By: ARP
Every so often, a debut arrives with teeth, and A. M. Blake’s Beauty on the Edge of Darkness is one of those books, a Gothic coming-of-age story that begins in British-occupied Montreal and ends in the Louisiana bayou, with a slow, creeping transformation at its heart that tints the whole novel with unease. The first entry in The Little Changer series is an atmospheric, slow-burning read for readers who like their dark fantasy steeped in real history and served with a heavy fog.
Jeanette is twelve when we meet her, the daughter of a French fur trader and a Mohawk mother, living in a fragile pocket of peace in 1760 Montreal. Her family is Catholic, mixed-race, and tolerated rather than welcomed, so one moment of childhood defiance is all it takes to shatter their life. What follows is one of the more inventive refugee journeys in recent fantasy. Blake marches Jeanette and her family down the St. Lawrence, across the Atlantic, into the bondage of a Caribbean plantation, then up through the Gulf to New Orleans and out into the wild Acadian settlements of the Attakapas. It would be a compelling novel if that were all it was, but it isn’t. Along that journey, Jeanette begins waking up feverish, her skin dusted with a strange white powder she does not recognize. That is the first crack, and everything that comes after widens it.
Blake’s instinct for dread is the engine of this book. He understands that the scariest monster stories are the ones in which the protagonist is the last to notice what is happening to her. Hair darkens on Jeanette’s arms. Her hearing sharpens past anything a human girl should be able to. She begins to dream of blood. By the time she meets others who have been changed, the novel has already taught us to flinch at ordinary things. I will not reveal the end, but the final pages close on one of those exquisite cliff-edge moments when the reader and the heroine both realize, at exactly the same time, that the story is only just beginning.
The novel works because Blake commits to both halves of what he is doing. The historical half is rigorous: every location smells, tastes, and weighs right. The Gothic half is just as rigorous. Blake is not writing a fairy tale of transformation in which the change is beautiful and empowering. He is writing horror, and he lets it be horror, the loss of community, the disgust of neighbors, the isolation, the hunger that asks terrible things of you, the way a kind person can become a frightening one. There is real tenderness and faith in the book, too, but tenderness earned against that kind of darkness registers all the more strongly.
Jeanette herself is a marvelous narrator. She is devout without being pious, watchful without being passive, capable of moral clarity one page and childish pettiness the next, which is to say she reads like a real girl on her way to becoming a real woman. The supporting cast orbits her with distinct gravities, and even the antagonists get the dignity of specificity. Blake understands that evil is more frightening when it has manners.
This is a book for the dark fantasy shelf. Readers who love the mood of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, the slow-building transformation horror of Carmen Maria Machado, or the historical menace of Jennifer McMahon will find themselves very much at home. It is appropriate for older teens and adults; the book handles racism, slavery, illness, bereavement, and predatory adult attention with care, but it does not look away from them, and younger or more sensitive readers should know that going in.
Beauty on the Edge of Darkness is a moody, confident, seriously felt piece of historical dark fantasy, and the rare debut that earns its “to be continued.” Pick up your copy on Amazon to join Jeanette’s journey.
