Chia Black Dragon
Encyclopedia
Chia Black Dragon is the eponymous anti-hero
of a dark fantasy
series of novels written by Stephen Marley
. Chia is identified in the novels as "The most dangerous woman in the history of man". The term "Chinese Gothic" was coined to describe the world of Chia Black Dragon.
Chinese
woman. She was born on the shores of north China
in the third millennium BC. Her mother, Chi, was human but her father, Glak, was the last of a monstrous prehuman race who possessed the capacity for "infinite flesh", i.e. the ability to transform into a bewildering variety of Lovecraftian
metamorphoses. This ability has passed on to Chia in the modified form of "wild flesh" which rejuvenates her every few years, with the result that she ages about three years in every thousand (after having aged normally up to her twelfth year). In the months leading up to her wild flesh rejuvenations she becomes increasingly deranged and dangerous. At the time of the first Chia novel, Spirit Mirror, she is twenty years old in appearance but almost three thousand years old chronologically.
Chia, whose name means Twilight in a pre-Chinese language, and who later gained the title "Black Dragon" from her valley-home on Black Dragon Mountain, is very much a dark and light character, her spirit blighted in infancy by her father whom she later kills with the aid of her twin brother, Nyak. She and Nyak soon take different paths, Chia struggling (and constantly failing) to become fully human, Nyak aspiring to inherit the full powers of his father. As the centuries progress the twins become the bitterest of enemies.
Chia Black Dragon was brought up as a cannibal and psychic vampire
by her father, and although she rejected the cannibalistic rituals of her childhood she still reverts to vampirism at times throughout her life, sometimes by choice. She never does quests but is spurred into action only by the desire to help a close friend or (more usually) destroy an enemy. Chia's lesbian
nature is clearly stated in the novels but, with the exception of a scene in Shadow Sisters, there are no outright sexual encounters.
Although the Chia series definitely belongs in the darkest of the dark fantasy genre, the stories, and Chia herself, abound in quirky black humour that counterbalances the frequent eruptions of horror and violence. Chia is, for example, deliberately written as an anachronistic
character, in speech and also in appearance (she strolls around ancient China and Rome
in a modern black overcoat and wears sunglasses - both of her own design). She is, essentially, a modern character set in the past. Despite her daunting history as a former cannibal, sometime vampire, assassin etc., Chia nevertheless comes across as vulnerable as well as formidable. Self-loathing is a permanent feature of her personality. The other characters in the stories rarely see Chia's vulnerable side but the reader is frequently afforded an insight into her self-doubt and fears even as she is putting on an arrogant front to those around her.
To date, there are three Chia Black Dragon novels and also a planned Chia video game, Shadow. Two examples of artist David Hitchcock's concept artwork for Shadow, copyright Creative Reality Software and Stephen Marley, are included here. Set in 1889, they show Chia immediately before and during an ambush by her brother's henchmen.
(1988) ISBN 0-00-223368-1
Set in 2nd-century China at the end of the Han dynasty
, this is the first and least typical of the Chia books. Spirit Mirror tells the story of a mirror haunting orchestrated by her twin brother, Nyak. Atmospheric, but rather too richly written, it recounts Chia's struggle against an insidious haunting spread through any reflective surface and her gradual realisation that her brother is behind the spreading evil. She discovers that Nyak's aim is to destroy the newly established religion of Buddhism
in China. However, as in all the novels, Chia's own actions (in this case predicted by Nyak) almost bring about the very disaster she intends to avert. Although not as unconventional as the following novels, the narrative still features a great deal of the graphic violence, horror and mystical passages that characterise the later works, although the dark comedy elements are less in evidence here.
Mortal Mask: publisher Random House
(1991) ISBN 0-09-920501-7
Chia comes into her own in this tale of Nyak's resurrection in a sinister mansion in Silver Music Bay. It is in this book, the first full-fledged example of "Chinese Gothic", that Chia dons her anachronistic attire and launches full flood into modernistic dialogue. Set a few years after the conclusion of Spirit Mirror, the story of Mortal Mask starts with a wild ride of a prologue in which Nyak's devastated spirit, after a titanic battle with Chia, flies east to Silver Music Bay. Some time later, Chia begins to suspect that her brother may have survived what she had hoped was their final battle after Nyak's deadly servants, the Silver Brethren, invade her home on Black Dragon Mountain. She travels to a Taoist hermitage in Silver Music Bay and meets and falls in love with Xanthippe, an orphaned Nubian girl who accompanied her parents on their journey from Egypt. Prior to Chia's arrival, all manner of insidious hauntings have afflicted the hermitage and the surrounding coastline, and with Chia on the scene matters take a turn from bad to worse. Chia eventually tracks the source of the haunting to a mansion known as the House of Heaven, which she discovers is the location of her birth and infancy. She also realises the full extent of her father's evil nature and of Nyak's impending resurrection. Mortal Mask, which was acclaimed a 'masterpiece' in the Clute/Grant The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
, is essentially a deeply layered ghost story
that plays out a host of metaphysical themes in a narrative that drives Chia relentlessly to the edge of damnation and an impending apocalypse
.
Shadow Sisters: publisher Random House
(1993) ISBN 0-09-931481-9
This is a full-scale epic, ranging from 7th-century Rome to China at the fall of the Sui dynasty
. Chia has turned the Catholic Church upside down in her desperate (and insane) attempt to make herself pope in place of Pope Adeodatus I
. Betrayed by one of her "disciples", Wittigis, she is forced to flee Rome and return to China after a centuries-long absence. Wittigis, self-renamed Crucifer, leads Chia's former disciples in a purportedly religious mission to China to destroy her, their quest motivated in reality by dark desires that none of the disciples care to admit. In China, Chia forms an intimate attachment to Nua, a young woman who belongs to a sort of all-female Chia fan club in which the members dress and try to act like their idol. Chia, at Nua's urging, agrees to assassinate the emperor, Yang Ti, to make way for the first emperor of the Tang dynasty
. After encountering the sole disaffected member of Crucifer's followers, a man renamed Judas, Chia and Nua head for Yang Ti's southern capital of Chiang-tu (modern Yang-chou). It is in Chiang-tu that Chia discovers that Crucifer and his disciples have been transformed into non-human entities by a buried power in Shadow Hill (the site of the Buddhist monastery in Spirit Mirror) and have drawn Yang Ti and his court into an alternative and terrifying reality which threatens to absorb the world. The story reaches its climax as Chia shifts between realities and confronts an old, but unexpected, enemy.
and provisionally titled Shadow. A companion novel to the game is expected.
Anti-hero
In fiction, an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis in which the character is generally useless at being a hero or heroine when they're...
of a dark fantasy
Dark fantasy
Dark fantasy is a term used to describe a fantasy story with a pronounced horror element.-Overview:A strict definition for dark fantasy is difficult to pin down. Gertrude Barrows Bennett has been called "the woman who invented dark fantasy". Both Charles L...
series of novels written by Stephen Marley
Stephen Marley (writer)
Stephen Marley is a British author and video game designer, best known for his Chia Black Dragon series. He was born in Derby of Irish parents and was educated in Bemrose School in Derby and at Nottingham. He graduated in Social Anthropology in 1971 in London, gained an M.Sc in the Sociology of...
. Chia is identified in the novels as "The most dangerous woman in the history of man". The term "Chinese Gothic" was coined to describe the world of Chia Black Dragon.
Character overview
Chia is a part-human, part-demonDemon
call - 1347 531 7769 for more infoIn Ancient Near Eastern religions as well as in the Abrahamic traditions, including ancient and medieval Christian demonology, a demon is considered an "unclean spirit" which may cause demonic possession, to be addressed with an act of exorcism...
Chinese
Chinese people
The term Chinese people may refer to any of the following:*People with Han Chinese ethnicity ....
woman. She was born on the shores of north China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
in the third millennium BC. Her mother, Chi, was human but her father, Glak, was the last of a monstrous prehuman race who possessed the capacity for "infinite flesh", i.e. the ability to transform into a bewildering variety of Lovecraftian
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
metamorphoses. This ability has passed on to Chia in the modified form of "wild flesh" which rejuvenates her every few years, with the result that she ages about three years in every thousand (after having aged normally up to her twelfth year). In the months leading up to her wild flesh rejuvenations she becomes increasingly deranged and dangerous. At the time of the first Chia novel, Spirit Mirror, she is twenty years old in appearance but almost three thousand years old chronologically.
Chia, whose name means Twilight in a pre-Chinese language, and who later gained the title "Black Dragon" from her valley-home on Black Dragon Mountain, is very much a dark and light character, her spirit blighted in infancy by her father whom she later kills with the aid of her twin brother, Nyak. She and Nyak soon take different paths, Chia struggling (and constantly failing) to become fully human, Nyak aspiring to inherit the full powers of his father. As the centuries progress the twins become the bitterest of enemies.
Chia Black Dragon was brought up as a cannibal and psychic vampire
Vampire
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...
by her father, and although she rejected the cannibalistic rituals of her childhood she still reverts to vampirism at times throughout her life, sometimes by choice. She never does quests but is spurred into action only by the desire to help a close friend or (more usually) destroy an enemy. Chia's lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
nature is clearly stated in the novels but, with the exception of a scene in Shadow Sisters, there are no outright sexual encounters.
Although the Chia series definitely belongs in the darkest of the dark fantasy genre, the stories, and Chia herself, abound in quirky black humour that counterbalances the frequent eruptions of horror and violence. Chia is, for example, deliberately written as an anachronistic
Anachronism
An anachronism—from the Greek ανά and χρόνος — is an inconsistency in some chronological arrangement, especially a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other...
character, in speech and also in appearance (she strolls around ancient China and Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
in a modern black overcoat and wears sunglasses - both of her own design). She is, essentially, a modern character set in the past. Despite her daunting history as a former cannibal, sometime vampire, assassin etc., Chia nevertheless comes across as vulnerable as well as formidable. Self-loathing is a permanent feature of her personality. The other characters in the stories rarely see Chia's vulnerable side but the reader is frequently afforded an insight into her self-doubt and fears even as she is putting on an arrogant front to those around her.
To date, there are three Chia Black Dragon novels and also a planned Chia video game, Shadow. Two examples of artist David Hitchcock's concept artwork for Shadow, copyright Creative Reality Software and Stephen Marley, are included here. Set in 1889, they show Chia immediately before and during an ambush by her brother's henchmen.
Novels
Spirit Mirror: publisher HarperCollinsHarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
(1988) ISBN 0-00-223368-1
Set in 2nd-century China at the end of the Han dynasty
Han Dynasty
The Han Dynasty was the second imperial dynasty of China, preceded by the Qin Dynasty and succeeded by the Three Kingdoms . It was founded by the rebel leader Liu Bang, known posthumously as Emperor Gaozu of Han. It was briefly interrupted by the Xin Dynasty of the former regent Wang Mang...
, this is the first and least typical of the Chia books. Spirit Mirror tells the story of a mirror haunting orchestrated by her twin brother, Nyak. Atmospheric, but rather too richly written, it recounts Chia's struggle against an insidious haunting spread through any reflective surface and her gradual realisation that her brother is behind the spreading evil. She discovers that Nyak's aim is to destroy the newly established religion of Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
in China. However, as in all the novels, Chia's own actions (in this case predicted by Nyak) almost bring about the very disaster she intends to avert. Although not as unconventional as the following novels, the narrative still features a great deal of the graphic violence, horror and mystical passages that characterise the later works, although the dark comedy elements are less in evidence here.
Mortal Mask: publisher Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
(1991) ISBN 0-09-920501-7
Chia comes into her own in this tale of Nyak's resurrection in a sinister mansion in Silver Music Bay. It is in this book, the first full-fledged example of "Chinese Gothic", that Chia dons her anachronistic attire and launches full flood into modernistic dialogue. Set a few years after the conclusion of Spirit Mirror, the story of Mortal Mask starts with a wild ride of a prologue in which Nyak's devastated spirit, after a titanic battle with Chia, flies east to Silver Music Bay. Some time later, Chia begins to suspect that her brother may have survived what she had hoped was their final battle after Nyak's deadly servants, the Silver Brethren, invade her home on Black Dragon Mountain. She travels to a Taoist hermitage in Silver Music Bay and meets and falls in love with Xanthippe, an orphaned Nubian girl who accompanied her parents on their journey from Egypt. Prior to Chia's arrival, all manner of insidious hauntings have afflicted the hermitage and the surrounding coastline, and with Chia on the scene matters take a turn from bad to worse. Chia eventually tracks the source of the haunting to a mansion known as the House of Heaven, which she discovers is the location of her birth and infancy. She also realises the full extent of her father's evil nature and of Nyak's impending resurrection. Mortal Mask, which was acclaimed a 'masterpiece' in the Clute/Grant The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is a 1997 reference work on fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant. Other contributors include Mike Ashley, Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, David Langford, Sam J. Lundwall, Michael Scott Rohan, Brian Stableford and Lisa Tuttle.The book was well-received upon...
, is essentially a deeply layered ghost story
Ghost story
A ghost story may be any piece of fiction, or drama, or an account of an experience, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or characters' belief in them. Colloquially, the term can refer to any kind of scary story. In a narrower sense, the ghost story has...
that plays out a host of metaphysical themes in a narrative that drives Chia relentlessly to the edge of damnation and an impending apocalypse
Apocalypse
An Apocalypse is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e. the veil to be lifted. The Apocalypse of John is the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament...
.
Shadow Sisters: publisher Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
(1993) ISBN 0-09-931481-9
This is a full-scale epic, ranging from 7th-century Rome to China at the fall of the Sui dynasty
Sui Dynasty
The Sui Dynasty was a powerful, but short-lived Imperial Chinese dynasty. Preceded by the Southern and Northern Dynasties, it ended nearly four centuries of division between rival regimes. It was followed by the Tang Dynasty....
. Chia has turned the Catholic Church upside down in her desperate (and insane) attempt to make herself pope in place of Pope Adeodatus I
Pope Adeodatus I
Pope Saint Adeodatus I or Deodatus I was Pope from November 13, 615 to his death....
. Betrayed by one of her "disciples", Wittigis, she is forced to flee Rome and return to China after a centuries-long absence. Wittigis, self-renamed Crucifer, leads Chia's former disciples in a purportedly religious mission to China to destroy her, their quest motivated in reality by dark desires that none of the disciples care to admit. In China, Chia forms an intimate attachment to Nua, a young woman who belongs to a sort of all-female Chia fan club in which the members dress and try to act like their idol. Chia, at Nua's urging, agrees to assassinate the emperor, Yang Ti, to make way for the first emperor of the Tang dynasty
Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...
. After encountering the sole disaffected member of Crucifer's followers, a man renamed Judas, Chia and Nua head for Yang Ti's southern capital of Chiang-tu (modern Yang-chou). It is in Chiang-tu that Chia discovers that Crucifer and his disciples have been transformed into non-human entities by a buried power in Shadow Hill (the site of the Buddhist monastery in Spirit Mirror) and have drawn Yang Ti and his court into an alternative and terrifying reality which threatens to absorb the world. The story reaches its climax as Chia shifts between realities and confronts an old, but unexpected, enemy.
Video Game
There is a Chia video game planned with Creative Reality Software, designed by Stephen MarleyStephen Marley (writer)
Stephen Marley is a British author and video game designer, best known for his Chia Black Dragon series. He was born in Derby of Irish parents and was educated in Bemrose School in Derby and at Nottingham. He graduated in Social Anthropology in 1971 in London, gained an M.Sc in the Sociology of...
and provisionally titled Shadow. A companion novel to the game is expected.