounced “sphinx”) is a yearly competition to recognize, honor, and celebrate the talent and creativity present in the indie community. We are a sister competition to both SPFBO and SPSFC, and we highlight greatness in the novella format in all areas of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.).” – From the official SFINCS website.
Note: The following review contains only my personal thoughts as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.
While on the run from the king’s guards, Éolina Halkin takes shelter in an ancient and abandoned underground city. She expects to find dark corners and hidden dangers. What she doesn’t expect is to find a mountain full of dead bodies. Nor does she expect ten of those dead bodies to suddenly come back to life and offer her aid in her hour of need.
The ten no-longer-dead knights are just as intrigued by her as she is by them. Nor are the knights human. They are ælfren – immortals from another realm, killed by their own queen during a war that ended centuries ago. And they are as unwelcome in their homeland as Éolina is in hers.
Seeking answers about their return from the land of the dead, and the reasons Éolina’s king is so intent upon killing her, the knights take Éolina into their company and venture towards their former realm. But learning the truth is just the first of many problems – and those hunting Éolina will not stop until she is dead and the knights sent back to the tomb from which they awakened.
Review
A Light for the Dead to Follow is for grim-cozy readers who want a touch of sweet romance in a story that tips its hat in homage to Tolkien.
Éolina is on the run from soldiers sent by the king. To escape them, she runs into some ancient ruins and finds herself trapped there, in a room full of ancient dead warriors with a monster she’s sure will finish her off. Still, she determines to fight bravely… and then something inexplicable (to Éolina) happens and she is suddenly surrounded not by dead knights but by alive ones who are quick to come to her aid. Much to her confusion, the non-human aefrin knights allege that they have been resurrected by her magic, and to repay the favor, they have now pledged themselves to her. Still on the run from the king’s men, Éolina sets off on a quest not only to save herself but to aid her new knights in their ancient quest for justice.
This story read to me as an ode to Tolkien but with a female protagonist, something I was quite interested in. All the names are vaguely Tolkienesque, complete with accent marks, which I felt helped evoke the Lord of the Rings atmosphere rather than muddle things the way generic fantasy accent marks often do. In addition, the scene where the knights return to life made me think so much of the barrow-downs, but it also bore shades of the Paths of the Dead. And then there's the monster Éolina fights at the beginning... clearly an homage to Shelob.
If you’re now worried that A Light for the Dead to Follow is just another Tolkien derivative, don’t; Light is clearly written as an homage to Tolkien, and in that sense, I think it succeeds very well--the little allusions here and there, the way non-human characters are portrayed in a more mythological and less Dragonlance sense (and I say that with all love to Dragonlance), all of this shines with a love for Tolkien's work that doesn't seek to imitate it.
But embedded within this callback to Lord of the Rings, there also seems to be an impulse to tell a cozy story in which the stakes aren’t really scary, life works the way everyone wished it would, and our heroes ride off into the sunset without suffering lasting injury. To that effect, sections of the story are told in a fairly whimsical tone, Éolina finds herself in a cozy, family-like arrangement with her ten knights, houses made of squash are introduced, and non-human characters provide necessary services without demanding payment. This gives the story a utopian feel which eventually helps to build the main thrust of the story as the pursuit of justice for the downtrodden, the betrayed, and the wronged.
I’m having a little trouble writing this review, and I think it's because while I certainly enjoyed the romance, the plucky protagonist, the whimsy, the allusions to Tolkien, and most especially, Éolina’s cozy interactions with her knights--in the end I felt like the story suffered from not knowing exactly what it wanted to be. One moment there were squash houses, the next we were learning how people were starving, and then there would be a moment of horrible violence. One of my notes says, “It can’t decide whether it wants to be a whimsical fairy tale or Lord of the Rings.” I think if the story had focused on one or the other, it would have been more successful, but trying to do both at the same time made me sometimes feel like I had whiplash.
Which isn’t to say that fairy tales aren’t ever gruesome, because they're often very gruesome... but I think a gruesome story written in a fairy tale tone signals that we’re not supposed to ask too many questions. An element of magical realism glosses the world and it can get away with a lot more telling versus showing. But when a story slides into epic fantasy mode, to me that opens the story up to certain worldbuilding questions and also to perhaps more need for dramatization versus straight telling.
And I think the allusions to Lord of the Rings do open the plot of Light up to these sorts of worldbuilding questions. For instance, Éolina’s necromantic magic is very powerful and only grows over the course of the story. In fact, it requires no sacrifices or costs that must be paid and apparently has almost no checks either. By the end of the book, I couldn’t help thinking of Galadriel, who refused the One Ring because it would make her “great and terrible”--not because she was evil, but because it would corrupt even her goodness.
In contrast, I felt like A Light for the Dead to Follow functioned in some ways more like a power fantasy, a story of wish fulfillment. The plot has complications, but they are easily resolved without lasting consequence. The darkness of the story exists on the surface—dead knights, necromancy—but any darkness that might also exist within the good characters, which might be demonstrated by the consequences of their actions, isn’t explored or acknowledged (as in Tolkien’s work).
In the end, I think I would have enjoyed the story more if it had stuck to the cozy interactions between Éolina and the knights without opening itself up to a big epic fantasy-like plotline with all its worldbuilding and character requirements. I certainly did savor the small, quiet moments where the knights and Éolina built a new kind of family, and I think grim-cozy readers will find a lot to like here.