On the face of it, writing a (notionally fantasy) novel from the inside view point of slave rebellion is a laudable endeavour. Though recent fantasy has tackled topics of colonialism and the oppression and estrangement of the peoples suffering from it, the viewpoint has mostly been one of its eventual subversion (with the poster child probably being Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant series), which tends to neatly evade the fact that, historically, resistance has mostly been successfully repressed (for a time, at the very least), often violently. This is especially true of slave uprisings, most of which have been drowned in blood, from Antiquity to the antebellum US South. The fantastic literature I am aware of has done little to address this horrific leitmotif of history, beyond using it as a foil for its plots.

Callender attempts to change that in the second and final instalment of their Islands of Blood and Storm cycle. King of the Rising starts where Queen of the Conquered left off, switching viewpoints from the Islander slave owner Sigourney to the leader of the uprising, Løren, and follows his doomed struggle to salvage a better world from the ashes of chattel slavery.

As a narrative of the deep and lasting damage to the soul the trauma of slavery causes, King of the Rising is a triumph. As a fictionalisation of slave uprisings, it is a hodgepodge of eras and forms, combining elements of genocidal colonisation, the late antebellum US slavery era and historical uprisings in the Caribbean, which irks the historian in me no end. As a novel, especially as a fantasy novel, it is a failure – and that is a pity.

The first instalment, while marred by one-dimensional characters and a slow, often repetitive pace, kept the reader engaged with its colonial game of thrones participants missing the ultimate point. The second never manages to go beyond hypnotic bleakness. Its cast loses all remnants of depth, getting relegated to set pieces illustrating the impending doom (especially Sigourney, who is reduced to the kind of “in the end, everybody is either evil or weak” cardboard cutout last seen in Abercrombie ’s First Law trilogy); there is no arc beyond the certainty of violent death under the merciless sun (characteristically, the one sequence involving getting help from outside the islands is the books’s weakest, remaining almost entirely inconsequential to the unfolding action); and the magic that was so central to the first part is surplus to requirements (it just adds to what is already there: fear, pain, power imbalance, treachery).

With all this said, Callender’s voice still is a resonating one, and until fantastic literature does better at giving the forgotten their voice back, their deeply flawed pair of novels should be on your reading list.