In Black Leopard, Red Wolf, she was the one with some sense of mission and some sense of obsession. But also, I knew there was a story there, if for no other reason than that she was the oldest person in the room. In terms of how I started thinking about it, there was a practical reason to move forward with Sogolon: she’s one of the few left alive.
I have a theory that fantasy writers wrote more than anyone during the pandemic, because to write fantasy was to escape into a world totally unlike the one we're in. It's the second longest novel I've ever written, but it's the second shortest time it ever took me to write a novel. My partner and I went to his sister’s house in Connecticut for almost six months, just to get out of New York.
I started writing Moon Witch, Spider King in March 2020, just as Covid was exploding. Marlon James: There are two answers to that. James spoke with Esquire by Zoom to discuss his process of designing fantasy novels that both subvert and embrace the genre.Įsquire: Where in the process of formulating The Dark Star Trilogy did you determine that you’d have to tell Sogolon’s story? Jordan, the Dark Star Trilogy continues to amaze readers, packed with riveting tales of empire, adventure, and power. “I'm still waiting on Sogolon to leave my damn house,” he tells Esquire.Īs Black Leopard, Red Wolf prepares for the small screen treatment, courtesy of Michael B. Curiously, this was never in the author's original design James didn’t set out to turn back the clock nearly two centuries, but Sogolon took hold of him and wouldn’t let go. As Sogolon's challenges grow, so too do her mystical powers, keeping her aloft on a wrenching journey of love, loss, and revenge. But Sogolon’s recollection sends her careening back into the past, from her hard-scrabble childhood as “a girl of little use” to her fateful arrival as a handmaiden in the royal court, where she makes a powerful enemy in the king's chancellor. Sogolon the Moon Witch, the legendary adversary who tangled with bounty hunter Tracker during his search for a vanished child in Black Leopard, Red Wolf, now takes center stage to share her own account of the boy’s disappearance. In this ambitious new installment, James masterfully flips the first 's plot on its head, probing the distance between two versions of the same events to ask powerful questions about truth, history, and storytelling. Moon Witch, Spider King is the second volume in James’ outstanding Dark Star Trilogy, which began unforgettably with 2019’s National Book Award-nominated Black Leopard, Red Wolf.
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