Blacktail by Scott Hawkins: Review & Analysis
Rise up and call the Hunt
Introduction
It's here! And my [forest] god, it's wonderful. I've read The Library at Mount Char (2015) by Scott Hawkins every December since 2022, and have yet to experience a dull moment amid all the vivid imagination, dark humour, and morals about power that that incredible book has to offer. An eventual second book from Hawkins had been feeling more and more like a pipe dream as the years went by, despite Mount Char's apparent promise of more adventures to come.
Then Blacktail (2026) was announced earlier this year and released just about a month ago. To hear it from the man himself, he only rediscovered and began work on this idea in early 2025—so it's clear that he didn't know this was coming very long at all before we did. And despite my misconceptions, it is truly an independent book rather than a sequel to Mount Char (with some very minor caveats). In case Blacktail is your entry point, I'll avoid spoiling or referencing The Library at Mount Char until a dedicated short section below.
Blacktail follows a wolf named Blacktail, who sets out on a quest to wake the sleeping Forest God. It's entirely from the perspective of animals and has a lot of fun interpreting and demonstrating how that could and would work.
You may be shocked to hear that I do highly, highly recommend this book, and reading it for yourself if you're interested, willing, and able to. Be warned that there is intense and brutal animal violence. But it also isn't the worst I've read and it very much serves the plot, unlike other examples which come to mind.
Spoilers ahead for Blacktail.
Blacktail Review & Analysis
Plot Intro
In structure, Blacktail resembles a fairly straightforward journey for vengeance—albeit following a big scary wolf instead of another dorky human. We are introduced to Blacktail in the prologue through the eyes of the lynx Hate, who seeks to finally claim dominance of his mountain now that the (in his eyes) tyrant wolf White-Eye and her pups have been killed by humans. Hate soon learns that one of her litter survived, but gambles on his experience and skill against the survivor's size and rage. It's a tough fight when they meet, but Blacktail's surprising cunning and ferocity win out in the end.
A few years pass before the first scene we get from Blacktail's perspective, where a chipmunk named Apple scares off a grizzly from fighting Blacktail for dominance by telling incredible tales of the wolf's brutality and achievements—all of which is hilariously shattered moments later when we learn our hero has never even seen a creature the size of the bear before.
I love this character setup. We see him as a powerful youth, we hear he's the most powerful beast on the planet, then we finally get inside his head and see he's just a normal character. It makes all of his later accomplishments, and lore and legends around him that much more believable while also establishing him as goofy and lovable.
... At least until he falls in love with a domestic dog, whose owners terminate the eventual pregnancy and who dies from complications of the surgery. Then Blacktail gets Angry—murder the whole family angry, and eventually murder all of humanity angry. So it goes.
He's chased for a while by lots of people with guns and vehicles, before eventually encountering a centuries old cat witch named Old Kitty Mother, who gives him his quest to wake the Forest God, who once ruled the world through the practice and worship of the hunt. She thinks the Forest God would agree with Blacktail's judgment that humanity has far too much power these days, and that waking the god would go paw in paw with Blacktail's quest for vengeance.
Plot Ending & Theme
(Jumping straight to the twist, so leave now if you want to!) What we slowly learn through hints from Old Kitty Mother and strange thoughts from within Blacktail's own mind is that the Forest God isn't a physical being literally sleeping somewhere: it's the hunt personified, brought back further into the world and 'awakened' by acts of worship in its name. So as Blacktail grows (physically and culturally among the world's animals) and teaches them that humans can be prey too, he is already waking the Forest God within himself.
He begins receiving prayers in his dreams, which lead him to an animal testing facility. He and his pack storm the gates and liberate the prisoners, including a few currently infected with powerful bioweapons. Good night humanity.
It's a pretty powerful idea for the natural world taking its vengeance on the anthropocene and restoring the order that was, and I really love how Hawkins uses Blacktail's journey and perspective to get us there. The Christian God is real, by the way, and Blacktail kills first an angel then later storms Heaven itself to slay humanity's God and make way for the Forest God's return.
The book also goes right for the emotional throat by having Blacktail come up against what we see as beautiful domesticity: he finds a woman, Mercy, who's lovingly adopted dozens of abused and stray animals, and who is worshiped by them. But they are heretics in Blacktail's eyes because they do not hunt, and he cannot believe that she truly loves them back, and so terrible conflict ensues.
I'll jump into Mount Char references for a last few things, but feel free to skip to the Conclusion below if you haven't read that book!
Mount Char Ties
So, this definitely isn't a sequel to Mount Char. Right? Even though it picks up beautifully from that book talked about the language of beasts and of the hunt and about the Forest God. I thought for a while that Father/Ablakha might be humanity's god, but the angel and heaven do crush that theory pretty well.
Blacktail's father is also made mysterious for most of the book, so I thought he might be the son of Michael (Carolyn's surviving librarian brother) somehow, but also dismissed by the book's conclusion that Blacktail's father was just a random dog, that any beast could have started the avalanche that brought back the Forest God.
But back to the language of the hunt for a moment: one of Blacktail's encounters is a human serial killer who has taught himself the language of the hunt and is able to speak with Blacktail and other beasts. Such a horrifying, incredible scene, and deeply reminiscent of Michael struggling to navigate human society and speech after spending time among beasts. The human also introduces Blacktail to another small god, of lost things, which didn't come back or tie into Mount Char particularly but scratches my brain in the best kind of way.
Then, of course, Old Kitty Mother references the great tiger Nobununga a couple times at the end. Which is just kicking me when I'm down, Scott! But it is really cool to have him woven into this world as well, even if it's ultimately just name dropping.
Fans of Q-33 North will also adore the early reference to "great chunks of ice that walked on three legs." He's out there, I tells ya.
Technically, there's a part of me that's found ways to imagine this as being in the same multiverse as Mount Char. Perhaps this is Father and Nobununga's new universe! Perhaps Carolyn did ascend only for the Forest God to usurp her. There's probably other ways to contort it into working. Even though ultimately it probably doesn't and shouldn't.
Finally, there's obviously there's the thematic tie between Carolyn's quest for vengeance and power and Blacktail's; though the former is much more calculated than we first see and the latter much more natural, following and cascading with the desires of the natural world. Still a fascinating parallel!
Conclusion
It's a truly fascinating book, and I imagine I'll reflect on it more in time and with re-reads. Incredibly imaginative, creative, and full of heart. As I said at the start, I can't recommend it highly enough!
I'm quickly running out of time today. I hope this review & analysis was helpful and/or interesting! I'd love to hear about any other references I missed or insights I didn't manage to land on here.
Did I mention that you should read this book? And Mount Char?
Thanks for reading and until next time <3
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