The Red Knight is an often brilliant, often frustrating fantasy debut. The titular character is leader of a mercenary band with a contract to protect an isolated fortress-nunnery. The Captain and his merry band of sell-swords find that they've bitten off more than they can chew when a tide of monsters from the Wild washes over their stronghold, leaving them to face a perilous siege.

So the brilliant part first. Cameron is a giant historical re-enactment nerd, and he's done everything in this novel short of killing a man with a sword. The personal knowledge of medieval clothing, arms, and sleeping rough shine through in the little details. Where other fantasy writers are working from the literature, he's working from the stuff, and this book has the bronze glow of authenticity about it. Getting the little details right mean that the big stuff, armored knights fighting monsters, absolutely works. You get how utterly dangerous a trained and armored man on a warhorse is.

But there's also a lot of aggravating stuff. The point of view jumps around between characters because that's what Epic Fantasy does, and like constant jump cuts in a movie, this interrupts the flow of the story. There's a lot of minor skirmishes and side stories that don't pay off nearly enough to justify the investment in pages or emotional energy. I kept thinking that Poul Anderson would have written an absolutely crackerjack version of the same basic story that came in at half the word count and hit all the themes better. And while it's a little unfair to compare a first novel to the skill of a master craftsman like Anderson, it's more a matter of the form, the idea that epic fantasy should be 600+ pages a book, rather than the proper length of enough story to cover everything that needs covering while being short enough to be interesting.

The setting and characterization is erratic. I enjoyed the Captain and his mercenaries, and the slave turned Wildling warrior Peter, but the voices of many of the other secondary characters were false or redundant or both. The story is set in an England-expy, with a France-expy and Holy Roman Empire-expy nearby, though the religion is literally Christianity and not Christianity-shaped polytheism. Part of this worked, because even if it's not my religion there's enough culture Christianity around that its notions of holiness had power, where invoking St. Cuthbert would be LARP nonsense, but the mix of real and fictional elements was a little jarring. But finally, if there is a real conflict in this book, it's between the works of Man and the Powers of the Wild, and neither side is drawn particularly clearly. The world of knights lacks the layers of personal relationships, histories, and betrayals that made say, A Song of Ice and Fire so good when it was good. The forces of the Wild are hostile and dangerous, but not as malevolent as a true Dark Lord would be.

I did enjoy this book, and anything to do with swordfights was amazing, but I'm looking at the next four with aprehnsion rather than joy, and that's not true of a five-star book. This review is more hostile than the book really deserves, but that's because this book is almost great, and that's more frustrating than just being mediocre.