In 2015, Scott Hawkins, a software engineer who wrote fiction as a hobby, burst onto the fantasy fiction scene with his dark but original and compelling debut, The Library at Mount Char.
After that, Hawkins admitted he “got a little cocky.” It took ten years and three failed attempts—three novels that “nobody really liked” before he dusted off an old short story that became his new novel, Blacktail.
Blacktail is a story of revenge. The eponymous character is a relatively ordinary wolf who faces a set of tragedies at the hands of men. His desperation for revenge catches the attention of a witch, Old Kitty Mother, who is herself a house cat. She encourages Blacktail to seek out the old sleeping Forest God to help him exact his revenge against mankind.
The novel is an inventive celebration of the natural world but also has some moments of brutal violence. In a recent What We’re Reading interview, Hawkins explained some of the more violent aspects of the story is a way to stay true to the nature of animals.
“The wolf--he's gonna do wolf stuff, and he can't really negotiate with them [people],” he said.
As Blacktail travels the land in search of the Forest God, his own legend grows with each act of revenge, begging the question: is Blacktail a hero or a villain?
Hawkins explained, “Clearly from the human standpoint, he's the bad guy…A lot of what counts as commandments in the Bible and other religions are effectively just what works best for humanity as a whole: don't kill and so forth. These are all moral things. And I think animal morality would be necessarily a little bit different from that. The ‘don't kill’ obviously is for people--don't kill other people--because we're pretty routine about killing animals. And the animals, you know, why wouldn't they be the same way in reverse ... So I think depending on where you're sitting, he's either a hero or a villain.”
While writing Blacktail, Hawkins was fostering several rescued dogs, including a stray named Renren and a half-wolf clocking in at 120 pounds and big enough to “lay his head on the kitchen table if he wanted something to eat or share dinner with you.”
According to Hawkins, each of his four-legged companions colored the story.
Blacktail is published by Crown / Penguin Random House.
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