Black Leopard, Red Wolf, volume one of The Dark Star Trilogy, is an Epic Fantasy book by Booker award-winning novelist Marlon James. It is set in a fantasy version of ancient Africa, complete with both human and actual monsters.
Tracker, our protagonist and Unreliable Narrator, has a "nose" with the ability to sniff out and track people for miles. When hired to find a missing child, Tracker breaks his one rule of working alone and joins a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits. His trek across a dark fantastical version of Africa leads him to monsters, slavers and a conspiracy, forcing him to ask; "who exactly is this child?"
Black Leopard, Red Wolf contains examples of:
- Anti-Hero: Tracker and pretty much all of the more moral members of his "fellowship" are far from traditional heroes. Tracker is a violent mercenary and he's one of the more pleasant members.
- Bestiality Is Depraved: Tracker accuses his guards of screwing goats on their off-hours. Although, see below, it's doubtful whether a single actual goat gets defiled.
- Blasphemous Boast: "Fuck the Gods!" is the standard swearing (conversation?) line. Maybe they take it as endearment anyway.
- Crapsack World: Africa as portrayed in the novel is a brutal place of misogyny, slavery and actual monsters.
- Deadpan Snarker: Tracker has a very acerbic wit and loves to use it toward anyone he dislikes.
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Invoked. Tracker doesn't parse the Queen of Dolingo having Mossi's clothes cut off as sexual harassment, despite Mossi's clear humiliation and sense of violation, and originally has a hard time believing that Mossi didn't want to sleep with her. Mossi has to spell out that they're in her city, surrounded by her guards, and that just because he got hard doesn't mean he wanted it.
- Driving Question: Multiple ones! Who is the missing boy and why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And maybe most importantly; who is telling the truth, and who is lying?
- Foregone Conclusion: The very first line is Tracker telling the audience that the child is dead, plus Tracker and at least two other members of the search party are being held captive.
- Foreshadowing: When he takes the case, Tracker notes that kidnapping cases where the child is very young are difficult, not because finding them is hard, but because they're still malleable enough to forget their birth families and view their kidnappers as their true parents. By the time Tracker and company find the boy, he's a lost cause. On top of being raised by a gang of monsters since he was a toddler, they used him to draw in prey and addicted him to vampire blood. He no longer considers Lissisolo his mother and runs away with Sasabonsam.
- Heinous Hyena: Tracker encounters a clan of hyena-women at one point, and it's a traumatic experience both for him and the readers.
- Might also be seen as a subversion of Black Is Bigger in Bed, given how the hyenas, eh, screw him over (metaphorically speaking).
- Lineage Comes from the Father: The North kingdom switched to this from the old system, with the eldest son of the king's eldest sister inheriting the throne, a few generations back. (Conveniently, a "tradition" of the king's eldest daughters becoming celibate priestesses sprang up at about the same time.) Basu and his family were murdered because he was advocating for a return to the sister's-son formula.
- Name Amnesia: Tracker has forgotten his birth name. As it was given to him by his abusive father, he left it behind when he left the house.
- Only Known By His Nickname: Many of the other party members, including the Leopard from the title, go only by their nicknames. This also applies to the children that Tracker saves. He only gives them names off-page after the initial quest, which makes it twice the gut punch when they are murdered by Sasabonsam.
- Pædo Hunt: It seems that the elders and chieftains love to abuse their power but again, we only have Tracker's word for it.
- Rescued from the Underworld: In the third of Tracker's stories, a queen tells him to find her king, who has been dead for five years. Tracker takes the payment, travels to Monono where those who died by drowning live, and retrieves the king. When the queen meets her king again, she quarrels and beats him, and Tracker mentions that the king will probably drown himself again soon.
- Sword and Sorcery: Black Leopard, Red Wolf is, at its heart, a throwback to Sword and Sorcery as much as it's an Epic Fantasy.
- Unreliable Narrator: Most of the plot is Tracker relating his quest for the missing child to an interrogator after the fact. However Tracker's tangents and somewhat obvious bias puts a significant amount of the story into question.
- The Wrongful Heir to the Throne: Lissisolo would be a far better ruler than her brother—but unfortunately, that her is a crucial sticking point, superior qualifications be damned. She plans to rule through her son, who per the original succession rules is the true king. However, being raised by the Ipundulu utterly warped him, and there's a prophecy that he will be a horrible and cruel king (at least if you believe Tracker)—and, at the very least, it's unlikely that he would be as obedient as Lissisolo would need.
