The Blacktongue Thief is a standalone epic fantasy from Christopher Buehlman, an author originally known for writing some rather nasty horror. The adventure follows a hapless thief and his companions on a quest into territory overrun by giants – hence I’m writing about it here. The instances of giants and giantesses are somewhat limited, but I loved this book regardless.
Buehlman’s writing is exactly the kind of horror and fantasy I enjoy: it’s very dark, very creative, well-paced and laced with humour. His writing is engaging and chilling, and fans of monsters and nastiness are in for an extra treat as he goes in for big, bad beasties. See also Between Two Fires, where there’s a horrific river monster that swallows a man whole, and a lion-headed giant that picks up a woman and bites her legs off. But The Blacktongue Thief is even more fun and includes more humanoid giants.
Giants and Giantesses in The Blacktongue Thief
Giants make an early appearance in this story in a somewhat abstract vision of big people coming down to trample the villages of humans. We don’t get much detail of them, but they are very threatening. From there, they take something of a backseat through the story’s main quest, and I did wonder if they’d eventually work as a bit of a MacGuffin, driving the quest but not touched on in detail. This is somewhat true, as we don’t see widescale encounters or battles with the giants, but their eventual appearance is still worth noting.
Be warned that I’ve shared details about the final stages of the journey below; if you want to avoid spoilers, I’ll summarise by saying there is a fight with 3 giants and an encounter with a seated, injured giantess, both of which include little major interaction. The giants are something like 15-20ft tall and mostly try to crush people. If you don’t mind slight spoilers, here’s the main detail of these scenes:
The adventurers have three major encounters with giants in the final stages of the story. Firstly, the hero (or antihero, he’s a bit of a rogue!) infiltrates a trampled town and has to run from male giants with captured humans on chains, like dogs. They smash things trying to get him, but the chase is over rather quickly.
Secondly, the crew come across three giants and have to fight them out in a field. They manage to cut down two male giants, but the female giant puts up more of a fight, swatting a woman off a horse and crushing some people by throwing an uprooted tree at them, before they manage to bring her down, too.
Finally, a giantess is found injured in a cave. The heroes have long discussions with her, keeping their distance, and she tells them her backstory about being captured by men – before briefly describing how she crushed one of them with her bare hands. At one point, the hero gives her a drink, pouring it into her massive mouth, but they mostly stay away from her, and she’s not really involved in their final encounter.
Overall, these giant instances are chilling with a good sense of scale and threat, the kind of horror we should get from giants, but the interaction is fairly limited. Sadly no big battles or giants getting their hands on people, that we see! But it is a great book anyway, and I’d recommend it, with the giants being a small bonus. You can check it out on Goodreads here.
For more examples of big and little people in books, check out my master list of giant women in literature here!
