Today’s subject is a powerful, much-anticipated sequel, The Thrice-Bound Fool by Christopher Buehlman. Fool is the second book in the Blacktongue series, except it’s actually the third. Buehlman put out The Blacktongue Thief in 2021 about the protagonist Kinch, then put out a prequel book called The Daughters’ War in 2024 about his protagonist Galva, and now we are coming back around to Fool, where both protagonists are paired up to continue the plot from Thief. The path to The Thrice-Bound Fool has been winding and confusing. While this odd story design is not my preferred reading experience, it is very representative of the themes and messages that Buehlman has packed into his third novel in the series.
So with all the back and forth of the story, what actually is the plot of Fool? Well, that is a bit complicated. At the end of Thief (review here), the goblins are planning to invade, the chances of survival for the human kingdoms look low, and Kinch is on the run from his thieves’ guild for stealing from them. Kinch and Galva have a magical sentient book (who is an asshole) that might hold secrets to getting the guild off Kinch’s back and unlocking power for the human kingdoms to fight the goblin horde. All Kinch needs to do is read a book that is actively trying to kill him while Galva beats off the assassins that dog their heels. What truths will the pages unlock for our companions?
If I am being honest, the plot of this book is a little bit of a false flag. Looking at the series at a macro scale, it is pretty clear that Buehlman, with his massively influential horror background, is more interested in telling just a character-focused story than an epic fantasy plot. This is absolutely fine, as the character work on display, particularly in Fool, is phenomenal. Buehlman uses the very loud (and crass) prose to sleight-of-hand incremental character shifts as our protagonists go through inconveniences, barriers, and full-on tragedy. We start the journey as witnesses to arcane decoding but rapidly become hostages to a laundry list of bad things that happen to our ‘heroes’ over and over. The result is a full circle that leaves the characters almost back where they started, but as profoundly changed individuals with very different outlooks on life.
The vehicles by which Buehlman affects these character changes are brilliant. The dream sequences between Kinch and the book and the various witches in the story are disorienting and revelatory. The interplay between both protagonists, their faiths, and the literal manifestation of various divine forces in the narrative is a really clever thematic device that still has me thinking about certain sequences. The ending, in particular, is wondrous in a way that left me reeling. I originally was going to come with a bunch of gripes about various elements of the story, but I found the ending of Fool to be so perspective-shifting that I had to sit down and re-examine almost my entire experience with the story. Especially for a bridge book, Fool had one of my favorite endings to a story I have read in a long while.
That being said, the brilliant thematic execution of the book didn’t quite completely alleviate some of my issues with the functional execution of the plot. First, due to the large gap between time reading book one and book two, I didn’t have as strong a grasp of all of the details of The Blacktongue Thief. I suspect that if I had read the two books much closer together, I might have had an even better experience, but I went into Fool a little lost. This was immediately compounded by the fact that each book in the Blacktongue series reads like its own independent quest, but has numerous intricate ties to one another that don’t allow the books to exist independently. To put it more plainly, none of the events in Fool feel like they noticeably affected the stakes or world that were established in the first books. Yet, at the same time there are so many callbacks and interwoven lore elements that it doesn’t feel like you could read Fool independently, which results in a feeling of being somewhat adrift. Some of this is definitely intentional. The story in Fool is meant to be a commentary on how sometimes you don’t make progress in life, but you do make progress as a person. I just wish the ties to the plots of the three books felt a little stronger.
Despite a general feeling of disconnectedness, the lore and worldbuilding introduced in Fool was great. We meet three cultures of nomads, giants, and half-giants, each of which has intricacies and a mutual hatred of one another. We get a closer look at the goblin societies, which deepens the antagonists, without lessening their role as a complete and total existential world-ending threat to the human kingdoms. We also meet a cavalcade of colorful side characters who are all solidly in the grey space of morality but are all impressively likable despite their extremely open self-serving motives.
All in all, I think Buehlman has created a brilliant follow-up novel that is going to delight and amaze anyone who is a fan of his style of story. I think that I personally struggled a little bit with the form of storytelling that Buehlman has chosen, but my personal taste shouldn’t detract from the brilliance in what Buehlman has been able to accomplish with The Thrice-Bound Fool. This is a phenomenal follow-up to one of the best new fantasy series of the decade.
Rating: The Thrice-Bound Fool – 9.0/10
-Andrew
