The Black Flame

A good adventure story. In some ways it has the flavor of a Conan novel, without Conan's more violent tendencies, or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories.

The lead character, Rifkind, is a strong female hero, portrayed without resorting to the beaten-to-death "men abused me! I hate men! That makes me strong!" motif. Lynn Abbey also doesn't resort to showing the other female characters as wilting flowers, they have their own strengths as well.

The characters a little wooden for my taste, I don't really feel the growth of the characters or feeling of depth. Likewise, the plot is straightforward and purely an adventure story and employs a little too much of "this event or circumstance" saves the day.

If you're looking for some show more sword and sorcery action without epic trappings or complications, this may be what you want. If you're looking for more complicated plots, strong characterization, or epic style fantasy, I recommend selecting a different book. show less

In my opinion, Abbey makes some questionable choices in this novel - at the end of the first book, war has broken out and Rifkind is going back with the hero, a potential romantic interest, to his mountain stronghold to help defend the mountain country against, among others, the hero's nasty and ambitious father. But when book two starts, there is amnesty and the army is being disbanded. We're told that the veterans respect and like Rifkind though others still regard her healing powers as witchery, and there are various statements throughout the book, for example, saying she trained a lot of the fighters, but we aren't given the chance to see how they all coped in the war, how she adapted to their different fighting style, how she coped show more with the suspicion about her being a desert tribeswoman and having uncanny powers, etc. Instead, she decides to go off on a quest into a swamp because the moon goddess she is vowed to does not give her a sign that it is OK to marry the hero although she has feelings for him, and faced with her refusal he arranges to marry someone brought in from elsewhere, to fulfill his dynastic duty. Just seems to cut out what could have been an interesting story with maybe her deciding to leave at the end because most of his people would not accept her as their ruler's wife and she would also find domesticity and child rearing too difficult to reconcile with her life as warrior and healer sworn to her goddess.

As it is, we instead have another quest which lacks the motivation of the first book where she was in conflict with a powerful worshipper of the negative dark moon, who was manipulating politics in the country she ended up in after her desert tribe was wiped out by the other tribes. The swamp environment and the culture of the raft people in the current volume is well evoked and the descriptions of how Rifkind and her companion Jenny cope with it, and there is a tie-in to the first book when she discovers that an enemy is after the same thing as her but for evil purposes.

However I couldn't believe in Rifkind's sudden over-riding passion for the callow and non warrior rather weedy man she finds living in the place she has been seeking. Also fans of Turin, the horned horse, will be disappointed as he has far less to do in this book.

As with the first volume, this suffers from a convoluted and turgid writing style which deadens what would otherwise be action packed or suspenseful scenes.

I recently found out that Abbey finally published a third volume in 2006, about 25 years after The Black Flame, but on the basis of this volume and an extract she published on the internet, don't intend to read the final volume. show less

One of the issues with sequels is that if the first book ends happily, the author has to undo that happy ending for the next volume. At the end of the first volume Rifkind had settled down wth a man she thought she might love, but the leaves this behind in the second volume to go into a marsh and confront the black flame (no relation to the earlier sf novel of that name).