SFINCS3 Review: The Knight of the Moon by Gregory Kontaxis
- Angela Boord
- 3 days 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.
John, the Long Arm, leads a life as a bounty hunter at the Three Heads. His name has spread far and wide across the north while plenty of gold weighs down his pockets. Just when everything seems to be going well for him, a group of soldiers order him to take on a new mission.
This time, his task is to track down a very dangerous man—a knight who rejected his oaths, turning his back on Gaeldeath and its ruler.
Will John choose the way of honour and devotion or will be succumb to his unquenchable thirst for wealth?
As part of “The Dance of Light” series, “The Knight of the Moon” is a novella which takes place seventeen years preceding the events of “The Return of the Knights.”
Review
Knight of the Moon by Gregory Kontaxis is an ambitious grimdark attempt to critique a patriarchal society which treats women as commodities. Though I appreciated this attempt and I liked many of the elements that went into making this story, it never quite came together for me.
According to the author’s website, the larger series of which Knight of the Moon is a part melds “Game of Thrones with Greek mythology.” Honestly, I was totally up for that. I think the novella does fit into the general scheme, particularly with its emphasis on knights, court intrigue, and a plot which seemed (to me) to borrow some of its structure from Greek tragedy. The prose was spare without a lot of detail, but it kept the pace moving quickly and I never at any point wanted to put it down. I kept reading to the end wanting to know what would happen next. I do wonder if I would have had a different reading experience if I had come to it after reading Book 1 instead of before, but I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.
Knight of the Moon begins with a problem that immediately drew me in. A kickass military woman named Nemesis and a jaded bounty hunter named John the Long Arm are forced to team up to kill the only honorable knight in the Kingdom in order to save themselves. If this also seems like the set up for a romantic subplot, you're not wrong.
But this is also where things began to go awry for me. The romance never rang true, I think because it seemed to come out of nowhere. Although there was some time spent on character work, I think those two particular characters needed much more on-page time together in order for their relationship to change; we needed to see it changing through dialogue and action, but instead we were just told there was an attraction which didn’t quite jibe with what we’d been shown. Of Nemesis and her backstory in particular.
In fact, although I am a fan of romantic fantasy (I also write it), I think the story would have been stronger without the romance. If we had been able to see Nemesis and John interacting as equals, working a job without sex ever entering the equation, that would have gone much farther to shore up the critique against the commodification and sexualization of women that I think the author was trying to make. I have to admit that the way the Nemesis was portrayed in this novella confused me, and as soon as I finished reading, I immediately went to refresh my memory of Nemesis’s role in Greek mythology.
So, (according to Wikipedia) Nemesis is “the goddess who personified retribution for the sin of hubris: arrogance against the gods.” As in the Greek myths, there is a lot of emphasis on rape in Knight of the Moon. None of it is shown on page, but after I finished reading and went to the author’s website and then to brush up on Nemesis, I started putting a few things together. Certain events in the character’s backstory and in the ending of this novella began to make sense, in way, because they felt like events that could happen in a Greek tragedy.
I won’t spoil anything, but there is one event toward the end that leads directly to the climax which seems to happen purely by chance. And I thought when I read it, “Oh, I bet the gods had a hand in that.”
The problem is that the worldbuilding, except for the political situation, is very thin. I really have no idea if the author meant for it to look like the gods had a hand in or not because on the page, it feels like it just happens, no gods are mentioned. Also, it’s hard for me to decide if my hunch that the story is supposed to be a “tragedy” (according to the literary definition of tragedy) is correct because I’m stretching to pull together a few vague threads. If it is, I feel like the protagonist’s character wasn’t set up well enough to be a tragic hero. In my understanding, a tragic hero is one who has a fatal flaw, and the plot, including the ending, springs directly from this flaw. It isn't just a plot where sad things happen. That may have been what Kontaxis was trying to do here in the context of a grimdark adventure story. But if John’s desire to preserve himself was his “fatal flaw”, I don’t think this really played out directly enough to give the ending the sort of power a true tragedy commands.
Instead, I was left wondering how a character named for the goddess of divine retribution had ended up being dealt such an unfair hand. Actually, one of the questions I had—and this goes back to the worldbuilding—did Nemesis’s parents name her Nemesis? They certainly didn’t seem like the sort of people to do that, so did she choose the name herself?
I think this story could really have been excellent with more character development and worldbuilding that had leaned harder into the Greek mythology element, instead of leaving Nemesis an unexplained anomaly in a sea of somewhat generic medieval fantasy. But unfortunately, the elements didn’t pull together for me. Instead, both the characters and the world felt like they were at the service of a preconceived plot. Because they felt like they were meant to serve the plot instead of creating it, both the characters and the world felt fairly one-note. And that one-note didn’t allow for the complicated relationships the author was trying to build.
A caveat—I am reading this as a standalone with no prior knowledge of any of the characters. Prequel novellas (in my own experience) can be really tough to write because you’re juggling trying to draw new readers in while keeping series readers happy, and certain things in the series (like a character’s backstory) have already been set in stone.
I finished feeling fairly conflicted about the story, but if you like your grimdark epic fantasy plot-driven rather than character-driven, and you also want a fast-paced story in a bite-sized package instead of a big chonk, you might give this one a try.
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