2025 Reading Challenge 36 Black Easter
It’s only a hundred or so pages, and I gave myself an extra week to read this after holiday time allowed me to get ahead.
This is Hard Fantasy in its strictest sense: the occult ceremonies are rendered in technical detail, as though excerpted from an academic treatise. Plot progression, character psychology, and dramatic action are present only in outline.
The novel forms part of a trilogy, collectively known as After Such Knowledge, in which each volume interrogates a discrete body of human understanding. Here, the subject is demonology as a practical science.
The style is deliberate, intellectual, and unhurried. It eschews the sensational in favour of a clinical precision that recalls a scientific monograph more than a conventional novel. The intention is transparent: to present the mechanics of magic without recourse to melodrama, gore, or supernatural awe. Only in the closing chapters, when the consequences of the experiment become manifest, does the narrative accelerate, producing revelations of lasting resonance.
The ostensible plot is simple. A black magician, Theron Ware, is commissioned by an arms manufacturer, Baines, to conduct a grand evocation: the summoning of every demon of Hell for a single night upon Earth. A Dominican, Father Domenico, is deputed by the Church as observer, tasked with authenticating the phenomenon.
The remainder of the book concerns itself with the logistics of such an undertaking. The effect is less that of a story than of a case study. For readers conditioned to narrative drive, the experience can be exhausting. Yet it is precisely this severity that has secured the book’s reputation as one of the more rigorous and unsettling works of speculative fiction. But for this reader, it was a demanding, torturous experience and has consigned Blish novels back to the dimension they came from.
I gave this book 4.0 out of 10
TTRPG Thoughts:
Is there an Ars Magica hack that can do justice to this setting? Quite possibly, but I’ll leave that to those with a love for this novel and the works of Blish.