Once Was Willem

Once Was Willem is a dark medieval fantasy narrated by a boy who came back from the grave wrong. It is the twelfth century, and England is torn by the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda. In the village of Cosham, Willem, the much loved son of a farmer, dies at the age of twelve. Nearly a year later his grieving parents reluctantly let a sorcerer named Cain Caradoc raise him. Caradoc's price is a tithe from the boy's soul, which he spends on keeping his own hold on immortality. What climbs out of the grave is hideous and no longer quite Willem. His parents recoil, the villagers chase him out, and the boy, renamed Once Was Willem, begins to forget the child he was.

In the wild country beyond Cosham he finds others the world has cast out, shapeshifters, elemental creatures, monsters and spirits, and they become a band of seven. Caradoc, meanwhile, settles in the nearby castle and turns to black magic and child sacrifice to command the vast power he senses in it. Willem tells his companions' stories alongside his own, and when the sorcerer's magic threatens the villages, the people who drove the outcasts away come to them for help. The battle that follows is fought over the children of Cosham and over the power Caradoc craves, which sleeps beneath the castle in the bones of an angel. Folklore runs all through it, nixies and boggarts in the forests of the Chase alongside angels and hell.

The reason to read it is the voice. Willem writes in an old fashioned English, as a chronicler of his own century would, and he wanders: he doubles back and breaks off for a memory or an aside. Some readers find the opening slow and the style hard to parse; others settle in quickly. The first half is cruel and close to hopeless, the second opens into something warmer, and the violence is bloody enough to turn the stomach now and then. Underneath it is a plain question about who the monster is, since the grotesque narrator is kind and restrained and many of the people who fear him are not. Readers who like Frankenstein, The Magnificent Seven or a family made out of outcasts will find all three here.