Warner's first foray into historical fiction for Polygon's Darkland Tales recounts the flight of Charles Edward Stuart from Scotland in the months after the Jacobite army's defeat at Culloden in April 1746. It's thoughtful stuff, clever and brooding and sorrowful and darkly humorous while remaining tightly bound to the narrative tradition of this storied historical fulcrum. And it's beautiful, if not always in the imagery then at least in the way in which Warner's prose captures both landscape and human interaction with a biting verisimilitude that defies the primitivity of most fictive sallies into historic territories.

In his afterword, the author explains that his challenge was to explore the 'fundamental mystery' of what the Bonnie Prince's epic coda was really like, and, as a scholar of the Jacobite era, I can fully endorse that he accomplishes that goal with equal parts criticism and compassion that is as interesting and as relevant as anything that Prebble, Broster, Stevenson, and Scott have ever penned. ( )