Book Review: "His Black Tongue" by Mitchell Lüthi

It's another day in 'let's read something we've never heard of' and well, sometimes it goes a bit strange. When I think of the phrase 'Medieval Horror' I'm often quite excited because there are so many things you can do with it. You can definitely get inspiration from the old Italian writers, you can have some old-world church settings, you can even incorporate the plague. Initially, I felt odd about this book because I wasn't familiar with the author, but the subgenre of Medieval Horror definitely put me at ease. But I did find there were perhaps more things I didn't enjoy about this book than things that I did. Unfortunately, it made for a very average reading experience...

His Black Tongue is set in 14th-century France, a time when the Black Death has ravaged most of Europe. In the middle of this devastation lies Enfaire, a tiny religious community that miraculously remains untouched by the plague. This strange exemption breeds suspicion, whispers of witchcraft, and paranoia among the faithful, setting the stage for a tale steeped in medieval dread. This dread is over whether this is some sort of divine intervention or work of demonic forces.

There's a lot of dialogue which means the author doesn't spend too much time slow burning the atmosphere. There are bits and pieces but honestly, I feel like I wasn't steeped in gothic terror as much as I wanted to be. Often the story, especially at the beginning, felt detached from its setting and I wasn't immersed enough to be invested in the characters' journeys.

Caught in a violent storm, an aging Franciscan friar and his young ward, who is described almost in saintlike terms, stumble upon Enfaire in search of shelter. Instead of sanctuary, they find themselves entangled in a town rife with secrets, unholy rumours, and the stench of something profoundly unnatural. This build is actually done fairly well, there is a bit more description and the language definitely seems like the author was trying to make it sound medieval. However, that let-down from the beginning sort of permeates over the whole book and yet again, I felt like there was far too much dialogue.

Outside Enfaire, fields yield grotesquely twisted corpses and malformed bodies - body horror classics but again, without the atmosphere they definitely don't yield the same impact. Strange shapes are glimpsed under moonlight, and corpses appear as if mauled by something not entirely human. From what I've read, it seems like ideas surrounding the 'inhuman' weren't necessarily established. It felt a bit matter-of-fact, but I'll take it. On top of this, there's clearly an attempt as religious-based horror. But if I've said it once, I've said it a million times: without a strong sense of atmosphere we are really not getting very far.

There's an attempt at some monster horror, but apart from that we have the fragility of faith as a big theme, and this often overtakes the sense of horror. I'm getting the experience of a book that doesn't know what it wants to be, but I did enjoy the main character's crisis. The ending was a bit awful but regardless, there were some saving graces. There are a couple of companion stories within: The Bone Fields (about Vikings who believe they have landed in Hell itself) and The Knights of the Non-Euclidean Table (a Lovecraftian Horror attempt on the Knights at the Round Table legend).

I don't really want to talk too much about those stories because they aren't mentioned in the title of the book and therefore, I feel like the author wants it to be a bit of a surprise (well, not if you read the Amazon summary but you get the idea). This is clearly a book filled with the author's dabbles into the horror genre, especially the subgenre of religious horror, but it is rather unrefined and more than often not immersive enough. However, I won't say it is a bad attempt by any means. It definitely gets the job of being a straightforward story done, it just constantly felt like it was unfinished and didn't have much editing work done.

Perhaps I will keep an eye out for stories by the same author, but I do hope that there is more of a role for heavy atmospheres to play in the future works they write.