Before she became the N.K. Jemisin, first Black woman to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel and first author to win that award in three straight years, she was an acclaimed but at least less-known author of sci-fi and fantasy novels and perhaps better known for her speech standing up to the Christian nationalist shithead Theodore Beale, a.k.a Vox Day, who was so mad about it he later tried to blow up the Hugos entirely. Then Jemisin published The Fifth Season and became a literary superstar, quite deservingly so, putting the focus squarely on her writing output.
The Killing Moon is one of her five pre-Hugo novels, a work that stands alone but that came with a sequel published a month later (The Shadowed Sun), forming the “Dreamblood Duology.” Reading it now, it’s easy to see the seeds that eventually grew into Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, and in some ways it features even stronger character development than those three novels worked into their vast plotlines, producing a book that’s lighter thematically but incredibly fun and gripping to read.
The Killing Moon takes place mostly in two rival cities, beginning in Gujaareh, where power is shared between the Prince, who succeeded his father to the throne, and the clergy of the Hetawa temple, who practice magic powered by dreams called narcomancy. Some clergy members known as Gatherers can enter dreams and reap “dreamblood,” which is an extremely powerful substance with addictive properties, while they can also guide dying people gently into death – or kill those the temple has deemed ‘corrupted.’
The story follows Nijiri, a young acolyte in the temple who becomes the protégé of an elder Gatherer named Ehiru, who is dealing with a spiritual and professional crisis after losing his focus during a gathering and failing to capture the target’s soul, leading to its destruction; and the ambassador from the neighboring city of Kisua, Sunandi, who visits Gujaareh in her professional capacity but becomes the target of an assassination plot involving Ehiru and Nijiri. The three of them begin to work together to unravel the conspiracy behind this scheme, to determine who or what is harvesting souls in Gujaareh beyond the purview of the Temple, and to stop a potential war between the two cities.
Jemisin creates a rich world here where religion, politics, and human frailty combine to create a world of deep uncertainty, where there are no clear ‘good guys’ and even our heroes are suspect. She reveals the mystery, or at least most of it, to the reader before the characters figure out what’s happening, so it’s not purely a mystery, but there is a mysterious element beyond the mere fantasy setting, where it isn’t clear who is actually pulling the strings – and why. The trio of heroes divide and conquer, moving to Kisua and then back to Gujaareh, even as Ehiru finds himself fighting a dark force inside of him that would make him a weapon for the very people he’s trying to unmask.
Jemisin does something interesting with religion in the plot of The Killing Moon that I haven’t seen before, at least not this effectively. Religion in this world is both a tool for succor and spiritual enlightenment and a tool of oppression, control, and self-enrichment. It is a balanced, honest portrayal of the role of religion in the last few hundred years of human civilization. I was tempted to say she comes out on the negative side of the ledger – it is certainly easier to interpret it that way if you weight the evil done by and through religion in this book more heavily than the kindnesses and solace it provides – but decided that was ultimately my own bias at play.
Although it certainly seems like Jemisin wrote the two novels as a single story, given their publication dates, The Killing Moon has a clear and decisive ending – and an extremely satisfying one that gets the right characters into the right positions, without relying on something beyond the worldview she’s created. Nijiri gets a proper end to his hero’s journey, more than Sunandi does, with a clear arc that takes him from the innocent apprentice to a man worthy of rising to the inner-circle status of his mentor. It made me want to read the second book, without actually needing to do so to complete the story.
Next up: I’m past the halfway point in this year’s winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel, Stephen Graham Jones’ horror novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.