• Note: In the interest of disclosure, I served as a beta reader on an earlier draft of this text last year and have placed fiction in Old Moon Quarterly, which the author edits and which shares a publisher with this novel.

Here is Hieronymus, the lead of Graham Thomas Wilcox’s new novel, Contra Amatores Mundi, reflecting on Boethius and the practice of imitatio, of taking into oneself the inherent qualities of another, such that their technique and experience reinforce and shape one’s own: “Thus, as Christ is the arch-knight, perfect by his nature in the sweep of his blade and the hammer of his hew, so must we knights endeavor to achieve that selfsame perfection. Therefore, our prayer is war” (p. 31). And here is Judge Holden, perhaps the devil himself, in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985): “This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination […] War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god” (p. 261).

I set these texts in conversation not only because Contra Amatores Mundi announces its own imitatio of McCarthy in numerous ways, but also because both of these texts ask the same question, one I find depressingly fascinating: Can you make the world (or any world) without violence?

Contra Amatores Mundi is a love story soaked in martial theology and stylistic decadence, in brotherhood and brutality—and earnest reverence for medieval poetry, Gene Wolfe, and Cormac McCarthy (as well as the game series Dark Souls). [1] Of these various touchstones, I am most familiar with McCarthy, and it was his voice and his characters’ philosophies that shined forth in my reading of Wilcox’s lean eighty-two-page novella. For me, it is the quality I found most compelling in the work. Part of the challenge in reading McCarthy is settling in with characters that believe in generative violence, to the point of zealotry; but where McCarthy gives us the ultimate villain in the Judge, a truly aberrant force that borders on the abstract against which all of his other characters can only flounder and fail, Wilcox develops a lovesick, forlorn knight, a character by whom we are repulsed, but also with whom we identify and sympathise. [2] It is this tension between violence and love, recognition and repulsion, that drives the story and generates a paradoxical novelty, reminding us that martial philosophy, passion, and theology are indeed ancient and medieval notions, but that they are also fully alive and thrumming with contemporary relevance.

The story concerns two knights, Hieronymus and Prospero, sworn battle-brothers in a holy order replete with its own profane rituals, taciturn nuns, and questionable beliefs (questionable from the readers’ perspective, anyway; the knights themselves believe in them with a holy conviction reserved for saints). In pursuit of an enemy, the duo find themselves plunged into raging waters, only to awaken in a blackened, desolate, and sorcerous underworld, “a land beneath the sea” where “waves like jade born beneath the primeval night rippled for leagues upon leagues, unto the gates of dawn” (p. 6). A lone tower looms in the distance, atop a hill in the midst of a forest, pulsing with light. The tower is guarded by a fearsome foe, a “giant-knight” who speaks in portents and power: “You must pursue. In pursuit, redemption. Do not falter. The unworthy falter. They bear their wounds eternal. They forget themselves. They dwell” (p. 16). They are knights and therefore given to quests, so off they go to “pursue” their individual goals: Prospero seeking, possibly, that “redemption,” but more generally a questioning of his purpose motivates him and perhaps a desire for absolution; Hieronymus, however, desiring only a return to his love, the mysterious Walpurga, a nun of his order with a hand of gleaming bone who appears to him in dangerous visions. And so the quest begins.

From here, the novella becomes a series of violent encounters, philosophical ponderings on the nature of love and free will and violence, glimpses into the knights’ shared and separate pasts, visions of a resolute Walpurga (who longs, like her lover, for his return, and pursues her own dangerous quest), and earnest displays of brotherhood and kinship between Hieronymus and Prospero. That Wilcox is able to convincingly develop each of these elements in under a hundred pages is a testament to his storytelling. Every word and sentence carries weight, every aside and observation serves a critical role in characterization—of the world, its peoples, its philosophies. And oftentimes Wilcox entangles these elements, which accomplishes not only an expediency and concision of narrative but also a braided appreciation of how intertwined the physical is with the metaphysical, of how mutually constitutive these aspects are for a medieval mind.

For example, early in their quest, Hieronymus reflects on their order’s belief in the twinned purposes of faith and violence (“our prayer is war,” as quoted above). Wilcox then gives us a glimpse into what such a practice might look like: “I say this all so you will know what regiment Prospero and I observed upon our hunt, at least on those days uninterrupted by hallowed battle. We swaggered staves, hurled stones, leapt high and ran long, and in all other ways exercised our flesh so that, when the moment arrived, we did not shame our swords (and thus, our God)” (pp. 31-32). The emphasis here on martial exercise, and the knights’ dedication to “our God” clearly communicates the sincerity of their beliefs, but unstated (and implicitly inferred from the reader) is Hieronymus and Prospero’s own bond. These are men that wrestle together, race against each other, push themselves to their limits and thereby create an accountability between themselves and their God; in other words, they display their own kind of love, a brotherhood of blood-bonded knights sworn, and it is all accomplished in a brief, seemingly throwaway observation about their daily routine.

Love, indeed, is the novella’s chief concern (apart from its style, which I’ll get to below), as it is in so many medieval romances. In those, love is often expressed as equal parts the greatest tragedy and the ultimate purity. In Contra Amatores Mundi, Wilcox’s characters frequently debate love and whether it is worthy of study and pursuit. Love “is a paper pedestal,” one character remarks, “easy to gaud, but liable to wilt when stepped upon” (p. 36). For Hieronymus and Walpurga, however, love makes the world and is inextricably bound with violence and sacrifice; in the text, their love cannot exist without great cost and bloodshed. For the knight, love is like battle, “one of God’s great gifts to man. It is an ambrosia, for even those it slays, it immortalizes,” while for his nun, love is worthy of aid from profane and forbidden counsel (p. 15). To the modern reader, these meditations on love imbue Hieronymus with a welcome sense of pathos and develop his character beyond brute killer, and I found that the thematic weight that love carries helps to distinguish the novella as something simultaneously contemporary and rooted in medieval tradition. Because, while romance has always been commercial (and is now enjoying a marked trend in genre fiction under the banal label of Romantasy), a medieval conception of love—which this text seeks to demonstrate—can feel both strange and recognizable, horrid and affective, medieval and modern. It is within these debates of love that the novella prevents itself from becoming yet another generic and contrived entry in the dark fantasy genre.

If there is an obstacle to enjoyment here, or a point of possible contention for a reader, it lies within the text’s intentionally affected prose stylings. Here the sun does not simply set. Instead, “cloud-robed Night descended—no moon again, its absence a hollow blade within the scabbard of the sky—and instead beheld I its imitator the Tower with his strobing glare, his ochred ray in which far-off bats whirled and dipped with wings like dragons made miniature by the widening of the world” (p 68). When Prospero questions his purpose, he does not simply hang his head in silent brooding; he monologues, as all good knights should: “As one great furnace flamed … yet from those flames no light, but rather darkness visible served only to discover sights of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace and rest can never dwell, hope never comes that comes to all; but torture without end still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed with ever-burning sulfur unconsumed: this is the Eternal Tyrant hath prepared” (p. 54). You might be thinking that these represent hyperbolic examples, but I can assure you the entire text displays this same style of self-seriousness and elaborately affected prose.

Admittedly, not every line works, but I adore the novella’s ambition in its language, in its elusive and allusive qualities. It sent me at turns to my dictionary, the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, and others as I sought out definitions, quotations, gestures. Readers of Clark Ashton Smith or Wolfe or medieval literature will find much to enjoy in Wilcox’s baroque presentation, each sentence buttressed with beautiful crenellations and frescoes, pillared finely and decadently carved, nothing flat-packed or sanded into the aesthetic oblivion of a smoothed stamp applied over and over. It’s possible to apply words like indulgent and purple to the prose, but in an age of AI-generated writing, I welcome any prose that feels decidedly human. This novella’s language is the element a reader will notice immediately. They will either flee it or embrace it, but the language is inseparable from neither the human artist invested in strange and ornamental modes of storytelling nor the storytelling itself. It is the one element that above and beyond transports the reader to a truly alien, medieval world.

Endnotes

[1] It is also, for what it’s worth and to those for whom this will light a fire—and I know you sick masochists are out there, as I am, in this desire—the closest I have come to experiencing the aesthetic of a FromSoft game on the page, a feat previously held by Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015) and B. Catling’s Hollow (2021). (Both are peerless texts in their own right.) [return]

[2] In addition to his challenging characters, it is important also to acknowledge the challenge in reading McCarthy himself in light of Augusta Britt’s recent testimony about her relationship with him. [return]