An SSH Challenge for the Future

How does the SSH fit in modern fantasy fiction

Modern romantasy is all about the Alpha males. Most romantasy, like the urban fantasy that preceded it, revolves around a love triangle of two Alphas, or one Alpha and a quasi-Sigma, competing for the same woman who is the stand-in for the female reader. It’s tedious, and predictable, and fulfills exactly the same purpose for women that visual titillation fulfills for men. The SSH is built right into it. Neither analysis nor discussion is necessary.

But coming-of-age fantasy is much more challenging because the age of the protagonists are usually set right around the time that the socio-sexual hierarchy is being established and the behavioral patterns are cementing themselves into the young men’s psyches. This is one reason why the inevitable boy-girl relationships are usually obscured, simplified, or simply screwed up, as seen in the cases of a) The Dark is Rising, b) The Belgariad and The Chronicles of Prydain, or c) Harry Potter and the Emotional Perspectives of the Author as a Teenage Girl.

We can go into detail some other time as to how and why those characterizations are correct, but for now, just accept them as provisional. The challenge here is not entirely theoretical, because it is one that will require being addressed beginning with the third book in this new magical school series, which was published today by Castalia House.

Dorian Vane has silver eyes and no idea why.

Raised by his grandparents on the quiet Somerset moors, Dorian has spent his whole life hiding behind a pair of mirror-shaded glasses. Then the letter from Wyrmwick College arrives, and he is pulled from his comfortable home in the countryside into an exciting world of magic and wonder.

Wyrmwick is a school like no other, ancient, magnificent, and impossible, carved into a mountainside above a lake that reflects its stone towers back into the deep waters. Here, students learn how to hold fire in their hands, to shape metal with their thoughts, and to create wards that protect the living from things that dwell in the dark and hunt in the night. At Wyrmwick, Dorian finds unexpected friends, magical challenges, a misfit house that claims him as its own, and professors who seem to know more about his heritage than he does.

But the ancient college conceals old and bloody secrets in its foundations. Even hidden behind his glasses, Dorian’s eyes mark him as something the magical world hasn’t seen in centuries, and someone at the school wants him gone. In addition to his lessons, he learns that wonder and danger stalk the same stone corridors, and that being special is not the same as being safe.

Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood is the gripping first novel in a gothic magical fantasy series of courage, self-discovery, and the darkness that every new generation finds that it must face.

Now, a boy who is only eleven does not yet have an established place in the SSH. But we know from nearly 70 years of fantasy fiction that he is likely to be a Gamma, as per the Chosen One favored by the special boys, a Delta as in the more traditional model, or a hallucinogenic perversion of someone grasping vaguely after the Sigma concept and utterly failing to reasonably portray it.

An Alpha is frankly beyond the imaginative capabilities of most authors; one does not become a leader of men by sitting in the corners, quietly observing people, and writing about them. Especially not fantasy authors.

But there is time to settle this question, as there will be at least one more book before it becomes necessary to start sorting out the various behavioral patterns and attractional elements of the characters involved. In the meantime, if you have any interest in the various works by JK Rowling, Susan Cooper, and Lloyd Alexander, there is every chance that you will very much enjoy the experiences of young Master Dorian Vane in his first year of attendance at Wyrmwick College.

Now available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.