Wild Isle Review:

WARNING! INEVITABLE SPOILERS BELOW!

The Star in the Darkness is a speculative semi-urban fantasy novel by indie author Antony O’Beara. The premise is familiar: in a tale of two worlds, a man and a young woman come together despite their society’s eagerness to tear them apart. Only, in The Star in the Darkness, things are lop-sided. Rather than two worlds at war like the two great houses of Montague and Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, Star’s setting takes place in a near-future human dystopia utterly separate from an elven Garden of Eden—save for the great Darkness threatening to decimate it.

But really, all this takes a back seat to the theme—the story’s thesis, its moral messaging. Star is an unapologetically political and religeous read. If you’ve read an Ayn Rand novel, you know what I mean. It is clear to me that the author intends for his novel to express in allegorical form either his own beliefs or, if not his own, then what I’ll describe as conservative Christian values. That fact is neither in question nor a matter of critique: what we’ll discuss in this review is how well author O’Beara executed in delivering his arguments in narrative form.

Let’s begin with the setting, as it’s good practice to first settle the reader in a time and place. In this regard, Star has a smooth path forward. The very-near-future urban / modern setting is only a slightly exaggerated mirror of current America assuming politics continue to enflame and radicalize as they have (time of writing: Nov, 2022). Think of San Francisco during current year and you know when and where you are in Star. Well, you know the half of it, at least. The other part of the setting includes the fantasy elements, a world of immortal elves surrounded by a vicious curtain of total Darkness which literally threatens to expand and rip them limb from limb. In the light, however, the elven people live in a verisimilitude of late medieval / renaissance society, plus nature magic, potion brewing, and a missive seven pointed citadel built to withstand the Darkness. And that’s about all I can say about the elven world. No elven politics are mentioned. In fact, aside from the Citadel, a few libraries, and the market, hardly any institutional anything comes up—making the elf society representative of the book’s lauded values.

. . . which brings us to the plot. Despite the novels length, the Star’s story is rather straight forward. Human protagonist, Orion, must decide whether he should stand and fight the darkness destroying his human world or if he should flee with his elven girlfriend to her fantastical dimension. The question of the entire book is, “Can humanity be saved?” I suspect the author was wrestling with this question himself, though we’ll save that discussion for later. For now, it will be sufficient to say that all the novel’s tension is wrapped up in this single conflict. In saying this, I level my first real critique.

Throughout the course of the novel, the subplot elements sputter out without having any real impact on the main plot. This is partly a pacing issue and partly a character issue. In regard to the former—the pacing—Star suffers quite a lot. The book as a whole could use with some scything, as many scenes which I believe are meant to show characterization amount to describe mundane events that don’t result in character or plot development. This causes entire chapters to drag for lengths of time, and then, when summary does occur, the reader is slung-shot forward in time. This is made doubly troubling by the perspective changes. We switch back and forth between Orion and his girlfriend Siofra. That’s not the problem. The issues comes from their time-lines overlapping more often than not. We even get doublets of some scenes. That wouldn’t be cause for concern, but just like the mundane slice-of-life scenes, these reiterations don’t provide much that the reader didn’t already imbibe the first time.

I’ll take a moment to note that I think I know what the author was going for here. I believe he wanted to capture the unique interiority of the masculine and feminine perspectives, and that was a great idea considering the themes of this story. Had the overlap changed how the reader thought about the characters and their choices via a kind of bait-and-switch, I think the repeated scenes could have even worked well. However, that success relies on the complexity and development of the characters.

The entire cast of The Star in the Darkness are symbolic archetypes or are otherwise stock charters. As I said before (and will say again), this isn’t a critique. One could say the same about the greatest tales told throughout the ages. Why this becomes a problem is because it means the novel will need to be plot driven as opposed to character driven. Allow me to explain.

A character driven novel derives its tension, and therefore its reader investment, from the development of the individuals in the cast as opposed to the events surrounding them. That means that even a story with hardly any plot can still be enjoyable and engaging if the characters are compelling enough. When it comes to character archetypes, aside from the hero of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, they tend not to be very dynamic. If they were, then they’d break their archetypes almost by definition, except for the “hero.” In the Hero’s case, he is expected to go through dramatic change and incredible personal moral challenges if he personality is what is criving the novel forward.

Without a very dynamic Hero, the only things at stake are plot elements, and so twists and mysteries must abound to keep the reader interested. But like I said, Star’s plot is straight forward. It doesn’t twist or turn despite occasionally threatening too (when it does, the threat deflates within a page or two).

So now the whole book is in Orion’s and Siofra’s shoulders. Neither are unlikeable. They are well-meaning, up-right, young, and attractive individuals. In fact, they are perhaps too much paragon’s of virtue. Star does try to show faults with their characters. Orion has a shameful past, and Siofra is impulsive. However, these are not tragic flaws. They are very minor weaknesses that if they didn’t have, they wouldn’t be believable at all. What missing from either one is weakness or temptation worth the overcoming.

In Orion’s case, rather than him being the one-true-good-man whose “great shame” was not being brave enough to stand up to his ultra-attractive girlfriend in college, he could he had real fear and real trust issues. After all, we loved his first girlfriend who, according to his beliefs, turned out to be a murderer. I would have loved to see Orion have to overcome that trauma in his relationship with Siofra. Likewise, it would have been very compelling to see him be overprotective and controlling with Siofra as a consequence of him losing his parents. Learning to let go of such pathological behaviors and attitudes would have been real growth for him.

In Siofra’s case, rather than her being ultimate, eternally young, perfectly devoted, trad-wife material, she could have had to learn why her culture is correct on its beliefs and perspectives. This course of development would have fit perfectly with the fact that most of the pain and suffering she knew came from her own people and not the Darkness. It would have been a much more investible ride to see her want to run away from a relative paradise which she does not understand, be enticed by human temptations, and then righted again through her relationship with Orion. Then the two could grow together as she learned to be honest with him as he learned that he could trust who she is.

But doing the above would shift the focus of the theme quiet a bit from morality and politics to navigating relationships. It might be that is straying too far from what the author intended. In this, I will stick my neck out and suggest that The Star in the Darkness would have been better off being more subtle—dare I say “suggestive” in its politics.

Now, I actually agree with most of the politic and moralizing strewn across the pages. However, it was never pleasant to read. It is insulting to the reader to batter them over the head with propaganda and pretend that it is story telling. It isn’t. When the narrator stops to stand on a soap box and tell the reader what is right and wrong, it isn’t a novel for as long as that goes on. The same can be said for similar exposition in dialogue. The show-don’t-tell rule is strongest in this regard. It is infinitely preferable to show the reader through the progression of the plot that a particular theme corresponds to reality outside the story. In Star’s case, in regard to abortion, the author would have been more effective to spend more time with characters who regret their abortions or who have spiraled downward mentally because of the presuppositions necessary for their mental gymnastics to justify their actions—note: show us those characters as opposed to telling us about them third hand. Bring in Orion’s ex-girlfriend and show us how much she’s likely to have degenerated from when he was dating her (mentally, physically, or both).

Now, before we close, I must address an elephant in the room. For a conservative Christian allegory, this novel features a lot of graphic sex scenes. Perhaps it is not for me, an outsider, to judge; but these scenes are pages-long, discursive-heavy, and mostly unnecessary errotica. In the otaku/weeb world, we’d call them “fan-service.” In the literary world, they’re more often labeled as “wish-fulfillment.“ To be clear, I’m not arguing against the inclusion of sex scenes. I am perfectly aware that some could be appropriate in order to show the reader a conservative set of values tying together sex, children, and family. However, the sex scenes in Star hardly touch on this. The first one (in the very first chapter) is described twice over from the male and then the female perspective. At first I held my judgement on it, thinking that it occuring in a dream meant it had deeper, psychological significance. Maybe it did, given other sexual and sexually tense scenes, but even if so, it was not in accord with the theme of the book. The Sex scenes are frankly hedonic. No amount of the narrator telling the reader they aren’t is sufficient to change what is described on the page. And given how strident the moralizing is in this novel, it strikes me as hypocritical (or, more so, unconscious projection; but let’s not get Jungian about this).

With all that being said, I think you should give The Star in the Darkness a chance. Give it a read for yourself, and let Antony know if you think I’ve been too critical here. If, after reading, you feel the same way I do, give him some helping advice. It is clear that he is passionate about his work. The sheer investment he put into The Star in the Darkness shows that. So if you’re interested in conservative, speculative, modern-fantasy, political fiction with a sexy elven girlfriend, click the image at the top and get you Star in the Darkness today.