Blacktail
by Scott Hawkins
Reviewed by Galen Strickland
Posted September 7, 2026
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It has been more than eleven years since Scott Hawkins' brilliant debut, The Library at Mount Char, and I have been anxiously awaiting what he would write next. Blacktail, which published last Tuesday, was not quite what I expected. It is hard to describe without spoiling, so I will try to be brief. In a conversation with my son yesterday I said, "Imagine if Watership Down was about wolves instead of rabbits." Only it is not just about wolves. Many other species figure into the plot, one of which is a mystical cat/witch known as Old Kitty Mother, even though the name she was given at birth was Night Dancer. If we are to believe her she is very old, hundreds if not thousands of years old, and I thought of her in the context of the Egyptian reverence for cats. The prologue introduces a different type of feline, a lynx named Hate, who ventures forth from his den to see if the gunshots he had heard might have taken care of the local wolf pack, only to be killed by Blacktail. It was Blacktail's mother who had been killed by the "two-legs" hunters. In a similar manner as we have seen in various animated films over the years, all the animals are anthropomorphized, and the different species are able to communicate with each other, with the exception of the two-legs. Even domesticated dogs and cats cannot understand what their owners say, although they may be able to guess what the sounds and gestures mean.
Old Kitty Mother is not the only mystical thing in the story. Blacktail thinks about the Forest God his mother had told him about. After several near disastrous encounters with two-legs, he begins a quest for the Forest God to learn what he might do to combat the encroachment by two-legs on his territory. Other mentions of the mystic realm include the world tree Yggdrasil, and Sariel of the Moon, one of the fallen angels who had been forgiven by God. Apparently Nobununga, the god tiger of the east, is a Hawkins creation, also mentioned in Mount Char. And speaking of the book/movie by Richard Adams, Blacktail references the rabbit trickster god El-ahrairah. It is possible I missed a few things, or misunderstood, but Blacktail appears to be more than just a wolf. Throughout his ordeal every other animal he encountered saw him as a special creature, growing larger than any wolf they had ever seen. What I am thinking now, which is probably wrong, is that Blacktail was already the embodiment of, or eventually became, the Forest God he sought. We have to keep in mind he never knew his father, had not asked his mother about him before she was killed. Something that happens later seems to imply Blacktail was a spiritually divine creature, destined to save not only his territory, but also all animal kind. That evoked the memory of something that occurred in a different fantasy book by a different British writer.
It was a short, quick read. I was slightly disappointed in the way the animals expressed themselves in recognizably human terms, and the conclusion may only be in the imaginations of those creatures, rather than what actually happened. Then again, as Old Kitty Mother once said, "We see only that which we can see, hear the words we can hear. The mind is bound by what it supposes to be real. The eye will see only in a certain range—to all that lays a little above or below that range we are blind." That is a good way of describing how we are limited by our knowledge, our willingness to open our minds to other ways of thinking, other perceptions and perspectives. While I was a bit disappointed when reading, I have had a few other thoughts since then, which makes me think I might have a different opinion of this book if and when I ever re-read it. So, a cautious recommendation for now, but I might rate it higher later.
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