First person narratives don’t naturally jive with me. Those in present tense bring to mind loquacious toddlers who narrate their existence to doting parents, and the ones in past tense undermine suspense. There’s no doubt the hero will make it through the present ordeal—after all, they lived to tell the tale!
And yet, there are those first-person books that work because the author so completely immerses you in the story you don’t even question the how or why of the narration. The writing, whether it’s sharp and snappy or lyrical and lovely, coats you in the narrator’s skin and draws you deep into their world. We become Dana Franklin or Genly Ai, and in doing so, embrace their tale. This is what happened to me when I read She Dreams in Blood—I became the self-doubting, partial-amnesiac, megalomaniac-in-waiting, but nevertheless-a-sweetheart, Khraen.
She Dreams in Blood is the second novel in The Obsidian Path. Although I thoroughly enjoyed Black Stone Heart (a SPFBO6 finalist; reviewed here), I tired of Khraen’s repetitive struggles with his conscience in the first book. Time and again, Khraen questions the morality of his actions and vows to do better next time. Then he turns around and helps his girlfriend kill some innocent people, about which he feels terribly guilty. Rinse, repeat. All that makes Khraen’s alternating inhumanity and “what have I done” conscience-pricking tolerable is he is wryly funny, and he maintains enough awareness of right and wrong to give us hope of his redemption.
Fletcher handles Khraen’s moral quandaries with more subtlety in the second book. Right from the beginning, we’re shown redemption may be beyond Khraen’s reach, not least because the pull of his destiny is so strong. Early in the novel, a violent storm casts Khraen and his companions adrift in the ocean, and their powerlessness and inability to change course is a theme that pervades the novel. Khraen’s new best friend, a young man named Brenwick, is an adventurer and storyteller, but all his tales are tragedies of hapless fate where elements beyond his control make for a sorry end (foreshadow alert!).
She Dreams in Blood is built from the bones of Greek tragedy, but it is at its core a love story. It’s a gory, grimdark, crazy narrative set by turns on the high seas, an island populated with Dr. Moreau–type human-beast hybrids, and a city partially occupied by gigantic, intelligent insects that enslave and parasitize people, but it’s still, in the main, a love story.
Khraen and Henka do a lot of horrible things, but they do it all for each other. And yet, their motivations are also not what they seem. Khraen, for the most part, remains a rube. A young man robbed of memory and uncertain of his true purpose, he continues to blunder into triumph and failure alike. And yet as he learns more about himself, we begin to see his rationalizations may have some merit. How much merit depends on how sympathetic the reader is to Khraen’s plight—he doesn’t, after all, have much agency and is swept toward an evil destiny like a man in a barrel headed toward a waterfall. Yet despite his malfunctioning moral compass and general idiocy, I found Khraen eminently likeable. He is deeply empathetic and wants to do the right thing. It’s just that he lacks the wisdom and the fortitude to stop his headlong rush over the falls.
In contrast to the hapless, helpless men, the women of She Dreams in Blood have not only agency but forethought. While Khraen and Brenwick both submit to the vagaries of fate, Henka has a plan, one backed up by contingency plans B through Z. At first, we’re led to believe she’s a duplicitous master manipulator, guiding Khraen to his Demon Emperor throne in order to regain her own power as Empress, but this may not be her endgame. As her reasons, and rationalizations, become a little clearer, they cast some light on Khraen’s actions as well. (Hint: as Huey Lewis said, “it’s the power of love,” and a little matter of who possesses whose heart.) There are other women in the book who do their wise-cracking best to serve as better angels for Khraen, along with some who do not have his best interests at heart.
And then there is the deity named “She Dreams in Blood,” whom Khraen refers to as his “god,” not his “goddess.” I find this choice fascinating, since in English the female-gendered suffix -ess always connotes less—be it waitress or stewardess, empress or goddess, it’s a diminished version of the male/neutral form. But like the other women in the novel, She Dreams in Blood is not only not powerless, she’s powerful far beyond her male peers. And she is terrifying. Khraen’s originally self-dedicated his life to serving this god, and as the reborn Khraen begins to remember more about her, we come to realize worshipping this divinity was a really, really bad idea.
What is really driving Khraen—the contemporary young man and the ancient one who ruled the world a thousand years before—is the central mystery of the series. There are hints the old Khraen saw the error of his ways and desperately wants the reborn one to avoid those mistakes. Whether Henka and the other women in Khraen’s life will help him or prevent him from realizing the ambition to be better remains unknown, but the conclusion of She Dreams in Blood reveals a lot about Khraen and how far he’ll go for the woman he loves. It’s a distance beyond reason and beyond madness, just like the story itself.
Jennie Ivins