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Jan is on the brink of manhood when he sets off to a neighbouring village to pay the blacksmith. He gets a little drunk with some local boys, and they talk excitedly about the rite of passage that all the boys of the world must take to turn into men – First Night. First Night is a ritual in which boys spend the moon filled hours outside of the protective walls of their villages and face the Beckoning; a seductive lure of the fallen Virtue, Malesephus. Undead bodies of those who have previously fallen to the Beckoning will attempt to take them into deaths midsts, but the boys are warded by runes, which ensure their safety. The next morning, waking up with a blaring hangover, Jan leaves for the long walk home to his own village. He knows he must get back before sundown, or he will have to go through First Night without the protective runes, and will surely die. Unfortunately, his hangover is still bearing down on him, and he stops for a nap; waking just as the sun begins to set. He is now outside of the protective walls of either village, and has no runes to help him survive the night. But, somehow, he does survive. Only to find that his entire village has been ravaged. Completely overwhelmed by grief, Jan joins a nomadic tribe of men who have also lost loved ones to the Beckoning, learning the runes and how to hunt the undead Nohetka. He is reborn in the new community, finding a new name and a new, deadly purpose.
What I particularly enjoyed about The Rune That Binds wasn’t only it’s take on the undead – these weren’t just mindless zombies roving the world to eat brains – they had been reanimated by a malevolent god with the sole purpose of creating more by welding allure and seduction. Any dead person in this world, unless bound after death by runes, would be pulled into this existence, meaning that whole communities feared the night and the dead. Goff also managed to capture Jan’s grief in an incredibly eloquent and emotive way; causing actual tears to pool in my eyes as I read.
The only aspect stopping me from awarding this incredible story five stars is that occasionally the narrative became a little repetitive; explaining the Beckoning and First Night over and over again (for example) in a short space of paragraphs. There’s a few times this happens – which became somewhat annoying; especially as there were other, more complicated aspects to the lore that could have been explained in more detail.
S. A.
First published on Reedsy Discovery as part of their ARC program. You can read the original review here.
You can purchase The Rune that Binds by clicking on it’s name.