This edition of The Book of Atrix Wolfe was published a few weeks ago, on February 25th. It should be widely available at this point, in both electronic and print formats. The new stuff includes a cover by Kathleen Jennings, who also contributes an introduction, partially about creating that cover (Jennings works in cut-paper, so it's more complicated than a painter would be) and partially about McKillip.
But, mostly, this is the novel, as expected: the same novel, as far as I know, as was published in 1995 and has been available since in various other editions.
This is a set in a secondary world, the kind with a few important countries without much geography - there's no map, and the characters will not be forced to march all around anywhere. As the back cover puts it, the four important realms here are "warlike Kardeth, resilient Pelucir, idyllic Chaumenard, and the mysterious Elven realm." (The word "Elven," or any variation, is never used in the book itself, but it's an otherworldly place ruled by the long-lived Queen of the Wood, so it's a reasonable simplification for marketing copy to make.)
We begin with a prologue: the King of Kardeth is besieging Pelucir in the depths of winter, to break them and get through to Chaumenard, a rich land with a school of wizards but no clear government. Doing this will kill a whole lot of the people of Kardeth, Pelucir, and Chaumenard, but, like Lord Farquaad, that is a risk this guy is willing to take. (McKillip tries to make him noble, of the unbending type, but he has absolutely no grounds for war other than "I wanna take that stuff" and the whole novel could have been avoided if someone had quietly assassinated him in a convenient moment.)
The title wizard, possibly the greatest of the Chaumenard practitioners, has been wandering in that region, and stops to see that Kardeth King. Wizards generally don't interfere in squabbles between nations, because their powers tend to do unexpected things either in ways or at scales, but Wolfe hopes he can find a way to talk Kardeth down. He doesn't, but instead does something else - something magical. It's not clear what he's trying to do, but what he ends up doing is creating a monstrous Hunter - a horned figure on horseback that leads something not unlike the traditional Wild Hunt and whom Atrix thinks (not entirely correctly) is an aspect of himself. The Hunter rampaged, killing the King and Queen of Pelucir but also somehow forcing Kardeth to retreat. (What actually happened, like a lot of things in Atrix Wolfe, is never quite made clear.)
The rest of the book is set twenty years later, and is about the next generation - and Atrix himself, still around, still mostly a hermit running around as a wolf on a mountain or otherwise avoiding human contact - fixing that magical thing he did.
I found this to be a book that talked around a lot of stuff more than I was entirely comfortable with - there were points towards the end when the dialogue was non-specific enough that I checked, more than once, to make sure a signature from an entirely different book hadn't been included.
The twenty-years-later cast is primarily two people: Talis, the prince of Pelucir born on the night of the siege, more recently training as a mage in Chaumenard, and Saro, the daughter of the Queen of the Wood, who was caught up in that magical working, left mute, and has been working as a pot-scrubber in the Pelucir kitchens ever since. (There's a lot of good kitchen-talk in this book; I wished I had been hungrier when reading it.)
The book of the title was written by Atrix at some unspecified time - I think after the siege but long before the present day, but maybe years even before that - and is in some kind of code where it claims to be a straightforward book of simple spells, and does dependably create magical workings when used by a practitioner, but the actual spells cast are vastly different, more powerful, and dangerous than what they claim to be.
Anyway, Talis find the book, tries to read it, causes problems. He's also dragged back home by his much older brother, the current king of Pelucir. (The heir to Kardeth is in the first chapter and seems like she will be important to the narrative, but she disappears entirely from that point, as does her entire nation.) From that point, we get Talis chapters and Saro chapters, and occasionally Atrix sections, too. The Hunter rampages around - he wants to kill Atrix, for good and sufficient reasons, but Atrix, being the greatest mage of his generation, can generally escape, though sometimes only through dreams.
Again, I found a lot of this book under-explained. We don't know precisely what Atrix did, what he was trying to do, how it happened that way, or, really, anything about how magic works in this world. How the realm of the Queen of the Woods relates to the normal human world is also pretty vague. There's a lot of talking, a lot of kitchen details of meals going up and coming back down, and the same few discussions between the same few characters happening repeatedly. McKillip was a supple, interesting fantasy writer, but I don't think this was one of her most fully-realized books. I may have missed something central, but it fell pretty flat for me.
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