New fantasy series tells epic tale through Tlingit culture

In the last several years, there has been a steady stream of Indigenous fantasy novels on the mainstream book market. One of these is “The Raven and Eagle” trilogy by Caskey Russell, who takes readers on an epic fantasy adventure set to the backdrop of his Tlingit culture.

Russell knew he wanted to become an author after reading science fiction and fantasy in junior high and high school. While he was with a band in Seattle, after briefly dropping out from college, he realized he loved writing, playing music and reading books and poetry. He then re-enrolled in Western Washington University as an English major.

The idea for the book first came to him in January 2013, when he was a professor at the University of Wyoming and earned a yearlong sabbatical. He and his family were residing in New Zealand where he was a visiting faculty member at the University of Waikato, when he saw his two boys were homesick. “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” was in theaters at the time, so he took his boys to see the movie and visited places it were filmed.

“I was at work one day in my office …. and I thought to myself ‘I’m gonna write like a ‘Lord of the Rings’ but a Tlingit ‘Lord of the Rings’ and teach my boys a little bit of their Tlingit heritage and also try to entertain them because they were just having a hard time adjusting to the new country,’ ” Russell said.

He started developing the story that would become “The Door on the Sea,” and read pages to his sons at night. As he read from his manuscript, his boys wanted to be characters in the book, along with their stuffed animals among other demands.

The manuscript lay dormant for around eight years until Russell rediscovered it during the COVID pandemic.

“I found that I had written like 80 single-spaced pages or so and I remember reading it and I was like ‘Oh yeah! I remember writing that; that was fun.’ ”

Throughout the pandemic, he completed the manuscript, found an agent and sold the book. He ended up keeping several pieces of his sons’ feedback in the book.

In the book, Elān, a young boy, traps a salmon-stealing raven in his cupboard, unaware that it would hold the secret to saving his people from the shape-shifting Koosh invaders plaguing their shores. With a crew of unlikely characters including a human bear-cousin, a massive wolf and a vulgar raven, Elān must face stormy seas and other dangers to retrieve the Koosh’s most powerful weapon that only the raven knows about.

Amy Borsuk, Russell’s editor, said his book took his Tlingit cultural experience and made it into a hero’s journey that jumped off the page.

“It follows a very archetypal structure that the Western world is familiar with, but it’s integrated with a Tlingit cultural point of view and way of thinking, and beliefs and philosophies in the world and that just brought everything to life,” she said.

Unlike some modern fantasy books like George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” that jumps from one character to another, “The Door on the Sea” maintains a linear narrative that focuses on the protagonist’s perspective all the way through the story.

Russell’s trilogy incorporates various aspects of Tlingit culture and legends, particularly stories about the character Raven. In the stories he was told growing up, Russell said Raven is a contrarian, scatological and an embodiment of the seven deadly sins. The opening chapters of his book reflect the raven in the same way.

Instead of repeating tales from oral tradition, Russell said he wanted to create new stories with the same characters.

“His writing emulates the oral storytelling tradition,” Borsuk said. “He often speaks directly to the reader as the narrator and that similarly evoked a very old yet familiar feeling of storytelling.”

At one point when they were developing the audiobook, Russell sent YouTube videos from projects done by his peers to Borsuk about elders being encouraged to tell Tlingit stories in their language. She said the videos helped with the pronunciation guides and showed the cadence of the language and how it was spoken.

For his book, Russell enjoyed using speculative fiction to create an alternate universe. Instead of trying to stay completely authentic to 18th century Alaska, he said it was a lot of fun to write a different universe.

“Indigenous storytelling doesn’t have to be relegated to the past, it can be speculative fiction,” he said. “You can reimagine the past and reimagine futures or alternative realities through speculative fiction.”

The book has been pitched and presented as a Tlingit Indigenous response to “The Lord of the Rings.”

Borsuk said the book is great for those who are looking for something new and exciting or those who have a sense of nostalgia and want to read Tolkien over again.

“If you like really fun ragtag adventures, even if you aren’t familiar with ‘Lord of the Rings’, I think it’s a very good entry point for youth fantasy readers,” she said. “I think it’s a refreshing sort of reboot or revival for a lot of people who read fantasy all the time because it is something different.”

Borsuk said the recent surge of Indigenous fantasy books is a good sign, because it means other editors are seeing the benefits of publishing these stories and bringing these cultures into the mainstream.

The next book in the trilogy, “The Eagle in the Mountain”, is scheduled to be released in September of this year, which Russell described as having a lot of action. He is currently working on Book 3, which is planned to be published in 2027.