Once Was Willem

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. (Mar.)