A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox
Katrina Kwan
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
I may have accidentally stumbled onto a new favorite fantasy subgenre: Chinese fox mythology. Yangsze Choo got me started some years ago with The Fox Wife, which remains one of the best books I’ve ever read, and then this year the craving started up again after I read Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetails. I can’t say I know a lot about the original folklore, but I want to read all the foxy books. I love folklore and I love retellings, and I can’t wait to see what other writers do with these foxes.
Set in the Southern Kingdom of Jian, the story begins not with a fox but with an archer, a man named Houyi who becomes a legend when he shoots down nine of the cruel star gods wreaking havoc on the land below. The tenth makes a strong enough case for himself that he becomes the sun, shining gently and worshipped accordingly, while his siblings are forced to atone for their misdeeds by serving as the heads of nine different courts within Hell. They are supposed to re-earn their place in the Heavens after a millennium’s worth of service, but over time they become entrenched in their respective courts as they torment an endless parade of human souls seeking the Gates of Hell (i.e., the exit). After an untold period of time, the youngest brother peaces out and slips into the world above, where he reinvents himself with the help of a magic paintbrush gifted to him by his mother. As the Maskmaker, he learns to paint ultrarealistic masks that completely transform the wearer: if he painted Houyi’s face on a mask, for instance, he could take on Houyi’s entire appearance, down to the last wrinkle. Later he attempts to exact revenge upon Houyi but instead sparks a chain of events that sends Houyi’s beloved wife Chang’e to the moon, causing Houyi to swear eternal vengeance upon him. There is no statute of limitations upon this vengeance; it passes down through Houyi’s entire family tree like the world’s shittiest heirloom. With his list of enemies rapidly growing, the Maskmaker – who originally had intended nothing more than the rescue of his trapped siblings – sets his sights upon the complete decimation of the human race.
Countless generations later, the current king of Jian fathers his ninth son upon the daughter of a long line of renowned archers. She has no proof of her ancestry, but she is accorded just enough courtesy for her son to be raised in comfort, though he is mostly separated from his eight older brothers and is not technically accepted as a prince. While living in a remote village to hide his father’s shame, Sonam meets a young nine-tailed fox named Yue and befriends her easily. Their friendship is a source of ire for the Maskmaker, who struck a deal with Yue and her eight older sisters: in exchange for masks of their own, with which they take on the appearance of humans, they are supposed to devour entire populations at the Maskmaker’s command, regardless of age, gender, or personal charm. This is a task Yue’s sisters have embraced with glee, but Yue herself is less certain. Smaller than all of them and instinctively drawn to humans, she balks at the Maskmaker’s demand that she eat Sonam. For her defiance he burns half of her face, leaving her with terrible scars for the rest of her life, while her sisters turn to ash in the blink of an eye when they try to come to her defense. With her sisters gone and her face permanently ruined, Yue does the only thing she can think of and steals the Maskmaker’s favorite mask before fleeing.
About thirty years after this, Yue establishes a new hunting range in the capital city of Longhao, armed with her stolen mask and a burning rage against the Maskmaker. She has spent the last three decades combing the earth for him but has been unable to find him, and presently is focused on surviving. Though she scrupulously does not touch children or other innocents, she makes a point of stalking and eating the worst dregs of society, primarily wife-beaters, which I applaud. During one of her hunts she encounters the adult Sonam, now called the Demon Hunter of Jian, who has built his entire adulthood around either killing or banishing demons (such as Yue) in a single-minded quest to gain acceptance within his own family. Despite his supposed rank, he is accompanied by only two people, Wen and Sooah, but together they have been efficiently ridding Jian of demons. They believe Yue to be the last one, given their complete ignorance of demon reproduction, but her banishment ceremony goes completely off the rails when she grabs Sonam at the last minute and drags him down to Hell with her. After a solid attempt to kill each other, Yue and Sonam furiously agree to a blood oath: in exchange for her life and a temporary ceasefire, Yue will lead Sonam back to the human world. Shortly after swearing their oath, they run into Wen and Sooah, who jumped into Hell right behind Sonam, and the three of them find their way to the first of the nine courts of Hell.
What begins as a quest for survival quickly morphs into a quest to kill the Maskmaker, who has been happily building up an army of ravenous demons in Hell and intends to unleash them, fully masked and undetectable, upon the unsuspecting human population. Despite their mutual distrust, Yue and her humans find themselves saving each other, repeatedly, throughout the course of their journey; Yue also cautiously grows closer to Sooah, who teaches her to swear in sign language, and begins to fall in love with Sonam, though she also frequently addresses him as “Dinner.” Sonam returns her attraction, drawing her in great and flattering detail in his personal hunting log as his daily observations of her begin to soften. Their budding romance is soured by the knowledge that they will most likely kill each other upon return to the surface world, though with each passing day this eventuality grows less and less attractive to both. Unfortunately, there’s little time to dwell on this: after a violent encounter with the Maskmaker, Sonam ends up in possession of the magic brush, bringing an entire army of demons down on their heads as they make their way to the Gates of Hell. Separated from the rest of the pack, Yue orders Sooah and Wen to take Sonam through the Gates, fulfilling the full terms of their oath. Arriving in the palace, Sonam finds himself back in the exact moment Yue was banished. His frantic warnings of an army of demons are not heeded, and he is unceremoniously thrown into a prison cell after punching one of his brothers in his stupid face, though I must say the dude had it coming.
And after all that, the king and his entire court all end up with egg on their faces when the Maskmaker leads an army of demons through the Gates of Hell and begins to ravage Longhao. Hearing the ruckus above, Sonam uses the brush to paint three demon masks and breaks himself and his crew out of prison, sending them to evacuate as many as they can while he himself takes the form of a nine-tailed fox and engages the demon army. During the fight for the city, he and Yue reunite and finally run the Maskmaker to earth in a quiet alley. The cornered Maskmaker succeeds in burning half of Sonam’s face, but rescue arrives in the form of Wen and Sooah, who turn the tide with the help of Sonam’s masks. After a vicious battle, Sonam manages to poison the Maskmaker, bringing an end to him permanently. In the aftermath of the battle, Sonam is taken into the palace and offered a permanent place by the king’s side, but he declines, knowing that the rest of Jian is currently being flooded by demons, and that he can do something about it. When questioned on his goal of killing every demon, he openly admits that an exception will be made for Yue, with the king’s apparent blessing. Yue readily agrees to accompany him on the condition that she be allowed to eat what they hunt, which handily resolves the problem of her need to consume human flesh; and the problem of human qi is resolved by Sonam himself, who willingly gives her his own blood when she needs it. When all is said and done, they and Sooah visit Wen’s family for dinner, and Yue – now known as Auntie Yue – begins to tell Wen’s children (again) the story of her time in Hell.
As seems to be my usual refrain for this year in particular, the prose is serviceable with some unacceptable abuse of at least one verb, and that is all I am going to say about that because this seems to be a pattern with a lot of the books I’ve read recently, and it’s infuriating. At the very least Kwan doesn’t suffer from the same problem as Sue Lynn Tan, who loves the word “as” so much that she might as well marry it, so I guess that’s something. (And before anybody comes after me, you should know that I love Sue Lynn Tan. But her prose drives me crazy, and it hasn’t gotten better with time.) Anyway, even though the writing is middling at best, it didn’t affect the overall rating because I loved this book wildly, after a while. I had the same problem that I had with Butter (Asako Yuzuki) in the beginning: it starts out fairly slow and isn’t particularly motivating to read, but everything goes so much faster when we get to the courts of Hell. Not that the beginning is bad; I do love Yue’s first hunt, or the first hunt that we see, and I don’t object to anything that happens in the first handful of chapters. I suppose we can blame my inertia on my ongoing Apothecary Diaries craze, because that thing is currently sucking up all my time and brainpower. It took me so long during my first try with this book that I had to restart it, which I also had to do with Butter, and this is frankly embarrassing. Aside from the slowness of the opening, Yue and Sonam spend a lot of time on dialogue of the “I hate you”/”I hate you more” variety, which is tiresome to read if you’re not into that sort of thing, which I obviously am not.
But stick with it, because the book grabbed me the minute we finally landed in the first court and didn’t let go until the sweet, sweet end, and it was so worth the ride. I am impatient and not particularly romantic by nature, which is why something fast-paced and quickly gratifying (er, relatively) – say, for instance, the Celestial Kingdom series – will hook my attention. Slow burn doesn’t do it for me because after book one I will start yelling “OH, COME ON!” with every thwarted kiss. I cannot follow a will-they-won’t-they for twenty books in the hopes that they might, I don’t know, hold hands or something similarly trivial. The only exception to this ironclad rule has been the Apothecary Diaries because I will go to war for my autistic queen Maomao and you know what she should take her time deciding how she feels about Jinshi. But all of that is to say that I was gratified by the speed of the romance, though some might call it rushed, and I liked where it ended up. I am glad that Sonam realizes there’s more to life than killing Yue for the sake of killing Yue. I love his admiration of her even when she feels her ugliest, his fondness for stroking her fur, his pet names for her (“my fox,” “my moonlight”), even the snarky notes that he writes and rewrites when they start to sound too affectionate towards her. I’m sorry for the burn on his face, but I love that he and Yue adopt it as a sign of their togetherness. I love that Yue affectionately calls him “Dinner” long after she’s decided not to eat him, and I am pleased with the resolution to her feeding problems. It sounds as if she has some good eating ahead of her, and this eating will probably go on indefinitely, especially given that human misery – which at this point is all but guaranteed – spawns new demons.
I also got used to Wen and even came to like him as time went on, but the surprise heart-steal was Sooah, who is calmer and more moderate in her approach to Yue: cautious, but not hostile or even rude. I love their friendship, which impresses even Sonam as he notes that Yue never treats Sooah badly or differently despite her inability to speak. And it was delightful to learn, later, that Yue personally removed two major problems from Wen’s and Sooah’s lives, though from a distance and without actually knowing either one of them at the time, because that is the kind of background connection that makes my heart so happy. The cyclic nature of the story works well: Yue meets all three of her humans (love that she calls them her humans) earlier in their lives and has an impact on all of them, both directly and indirectly, and technically that doesn’t mean much to the actual story but it matters to me. It reinforces Yue’s self-appointed role as a remover of Bad PeopleTM and strengthens the impression of her as a more reasonable demon who is intrigued by humans without feeling the need to exterminate us, and if your name is Carolyn and you run this book blog that combination is absolutely lethal. Yes, thank you, I will follow Yue into battle. Normally I might get after her for picking on Wen’s unfortunate looks as much as she does, but Wen seems fairly self-aware and Yue is after all a demon, so it doesn’t bother me as it otherwise might.
I will say that nothing in this book really surprised me and the ending was a bit too neat, which is the reason I docked it half a star. I guessed that the youngest star god would become the Maskmaker the moment he escaped his prison. I guessed young Sonam’s identity almost the second he appeared in the distance, and, for all my delight, there was a question in the back of my mind when I learned that Wen and Sooah knew of two problematic people who had quietly disappeared without a trace: Does Yue have something to do with this? None of the “twists” really merit the title, though I loved them just the same. I really was expecting the Maskmaker to have one final twist up his sleeve, because I thought for sure that he had replaced the seven haughty princes with demons in masks. What a twist it would have been if the king had revealed himself as a demon after Sonam refused his offer. But then the book probably would have had to go on for at least another 200 pages, and I do appreciate its brevity. As for the king and his offer, it just rubbed me the wrong way because the king seemed kinder and less manipulative than he did in the beginning, and the whole thing felt rushed. The demon-killing mission is not some mad fancy dreamed up by Sonam; the king makes it clear in his first scene that Sonam is not welcome in the palace without his explicit consent. Even with Sonam’s heroics, the easy capitulation at the end – to Sonam’s existence as much as to his relationship with Yue – is bizarre. It felt so out of step with everything we knew about the king that it would have provided a handy segue to revealing that the king was either a demon or the Maskmaker in disguise, supposing that the Maskmaker who died was actually a body double of some kind. Such a reveal would have been less surprising than the Maskmaker’s actual plot, which did involve sending masked demons to earth in advance of the main army but leaves us to assume that these demons merely blended into the general populace with no real strategy other than exploratory camouflage.
Ultimately, I guess my main takeaway is that it’s a damn good thing I’m not the Maskmaker because apparently I’m nastier, and if I’m honest I probably would’ve won. I would’ve slaughtered the entire royal family and replaced them all with demons, I would’ve taken the king’s place and had a masked demon masquerade as myself down in Hell, and I would’ve been the reason there wouldn’t be a book, or at the very least I’d be the reason the book had to turn into a trilogy. There is a part of me that kind of wants this, and there is a part of me that is strangling the first part because as a standalone this book was pretty much perfect. I would read another installment, but I don’t need one. It’s fine as it is. It is sweet and dark and it has just the right amount of goopy, fast-acting romance, and I am so glad that I didn’t DNF it.
