Once Was Willem
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the international bestselling author of The Girl with All the Gifts comes a wildly original and enthrallingly dark medieval fantasy unlike anything you've read before – a fable of twisted folklore, macabre magic, and the strangest of found families.
"A masterpiece of medieval dark fiction." – Christopher Buehlman, author of Between Two Fires
"A wild fever dream – monstrous and beautiful." – Seanan McGuire, author of Every Heart a Doorway
Eleven hundred and some years after the death of Christ, in the kingdom that had but recently begun to call itself England, I, Once Was Willem, rose from the dead to defeat a great evil facing the humble village of Cosham. The words enclosed herein are true.
I speak of monsters and magic, battle and bloodletting, and the crimes of desperate men. I speak also of secret things, of that which lies beneath us and that which impends above. By the time you come to the end of this account you will know the truth of your own life and death, the path laid out for your immortal soul, your origin and your inevitable end.
You will not thank me.
"It's been a long time since a book has reached out and just entirely enveloped me in its world the way Once Was Willem did. Astounding, and I loved every moment of it." – RJ Barker, author of The Bone Ships
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carey (The Rampart Trilogy) crafts an empathetic portrait of a medieval monster as a young man in this revelatory dark fantasy. In the 1100s, when post-conquest England is wracked by civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda, Willem, the cherished son of a farmer, dies at age 12 in Cosham village. His grieving parents reluctantly allow malignant magician Cain Caradoc to raise Willem from the dead in exchange for a tithing from the boy's soul, which Caradoc uses to maintain his foothold in immortality. But after the boy gruesomely rises from his grave, outrageously ugly and no longer quite Willem, his parents and the whole village reject him as monstrous. The boy, renamed Once-Was-Willem, goes on to recount Caradoc's sinister attempts through black magic and child sacrifice to command the vast power he senses in the local castle he now controls. Once-Was-Willem finds unusual nonhuman allies, and chronicles their lurid backstories and bloody struggles to free the town of Cosham from Caradoc with wit and compassion, building to a wonderfully satisfying climax. Powerful, captivating, and occasionally stomach-churning, this quintessential tale of good and evil is sure to win fans.
