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The Wizard's Shadow by Susan Dexter
This was a book I loved as a teenager, one of the many straight-to-mass-market fantasy paperbacks floating around the 80s/early 90s book market. It's long out of print, but I recently discovered it on Kindle and decided to see if I still enjoy it.
The answer is ... sort of? It hasn't been visited by the Suck Fairy nearly as hard as some books from the era, and I read it without regrets and can see why I liked it. But it's very Early 90s Fantasy and I kept getting distracted by the thinness of the worldbuilding and the protagonist's general failure to protag.
The premise is still unusual and delightful. A wandering peddler, Crocken, passes by the location of a wizard's murder and becomes trapped by the dead wizard's shade, which steals his shadow and replaces it. The shadow, more or less a ghost, wants vengeance for its original owner's death, and coerces Crocken into taking it back to the kingdom it comes from, and basically solving the wizard's murder. It can talk to him, but only he can hear it, and it can move independently and has to concentrate on mimicking his movements like a normal shadow, not always very well. In darkness or on a cloudy day, it can wander freely and explore on its own.
Things I had forgotten about this book include how much political intrigue there is (a lot, but also strangely flat in that early-90s-fantasy-novel kind of way) and how much of the book Crocken spends desperately trying to avoid doing anything protagonist-y while the shadow relentlessly drags him through solving a murder mystery in which it basically knows everything that happened but won't tell him. The vast majority of the mystery in this book is only a mystery because a) the shadow never tells Crocken anything it doesn't have to, and b) Crocken hates the entire situation, isn't curious about any of it, and actively tries to ignore most of the clues he finds, particularly a series of backstory-relevant dreams that he persists in assuming are normal dreams even long past the point when it's clear that they're not.
Basically I had remembered this book being way more "crime-solving buddy movie with a ghost" than it actually is.
That being said, all the backstory is really interesting and also very tragic, and the book managed to pull me pretty hard into feeling for a bunch of people who are mostly dead before the first chapter. The secondary protagonists (one male, one female) are just as great as I remembered, and while the Idiot Ball gets passed around a certain amount (one of their key plans is so terrible that I couldn't believe it was actually their plan, and then it turned out to be even worse than I thought) it wasn't enough to ruin the book for me, and generally the characters aren't strategic masterminds, they're just kind of muddling through.
Basically this is a middle-of-the-road 30-year-old fantasy novel and it shows, but I can also see why I liked it, especially since it came out before "murder mystery in X genre" was a big thing, so it was really unusual for the time. It's still charming and interesting, if not as charming to my 44-year-old self as it was when I was 14.
I remember back when I read this book, I tried some of the author's other books, didn't particularly like any of them, and absolutely loathed one of them, so I think I'll probably just stop here. This book was enjoyable, though, and I don't feel that I wasted my time rereading it.
I also feel, as I did when I read it the first time, that it seems to be blatantly setting up a sequel, leaving both a sequel hook dangling and a couple of the central relationships at least partially unresolved ... and then a sequel never seems to have materialized, which is a bit frustrating. I mean, it stands on its own and it's not a cliffhanger; it's just that the first thing I did was check the backmatter to see if a sequel ever did come out, and there's not. I would have liked to have learned that she wrote another in the meantime.
The answer is ... sort of? It hasn't been visited by the Suck Fairy nearly as hard as some books from the era, and I read it without regrets and can see why I liked it. But it's very Early 90s Fantasy and I kept getting distracted by the thinness of the worldbuilding and the protagonist's general failure to protag.
The premise is still unusual and delightful. A wandering peddler, Crocken, passes by the location of a wizard's murder and becomes trapped by the dead wizard's shade, which steals his shadow and replaces it. The shadow, more or less a ghost, wants vengeance for its original owner's death, and coerces Crocken into taking it back to the kingdom it comes from, and basically solving the wizard's murder. It can talk to him, but only he can hear it, and it can move independently and has to concentrate on mimicking his movements like a normal shadow, not always very well. In darkness or on a cloudy day, it can wander freely and explore on its own.
Things I had forgotten about this book include how much political intrigue there is (a lot, but also strangely flat in that early-90s-fantasy-novel kind of way) and how much of the book Crocken spends desperately trying to avoid doing anything protagonist-y while the shadow relentlessly drags him through solving a murder mystery in which it basically knows everything that happened but won't tell him. The vast majority of the mystery in this book is only a mystery because a) the shadow never tells Crocken anything it doesn't have to, and b) Crocken hates the entire situation, isn't curious about any of it, and actively tries to ignore most of the clues he finds, particularly a series of backstory-relevant dreams that he persists in assuming are normal dreams even long past the point when it's clear that they're not.
Basically I had remembered this book being way more "crime-solving buddy movie with a ghost" than it actually is.
That being said, all the backstory is really interesting and also very tragic, and the book managed to pull me pretty hard into feeling for a bunch of people who are mostly dead before the first chapter. The secondary protagonists (one male, one female) are just as great as I remembered, and while the Idiot Ball gets passed around a certain amount (one of their key plans is so terrible that I couldn't believe it was actually their plan, and then it turned out to be even worse than I thought) it wasn't enough to ruin the book for me, and generally the characters aren't strategic masterminds, they're just kind of muddling through.
Basically this is a middle-of-the-road 30-year-old fantasy novel and it shows, but I can also see why I liked it, especially since it came out before "murder mystery in X genre" was a big thing, so it was really unusual for the time. It's still charming and interesting, if not as charming to my 44-year-old self as it was when I was 14.
I remember back when I read this book, I tried some of the author's other books, didn't particularly like any of them, and absolutely loathed one of them, so I think I'll probably just stop here. This book was enjoyable, though, and I don't feel that I wasted my time rereading it.
I also feel, as I did when I read it the first time, that it seems to be blatantly setting up a sequel, leaving both a sequel hook dangling and a couple of the central relationships at least partially unresolved ... and then a sequel never seems to have materialized, which is a bit frustrating. I mean, it stands on its own and it's not a cliffhanger; it's just that the first thing I did was check the backmatter to see if a sequel ever did come out, and there's not. I would have liked to have learned that she wrote another in the meantime.
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I also think that as a kid, I was way more into the ~doomed romance~ of the tragic backstory (which is legitimately very tragic), and now it all just seems very depressing and sad, and I want more ghosts solving murders and less of people dwelling on the unresolvable tragedies of their youth. I think it didn't hit me nearly as hard when I was a kid because I didn't quite relate to grief yet in the way you only do when you've been through it, and now I'm a lot more aware of the general tragedy that once people are dead, there's no fixing the relationships that broke when everyone was alive, even if you want to.
.... Uh, that went down a depressing path; sorry! Anyway, it IS an A+ fanfic prompt and I also recently read a much less sad book on the same general premise, which I should post about.
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...sort of like the Umbrella Academy fanart/fics I remember seeing a lot of last year, with Klaus chatting to murder victims. Now I remember why I liked those.
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The first book starts out with this whole prologue about a speshul fancy mare and her owner I think hires a magician to get a speshul foal fathered by the Wind, which works... and then the foal is stolen and lost/escapes from the thieves and we never see or hear of the owner again. It's super tacked on, one gets the impression that the editor told Dexter that she needed a backstory for her intelligent fast beautiful clever horse.
The first one especially had a lot of the same protag without much agency issues - he's a prince who was born with mismatched eyes which is Super Unlucky, but his father the king slips trying to put one of them out and cuts a holy symbol on his cheek instead, so he's left with both eyes but his parents never take to him. He's sent away to school or a temple or something, but he's knocked overboard in a storm (unlucky!) and the storm immediately dissipates (so you know it was just because he was unlucky).
The whole thing kind of goes like that. He's So Unlucky in really big ways, but because he's the protagonist, everything still manages to work out and his native charm and good manners win over his Spunky Sorceress Princess co-protag (who's... really pretty shitty to him for most of the book) and they find her father and it turns out one of his eyes can see through magic which comes up, like, twice in the whole book (so isn't it lucky his father didn't manage to put it out), and they get married and live happily ever after + married people spats, because the Princess is Spunky, which means she's kind of manipulative and takes it out on other people when she doesn't get what she wants.
The second one is better, but still very 90s. The main character has dramatically more agency and there's a solid and reasonably believable enemies to friends to lovers character arc.
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The cliffhanger-seeming ending of "Wizard's Shadow" is, I think, actually the revelation of Crocken's relationship to one of the characters in the Ring of Allaire series. (I think. Been a while.) I would have liked more story, but I think I took it more as simply a tip to the reader that this story did connect to the prior series.
"Prince of Ill Luck", "Wind Witch", and a third one I never warmed to (despite reading it twice) were a prequel trilogy to the Ring books. And then she just seemed to sort of stop writing, except for one short work I was never able to get my hands on (I think a childhood story about the main guy of the Allaire series and the cat).
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(Hopefully this doesn't double post, I got an error the first time I tried.)
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I super don't blame you for hating the Prince of Ill Luck. I hung on to it for a long time because I almost liked the sequel (sucker for enemies to lovers, hadn't discovered fan fiction yet) and it seemed weird to get rid of book 1. And the cover was prettier than the cover of the Wind Witch. But the central relationship and both of the main characters are all so off-putting. Not to say I didn't reread it at least once out of a vague sense of obligation, of course.
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