Why You'll Love This
Gerald Tarrant is one of fantasy's most compellingly dangerous characters — and this is the rare chance to watch him hunt something that might actually hunt back.
- Great if you want: a dark, character-focused glimpse into a morally complex villain
- The experience: short and atmospheric — gothic tension in under 60 pages
- The writing: Friedman builds dread through world logic, not cheap horror tricks
- Skip if: you haven't read the trilogy — payoff depends on familiarity with Tarrant
About This Book
Four hundred years after humanity settled the alien world of Erna, the sorcerer Gerald Tarrant rides north toward a forest that allegedly consumes everything that enters it. In Dominion, C.S. Friedman uses this slim prequel to illuminate the cold interior of one of fantasy's most morally complex figures — a man who chose damnation with clear eyes and has never stopped calculating the cost. The stakes are not merely survival but something more unsettling: the question of what a creature like Tarrant actually wants, and whether anything on Erna is powerful enough to threaten him.
At just over fifty pages, Dominion earns its brevity. Friedman writes with the same atmospheric precision that defines the Coldfire Trilogy — gothic, cerebral, and genuinely eerie — and this novella functions as both a sharply focused character study and a controlled demonstration of Erna's terrifying ecology. Readers already familiar with the trilogy will find it rewarding to watch Tarrant from this earlier angle; newcomers will encounter a world that feels genuinely strange and a protagonist who resists easy reading. It's efficient, unnerving, and exactly as long as it needs to be.
