asianamlitfans | A Review of S.L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws (Tor, 2023)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

It’s been a little bit of time since I reviewed anything by S.L. Huang, so it was great to be able to spend the last week reading her high fantasy book The Water Outlaws (Tor, 2023), which is a retelling of the classic Chinese novel Water Margin. Some names are the same; others are changed, and Huang takes the core idea from the earlier text and then remixes it with a lot of speculative elements: “Lin Chong is an expert arms instructor, training the Emperor's soldiers in sword and truncheon, battle axe and spear, lance and crossbow. Unlike bolder friends who flirt with challenging the unequal hierarchies and values of Imperial society, she believes in keeping her head down and doing her job. Until a powerful man with a vendetta rips that carefully-built life away. Disgraced, tattooed as a criminal, and on the run from an Imperial Marshall who will stop at nothing to see her dead, Lin Chong is recruited by the Bandits of Liangshan. Mountain outlaws on the margins of society, the Liangshan Bandits proclaim a belief in justice—for women, for the downtrodden, for progressive thinkers a corrupt Empire would imprison or destroy. They’re also murderers, thieves, smugglers, and cutthroats. Apart, they love like demons and fight like tigers. Together, they could bring down an empire.”

Admittedly, I haven’t read Water Margin, so I don’t know too much about how to read this text as a kind of revision and a reimagining of it, but I did really enjoy it simply on the level of the plot. This novel does have a lot of gore, torture, and death, so the author includes a trigger warning early on, which I felt was more than fair and warranted. What was maddening about this book is the level of corruption and self-interest that motivates powerful governmental officials. The plot gets into motion because Lin Chong, a talented instructor of arms, basically refuses to be sexually assaulted by a high-level bureaucrat named Gao Qiu. Lin Chong is labeled a traitor to the empire under a false claim made by Gao Qiu, and she is originally slated to be executed. A plea by her friend Lu Junyi reduces the sentence, and she will be sent to complete hard labor in a prison camp, but what Lu Junyi doesn’t know is that Gao Qiu is already a step ahead and has planned for the guards who are escorting her to the prison camp to execute Lin Chong before she events get there. Lu Junyi had managed to send Lu Da, a lower-level military fighter to ensure that Lin Chong makes it to the prison camp, and it is Lu Da’s intervention (and the power of something called god’s teeth) that allows Lin Chong to survive that trip. Lin Chong ends up convalescing amongst the ragtag bandits of Liangshan. Back in the Empire, Cai Jiang, another high-level bureaucrat, is focusing on some experiments related to the scholar’s stone, which seems to be a kind of variation of the power that emanates from god’s teeth. Cai Jiang pushes Lu Junyi into this task, and it is Cai Jiang’s quest to harness this power that ends up the biggest source of antagonism for the Liangshan bandits. The Liangshan bandits end up getting into a tussle related to a group of soldiers that Cai Jiang needs to gain more resources, and so Cai Jiang ends up targeting them. The concluding arc sees Cai Jiang essentially use Gao Qiu as a pawn so that he can use the power of god’s teeth to destroy the Liangshan bandits. For their part, the Liangshan bandits put up a great fight, and the final sequence is impressively paced.

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