Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is Marlon James's 2019 fantasy novel, the first volume of the Dark Star trilogy and the structural pivot in James's career after his Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014). The structural premise is Tracker, a Northern Lyon hunter with a heightened sense of smell that lets him locate any person he has met across an effectively unlimited geographic distance, hired by an unnamed client to find a missing child across the pre-colonial sub-Saharan African fantasy continent that the trilogy is set on. The novel rotates across Tracker's first-person narration of the investigation, an ensemble cast of fantasy-companions (the Leopard, an actual shapeshifter; Sogolon the Moon Witch; the Ogo; the various other hunting-companion figures), and across approximately a dozen separate African mythological-and-cosmological systems that the trilogy draws on for its worldbuilding.

James's structural method is the sustained first-person Tracker confession (the entire novel is structurally Tracker's testimony to an unnamed inquisitor across the entire narrative arc) with the close-third-person Leopard and ensemble material providing the structural counterpoint. The novel reads in the patient sub-Saharan African mythological register James has been working toward across the past decade; the structural-and-cosmological worldbuilding is the structural advantage that lifts the trilogy above the broader post-Tolkien fantasy market. The novel's structural argument (that the operational mechanics of post-Tolkien epic-fantasy worldbuilding can be replaced by a structurally cleaner integration of pre-colonial sub-Saharan African mythological traditions and that contemporary literary epic fantasy can do this kind of work at the same scale as the post-Martin Westerosi-tradition has been doing) is made through the texture of the worldbuilding rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary literary epic fantasy reading, as the structural James entry point alongside A Brief History of Seven Killings, and for fans of N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, R. F. Kuang's Babel, and contemporary literary fantasy. Read Moon Witch Spider King (2022) next for the structural-counterpoint Sogolon-narrated retelling. The Dion Graham audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.