By Sanya Noel
Tochi Onyebuchi’s debut fantasy novel, Beasts Made of Night, is a complex labyrinth of a creation. It opens with Taj, an aki, one who eats the sins committed by others and carries their guilt for pay. He is the best in the walled city of Kos and is referred to as both Sky-Fist and Lightbringer.
Taj has been called to the palace to kill and eat an inisisa, a sin-beast that has been drawn out of a sinner’s body by a mage. It is a job that can often overwhelm an aki, especially if they aren’t skilled enough. Escaped sins can attack and even kill people. Their accumulation, on the other hand, attracts the arashi, mythical creatures that can cause total destruction.
Sins, once eaten, form a tattoo of the sin-beast on the aki’s skin. The smaller the sin, the smaller the tattoo. After a while, these tattoos fade away. Taj is different, though; his don’t fade. They remain as prominent as they were on first appearance. Once Taj runs out of skin for tattoos, he is sure that he’ll cross over – a comatose state that is the price of being killed by an inisisa.
Taj’s capacity to eat sin sets him up for manipulation. He’s tricked into service of the king, for example, and Onyebuchi hinges his story on the secret plans, and intricate conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, that Taj finds.
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Onyebuchi builds a world that, at a glance, can be quite dizzying. The city is run on a capitalist economic system based on the number of sins committed: The purest people rule the city – and the king and his royal family are the purest of them all.
Cleansing a sin is expensive, therefore the poorer one is, the more sins one is likely to carry around, and sin causes illness and even death. In his youth, Taj saw his mother suffer from an illness that would not heal. Getting an aki to eat her sin put the whole family in debt, which Taj is now working to clear while also providing for their living.
In this system, the aki are the lowest in rank; they are feared and despised. Children who are found to have the capacity to become akis are sent away to live with other akis and eat sins for the rest of their lives. However, Onyebuchi shows there are advantages to being an aki. No one wants to touch them, which makes it easy for them to manoeuvre through the city. At one point, a trader swindles a woman by selling her a drug to eradicate an illness that Taj knows needs a sin eater. And because everyone opens the way for akis, fearful of touching them, Taj manages to rob the trader of his money, which he sends home to his parents.
The intricate world Onyebuchi builds comes at a price, though. The dialogue often leaves the reader dissatisfied and some descriptions seem like hyperboles.
“We slap our hands together, and it makes the most satisfying sound in the entire Kingdom of Odo. It’s so good we can’t stop laughing,” Onyebuchi writes in chapter five.
But this does not diminish the story in any way. Onyebuchi’s tale is forward-oriented, moving all the time, and nearly every character has a purpose which they contribute to this motion.
Onyebuchi’s novel is, however, not a completely new invention of the wheel. There are similarities to other fantasy stories. Taj’s moniker, Lightbringer, reminds one of George R. R. Martin’s legendary sword in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. The act of sin eating comes up in Jeremy Crane’s character in Philip Iscove’s TV series, Sleepy Hollow.
Onyebuchi’s Beasts Made of Night also borrows heavily from biblical narratives. The Christian idea of sacrifice, in which animals or plants took the brunt of human sin, has been around since the story of Cain and Abel. The story of Jesus dying for humankind’s sins is at the centre of Christian theology. Akis are sacrifices that take the brunt of human sin. Their fate, like Jesus’, is also to die in the end.
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At first, reading the book was a little bumpy for me. The writer starts his novel as if in conversation with an old friend, and the first person narration does not make it any better. The immersion into the world of Kos was so abrupt, that for a while, I wondered what aki even were. Even after I learned they were sin eaters, I still wondered what sin eating was. This disorientation is increased by the introduction of other terms. However, as one catches on, like the storyline of a movie they’ve caught in the middle, one can get it as they continue reading.
This book doesn’t end satisfactorily, though. Perhaps this is to set the reader up for a sequel to tie the story up. In her review of the book on NPR, Caitlyn Paxon called it “The beginning of a great saga.”
There will be a sequel, one hopes. There should be a sequel. There must be a sequel.
