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A review by mariahaskins
The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson
5.0
I’m not quite sure what to say about Kai Ashante Wilson’s glorious, enigmatic, and utterly spell-binding ‘The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps’ that will do it justice. Maybe I should just say this: read it. Read it for a story-line that never goes where you think it might. Read it for characters that you desperately want to stay with, even when the story is over. Read it for Wilson’s intoxicating and dizzying prose that brilliantly flexes between crude and exquisite, between earthy everyday and divinely terrifying. Read it for the sheer pleasure of finding a writer who masterfully bends and twists and sculpts the language to conjure up and create another world – familiar enough in some ways to feel like it has to be our own world, yet so strange beneath that almost-familiar veneer that you’re gripped by a sense of WTF-vertigo.
I could read Wilson’s prose just for the pleasure of the language itself, but there is a compelling story here, too, and whatever you expect from ‘The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps’, I have a feeling that story will surprise you.
Kai Ashante Wilson’s prose is completely addictive: shifting effortlessly between crude and base, ornate and almost ceremonial in tone. I recently read his novelette ‘The Devil In America’ at Tor.com, a story that devastated me with its powerful language, original imagination, and bleeding-raw emotion. After reading ‘The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps’, I want to read everything he’s ever written.
Earlier this year I read Gene Wolfe’s ‘Soldier of the Mist‘, and in some ways ‘The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps’ reminds me of that novel. Just like Wolfe, Wilson manages to tell a fragmented and often utterly mystifying tale while keeping my rapt attention from the first paragraph to the last.
I could read Wilson’s prose just for the pleasure of the language itself, but there is a compelling story here, too, and whatever you expect from ‘The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps’, I have a feeling that story will surprise you.
Kai Ashante Wilson’s prose is completely addictive: shifting effortlessly between crude and base, ornate and almost ceremonial in tone. I recently read his novelette ‘The Devil In America’ at Tor.com, a story that devastated me with its powerful language, original imagination, and bleeding-raw emotion. After reading ‘The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps’, I want to read everything he’s ever written.
Earlier this year I read Gene Wolfe’s ‘Soldier of the Mist‘, and in some ways ‘The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps’ reminds me of that novel. Just like Wolfe, Wilson manages to tell a fragmented and often utterly mystifying tale while keeping my rapt attention from the first paragraph to the last.