Readers who picked up City of Bones as teenagers in 2007 are now old enough to have mortgages, bad backs and firm opinions on loft insulation, so it seems only fair that Cassandra Clare should finally start tying a bow on the whole thing. The Last King of Faerie, the first book of The Wicked Powers, the trilogy billed as the end of the Shadowhunter Chronicles, publishes today, 3 November, from Walker Books in the UK (£20 in hardback) and Knopf in the US. It runs to 576 pages, which is how a romantasy novel clears its throat.
Not everybody waited for today. Copies seem to have reached readers in Australia and New Zealand a little early, and X has spent the past day or so filling up with photographs of hardbacks, sprayed edges and people announcing that they will be unavailable until further notice. Time zones are a wonderful thing. So, apparently, is the antipodean book trade.
The set-up follows Drusilla “Dru” Blackthorn, a student at Shadowhunter Academy, whose night out at a club turns into a kidnapping. She ends up a prisoner of Prince Ash Morgenstern in the land of Faerie and, against her better judgement, finds herself drawn to him and to the darkness that hangs about him like expensive cologne. Long-time readers will recall that the Morgenstern family tree has already produced Valentine and Sebastian, so falling for a Morgenstern is roughly the equivalent of accepting a dinner invitation from somebody called Lecter. Meanwhile, a disappearance shakes the Shadowhunter world and forces Kit Herondale and Ty Blackthorn to set aside their lingering bitterness and go questing together, which is the fantasy version of being made to share a desk.
Faerie, of course, has never been a sensible holiday destination. From Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist to Susanna Clarke’s gentleman with the thistle-down hair and Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince, the rules have stayed admirably consistent: don’t eat the food, don’t make promises, and don’t assume the prince with the cheekbones has your best interests at heart. Clare has worked this territory before, notably in The Dark Artifices, and the new trilogy takes its name from an old Shadowhunter children’s rhyme about bronze being used to summon wicked powers. Nobody in a fantasy novel has ever read a nursery rhyme and then enjoyed a quiet week.
Her publishers are calling her the original queen of romantasy, and there is something in that. Clare was serving up angst, demons and smouldering glances in the late 2000s, long before BookTok gave the genre a portmanteau and a marketing budget. She has also signalled that plenty of familiar faces will drop in alongside the new leads, so expect Jace, Clary, Magnus and Alec to wander through like veteran rockers on a farewell tour, waving to the crowd for what may be the last time.
The audiobook, from Listening Library, is narrated by James Marsters, which is very nearly perfect casting. If anybody knows how to voice a brooding, dangerous love interest with an alarming family background, it’s the man who played Spike.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we were reviewing Clockwork Angel back when The Infernal Devices was brand new, so we have been on this road for a while. The good news is that the end is finally in sight. The less good news is that one US bookseller lists the remaining two books, The Last Prince of Hell and The Last Shadowhunter, for autumn 2027 and summer 2030, so finishing the final trilogy will take about as long as a degree, with fewer essays and considerably more leather.
In fantasy publishing, “final trilogy” is usually a statement of intent rather than a legally binding undertaking. Still, when the last book is called The Last Shadowhunter, it does rather sound as though Clare means it.
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