A New Darkness: Book Review

A New Darkness

The Starblade Chronicles #1

by Joseph Delaney
 
Greenwillow Press, 2015 (US)

352 Pages

Middle Grade (13 and up)

 
The Spook John Gregory is dead. His crusade against witches and boggarts in the County and his apprentice Tom Ward’s showdown with The Fiend has come to an end. The Starblade Chronicles now continue the saga of Tom, his allies, and enemies as he takes on the role of the Chippenden Spook.

A fresh storyline turns northward where Tom must address the growing threat of the Kobalos incursion. The first book in a planned trilogy, A New Darkness provides a skillful lead-in from the Wardstone Chronicles, introducing us to the returning characters and summarizing the groundwork laid in the original thirteen-novel series.

The big change in this book is that Tom is no longer an apprentice. But since the series is all about “The Spook’s Apprentice,” Tom will need a companion to fight the dark. Enter Jenny,
the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter who wants Tom to be her mentor… but he’s only just gotten the promotion himself and still has a lot to learn. Like a supplicant to a Zen Buddhist temple, she is told to go away three times, but is still there in the morning. So Tom decides to give her a try. He takes her to the haunted house where he himself was once tested by John Gregory.

She runs away.

The blood of the Samhadre runs through the veins of our family… They are the Old Ones, daughter– those beings who walked the earth while humans were no better than animals who sat in their own excrement… You will inherit some small part of what they were.

She later reveals that it wasn’t fear of the ghosts that drove her away, but one of her special gifts, an intense emotional empathy. She has the blood of the ancient ones, and her unique gifts include not only the ability to speak with dead people, but virtual invisibility from trackers, an opposite to Tom’s skill for locating people.

Jennie is only two years younger than Tom, which begs the question of their relationship. Will there be romance? What would Alice think?

Delaney switches to Jenny’s perspective to tell the story of how she, an orphan, finally met her birth mother and learned of her magical inheritance. Jenny then conveys her version of what happened when she accompanied Tom to deal with a witch and her pet “thumper” (part elemental spirit and part spell), a first professional encounter with the Dark.

I’ll take your bones! I’ll gouge out your eyes! I’ll drink your blood! I’ll flay you slowly until you scream and writhe. I’ll strip the meat from your skinny ribs and boil up your brains to make a broth! You’re mine, young spook! I’ve a use for every tasty inch of you, and the soft flesh of the girl will be my sweet desert!

A thing has been killing young woman in the County, and Jenny knows where it is holed up. The quest begins as the thing turns out to be none other than a Kobalos mage who captures Jenny in a horrifying scene she will never forget. Tom will need the Starblade to escape, a magical weapon forged by Grimalkin from the metal of a meteorite that can ward off magic. Too bad he buried it under Spook Gregory’s grave. This time it’s Tom’s turn to run away, leaving Jenny hanging, literally.

Grimalkin joins the team once more, an ally made by Tom himself while under the tutelage of his predecessor (along with the boggart at his Chippenden house,) who is not only a witch herself, but a clan assassin. Alerted by Tom, she starts experimenting with the Kobalos mage’s magical specimens. Bad idea.

Finally, Tom and Jenny follow Grimalkin on her reconnaissance quest to the north, noting how she is becoming obsessed with her hatred of the race.

We read from Jenny’s journal as her new mentor faces off against a Kobalos warrior. (The funny thing here is that Tom doesn’t use his special magic whereby he can slow or stop time; this is how he defeated the dark wizard Lukrasta, but it isn’t even mentioned here.) All the while, the days are growing unusually colder and colder. Almost reminding us of the frozen wastes preferred by the ancient god Golgoth (as seen in Book 3, Night of the Soul Stealer).

Grimalkin’s character at times comes across as a lot more forgiving and much less hostile than I would expect from the most savage witch assassin ever, but most of the trouble that arises in the story is initiated by her. We see clearly that Tom acquiesces to her machinations to the point of his blatantly being used. But what choice did he have? The Kobalos would soon be on the doorstep of the County.

There is some other quirky writing, too. In the first quarter of the book, for instance, Delaney must have mentioned villagers crossing the street to avoid spooks seven times. (not to mention that he’s dropped a plug for The Spook’s Bestiary in every book since it was published. But the place names, the rich setting, the grim frisson of the bog witches reaching out from the black mucky water is still, and ever, unparalleled.

I skipped this novel when it first came out because I had heard that it was a tough cliffhanger from a number of sources, so I felt that I should wait for the second book to be available* before I jumped in. Luckily, it was not too terrible a shock because Delaney loves to play life-and-death games. But you may not want to read the debut book of The Starblade Chronicles until you have The Dark Army readily available and your pockets filled with salt and iron!

Like the old days of The Last Apprentice series, with Tom Ward’s Survival Guide included as an appendix, this book also contains additional material. Grimalkin’s notes on the Kobalos all ready for immortalization in the Cheppenden library accompanies a lengthy Glossary of Kobalos Terms, combining not only what we know in this novel, but what we learned back in Slither’s Tale.

Our recent encounter with Bibby Longtooth had been traumatic– especially when we found the bones of the children in her cottage afterward, some still wet with blood. It had resembled a butcher shop. For a few days I wondered if Jenny would ever get over the experience…

*I’m not sure what the delay is with the latest few of Delaney’s books– The US editions by Greenwillow Press were always just six-months behind the UK release. In the new series, we’ve had to wait almost two years for the second book! Likewise, the second book in Delaney’s Arena 13 series has already been out in the UK for months, and the first is still not even slated for our shores yet.