Wolves of Winter

By Dan Jones

Viking 2024

With Wolves of Winter, historian Dan Jones continues the story he began in his debut work of historical fiction, Essex Dogs, which introduced readers to the titular rough, ragged band of English fighting men who accompany King Edward III to France and the bloodbath of the Hundred Years War. The Dogs, Millstone, Rebbe, Father, young Romford, their leader FitzTalbot, and others, might take their orders from lords and battlefield commanders, but their foremost loyalty is to each other – and to whatever riches they can grab for themselves. “Each of them bore the scars of seven hard weeks in the field, marching through the hot French countryside, joining the king’s assaults on cities and villages, risking their lives and losing their friends,” readers are told. “They had done it for the same reason they did anything. So that a richer man would pay them for their service and they could go back to their ordinary lives with their pockets full of coin.”

The main action of Essex Dogs climaxed at the famous Battle of Crécy in August of 1346, and the specific action climaxed in a veritable Mozart aria of violence. In these novels, the Dogs are never very far from chopped limbs, smashed skulls, and airborne viscera. On virtually every page, Jones ladles out action and gore:

White pain shot through the Captain’s leg. He tried to keep silent. He bit through the tip of his tongue. Blood flooded his mouth. In the blackness he saw the Brewer of Ghent, his head cracked open like a marrow. Eyes bulging impossibly out of the skull like the slick orbs of a skinned rabbit.

What was clear in Essex Dogs is even more emphatic in Wolves of Winter: these kinds of narrative maneuvers aren’t just an adolescent reflex on the part of an author who’s read too many Marvel Comics. There’s a very conscious, and considering the success of Essex Dogs very canny calculation being made here on page after page to trade anachronism for accessibility. FitzTalbot and crew are fighting and looting and eating in the 14th century, but they’re talking and thinking and cursing (“Baptist’s bollocks,” or, a personal favorite, “Christ’s teeth and claws”) and feeling in the 21st century. If readers can accustom themselves to immediately recognizing a cast who should feel very alien, the payoff will be the complete absence of the kind of starchy artificiality that still characterizes too much historical fiction. 

Just as Crécy was the big focus of the first book, so too the siege of Calais is the big focus of this new one. The Dogs have barely survived the chaos of the big battle and are picking through the corpses on the shattered field, pulling gold rings off dead knights on either side, when they’re rocked to learn that their two immediate paymasters are either dead or gone to over to the French. Thus they’re desperately unmoored heading into the Calais action only weeks later. 

Each character gets a handful of choice lines (each Dog is a type, even FitzTalbot, whose type is the Type for All Types); each has a tiny character arc either carried over from Essex Dogs or begun and concluded in this present volume; and in this volume as in its predecessor, young Romford all but steals the show, mainly, one suspects, because Jones loads into him all the ordinary human vulnerabilities that tend to be conspicuously absent from the other Dogs. No matter how fierce the fighting gets, no reader will hold their breath wondering about the wellbeing of Thorp or Millstone, but they’ll never know with certainty that reedy, foppish Romford will make it from one harrowing scene to the next (and readers of Essex Dogs will know he’s dealing with an equally-harrowing inner struggle that’s another of the story’s nods to modernity). 

In this trilogy, Dan Jones is taking the nonstop action and grubby moral relativism of the modern fantasy genre, stripping it of wards and wizards, loading it with exuberant expletives, and plopping it down in the mud of war in France. It’s easy to see Jones exulting in the kinds of imaginative liberties he can’t allow himself when he’s writing history and sticking only to what can be extrapolated from the sources. By rights, this should make the result a self-indulgent mess of pandering to the PlayStation crowd, but instead it’s tightly controller page-turning fun. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News