James Nicoll Reviews

Premee Mohamed’s 2024 The Rider, The Ride, The Rich Man’s Wife is a fantasy novella.

Rain should be welcome in an arid town like Wrathford, which is otherwise dependent on unreliable wells. But the infrequent rains come with an unwelcome price.

The rains are a harbinger of the impending Hunt. Every seven years, the Wife and her Rider select someone from Wrathford as their designated prey. The chosen one is given a head-start, then pursued by the two specters. If the prey can elude the two supernatural beings until nightfall, they will be spared. Nobody can remember the last time that happened. Many doubt that it ever has.

This year the pair choose Kit.

Of course, Lucas wants his brother Kit to live. However, the Wife and the Rider have rules that prey must follow. People who try to save one of the chosen perish along with the prey, killed in some unpleasant way to indicate the Wife’s displeasure. If anyone has ever survived trying to interfere with the Hunt, nobody in Wrathford seems to remember that either.

Although he is signing his own death warrant, Lucas sets out to help his brother survive until nightfall. Lucas doesn’t expect to survive, but doing nothing would be worse than dying at the hands of the Wife and her companion.

The brothers are cunning. The brothers will learn much about their world they did not know. However, not only are the Wife and the Rider supernatural creatures of great power, the pair will cheerfully cheat to win.

Therefore, Lucas and Kit are almost certainly doomed.

~oOo~

As you can see from my authors sidebar, I am pretty determined to track and review all Mohamed works. This one managed to fly under my radar; I only noticed it by chance. Was it publicized by the publisher? I didn’t see any publicity. I venture to suggest that books whose existence is a closely held secret may be less frequently bought and read than books that are widely publicized. Just a thought.

Readers may well wonder why anyone stays in Wrathford, what with the angry, homicidal ghosts committing sadistic murders every seven years. The answer is: this is a crapsack world and the other communities are as bad or worse. As well, if everyone follows the rules, only one person dies every seven years, which means any given person is very unlikely to be the unlucky chosen.

There is a scene later in the book that suggests that there is a real reason for the rite (and for other rites like it, in other places). However, as the supposed reason seems dubious, the person providing the justification is a beneficiary of the current arrangement, and there is no independent verification, I am inclined to take their claim with a grain of salt.

An alternative, more plausible explanation, is that the Hunt is distilled from Wilhoit’s Law: ​“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” In this case, the angry ghosts fall into the first category, while the chosen fall into the second.

For Lucas and Kit, none of this is theoretical. Mohamed artfully depicts their life and death struggle, in prose that that ensures that readers will care about the outcome. The Rider was a diverting way to spend an evening. How lucky for me that I noticed the novella!

The Rider, The Ride, The Rich Man’s Wife is available here (PS Publishing), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop UK), and here (Chapters-Indigo).

I did not find The Rider, The Ride, The Rich Man’s Wife at either Bookshop US or at Words Worth Books.