Genre: Fantasy, Dark Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
The Vessel. The great hope of the Vahndriin people. His is the body through which their Lord, Vahndestrus, might return to the world and bring with him promised salvation. A sacrifice. And the one to fulfill that role at long last, Vulfrey, a freckle-faced youth with the reddest of hair. But to Vulfrey, unyieldingly pious, there could be no greater an honor. He had prepared his entire life to see it done.
He was ready.
However. On the eve of his twentieth birthday—the day that should have been his last—tragedy befalls the mountain temple he’d lived his entire life caged within. Now for the first time, he’s thrust out into the world. Alone and broken, fleeing for the very life not belonging to him.
It’s then that he finds an unlikely ally in Kaill, a farm boy and son of the man who’d betrayed and nearly killed him. With no choice but to trust him, the two set off together across country—Vulfrey searching for a means to fulfill his duty and mend the wound torn in his people’s faith, Kaill seeking penance for his father’s deeds, and both falling prey to feelings doomed by the journey’s end.
The Review
The legacy of Lord of the Rings runs deep in any fantasy fiction not based in science fiction or outer space. Joseph Gorne’s ambitious Belarythm’s Branches series is no exception. What Gorne does here is create a complex religious context as a backdrop for the adventures of his young heroes, Vulfrey and Kaill. Frodo may have been the bearer of the ring of power, but Vulfrey is the Vessel for the Ascension (i.e. bodily resurrection) of the founder of a vast religion—the Vahndriin. Taken as an infant, he has been raised in a huge mountaintop temple complex with an unpronounceable name. Vulfrey doesn’t have a ring, but he has bright, ruby-red (not carrot-top) hair that sets him apart from all living humans.
Gorne does a really admirable job of world-building to establish the bizarre setting for Vulfrey’s short life so far. A flashback to a violent incident when he was still a little boy starts the story, and also foreshadows the looming violence and escape that will define the book’s long narrative.
The Vahndriin religion is, of course, alien to what we know—and yet it is unsettlingly familiar in many of its particulars. What is made clear to the reader is that, as powerful and ancient as this religion is, it is not universally accepted and, apparently, resented by more than a few of this world’s cultures.
Gorne also establishes his characters really well. Vulfrey is a curious mixture of spoiled arrogance and gentle innocence. He has been raised to understand that he will give up his life in order to surrender his body (the vessel) to the resurrected Vahndestrus. However, there is a great deal that he does not know, and that ignorance becomes a central motif of the whole tale.
Vulfrey’s chief protector and sole companion is his guard, Gajdren, about ten years Vulfrey’s senior. Gajdren’s own father gave his life protecting the Vessel, and he plays an odd dual role of guard and friend. It’s an oddly comic relationship, at least in the carefree beginning of the story, as the Ascension draws near.
The author’s fairly deft use of tonal shifts carries through once the action really kicks in, and Vulfrey is taken under the wing of Kaill, a farm boy a year younger than the Vessel. Kaill’s own family is deeply embroiled in the larger narrative, which binds him to the boy with the flaming-red hair. Kaill is also the focus of Vulfrey’s emerging emotions—and this fraught attraction between the two young men will no doubt carry through the entire series, with some level of frustration for the reader as well as the main characters.
My one real complaint is the fact that the author, for whatever reason, simply cannot use the past tense correctly. Given the sometimes baroque language that Gorne has devised for his narrative, it’s very curious that this one consistent and frequent flaw was not tagged by any editor. It’s an unfortunate distraction from what is a compelling and emotionally engaging epic.
I’ve already purchased book 2 in the Belarhythm’s Branches series: Vivisection of Faith.
Four stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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