To Marlon James, an epic is “a struggle that’s both very profound and very simple at the same time.” His Dark Star Trilogy, an African fantasy series, is certainly that. It’s not just the size of the books, which are 600-plus pages apiece, that makes Dark Star arguably an epic. The simple part? It’s a search for a lost boy. As for how the series is profound—that’s not so easily summarized.
In the Dark Star Trilogy, the same story is told in each book by a different character. The first volume, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, is narrated by Tracker, a nonbinary or queer figure with a magical sense of smell. The second volume, Moon Witch, Spider King, which has just been released, focuses on Sogolon, a witch whose allegiance to the search party is questionable.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. Per NPR, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is what you’d get “if Toni Morrison had written Ovid’s Metamorphoses.”
The trilogy is a follow up to the Jamaican writer’s novel A Brief History of Seven Killings about the death of Bob Marley. The novel won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle. James is the author of the highly praised novels The Book of Night Women and John Crow’s Devil. He teaches literature at Macalester College.
WD spoke to James about how to write an epic.
Each of your books, or the stories you’re telling, has been longer than the last. Can you speak to that progression?
As I write each novel, I have become more and more interested in the world in which my characters live.
