There are many books about the boy and his intelligent dog/cat/dragon/horse/robot companion. The two of them share a magical bond that often leaves the reader wondering what the companion gets out of the deal. In The Dragon Riders of Pern, for example, the dragons are genetically engineered to be the perfect soul mate for the rider they choose. The Companions in the Heralds of Valdemar Choose people that will make good Heralds and essentially agree to schlep them around and protect them, making the Herald a heroic figure. The Companions are sent by the Gods to do whatever needs to be done to serve the humans. But rarely are the animal companions treated as complete equals, getting something out of the relationship as much as the humans do. The animals give the humans prestige but not the other way around.

K. J. Taylor’s debut novel, The Dark Griffin, turns some of this on its head. Here humans serve the griffins. A griffin that has a human has more going for it than a non-attached human. A human can take care of a griffin, feed it, buy it things, and make sure it has the nicest place to roost. The wild griffins long ago learned that the humans were taking over their spaces so they must learn how to live with them. They chose certain humans to be ambassadors to the rest of mankind and give them their demands.

Griffins and humans learned to live together over the years, though the griffins do not become domesticated. They do not have qualms about killing humans, just as long as their human is safe. Everyone else can be dinner for all they care, and in some cases they are dinner. The griffins are the ones who choose who will be the leaders among humans they often push their humans into doing things to increase their prestige. The humans may not always like it, but they do what their griffin wishes. It’s either that or lose their own power.

With tight and simple writing that’s not filled with the fancy flourishes and over-wrought descriptions that some writers try to use to give their books a fantasy feeling, The Dark Griffin flies quickly through the pages following two storylines. The first is of a captured wild griffin and the second is about the man, Arren, who captured him.

Arren, the human protagonist, is not the traditional fantasy hero. In fact, he’s not very heroic at all. The novel makes the struggle not between great powers of good and evil but instead the human struggles of a man faced with potentially self-destructive behavior. It’s a simple, devastating, human story that doesn’t exactly end where you think it will.

There are a few plot points that seem to be contrived because of lack of set up, but they don’t interrupt the flow of the story much. Erian, a young man who comes to the city to be a griffiner, appears to come out of nowhere and is just there to contrast against Arren as what a traditional Hero should be like. Perhaps Taylor is making fun of the stereotypical blond, blue-eyed farm boy hero that is so commonly found in clichéd fantasy stories. But these are things that I noticed after I was done reading the book. It was a swift and engrossing read, one that I finished a lot sooner than I thought I would.

For a first book, The Dark Griffin is well paced and tightly plotted with only a few things left to ponder. The world is involving and the griffins and their society are different enough from all the other human/animal pairings that you really feel like you’re reading something never done before. Which, in this era of repeats and remakes, is a rare treat.

  -- Gabrielle Lissauer