The time is the distant future: on a world convulsed by seasons of terror and death; a world in which strange beasts overrun the terrain and phantoms patrol the nighttime skies; where the dreadful darkling appears to devastate the landscape and banish living creatures into hibernation; where a mysterious ethereal presence pervades the region, animating all existence with mystical resonances. In the midst of this haunted and menacing milieu, the young tribesman Maradek abandons the security of his northern home to search for his father, Afurad.
Armed only with a bow and guided by a psychic aptitude for scanning for life forms, Maradek is joined by a hermit plainsman and by a curious bestial anomaly who can communicate solely through telepathic subspeech. At the outset of their quest, the wayfarers employ primitive divination procedures to acquire three shag-haired quadruped muskeng, and then, following the trail of a crumbling ancient highway, Maradek and his colleagues journey southward into an unknown realm of wonder and terror. Vanished civilizations, fabulous creatures, a pernicious crystalline forest, treacherous tribes and peoples, all confront the three travelers until at last they enter a forbidding city and challenge the unnatural agents who are threatening to destroy their world.
This epic science-fantasy novel by a young Canadian author preserves all the marvelous imaginative qualities for which the genre is renowned, albeit with an element of humanity not always present in fatastic literature. The Darkling is a narrative of escapist adventure in excelsis, and yet after Maradek's journey has ended, there remains a sense of the yearning irresolution of such quests, of the bittersweet rewards that often attend determined wish fulfillment, and of the ceaselessly mysterious nature of man and the world he inhabits.