Scott Hawkins Books

Scott Hawkins is proof that one book can be enough to build a devoted readership. A software engineer by trade, he published his debut novel The Library at Mount Char in 2015, and for a decade that single book has been passed hand to hand with some version of the same warning: I cannot explain it, just read it.

The Library at Mount Char follows Carolyn, one of twelve orphans raised by a man they call Father, a being so old and powerful he may as well be God. Each child was forced to master one catalog of his impossible library: languages, war, healing, death, the ways of beasts. When Father disappears, the siblings begin maneuvering to inherit a universe, and Carolyn, the quiet one who learned every language ever spoken, turns out to have been planning something for a very long time. The book is violent, funny in a way that sneaks up on you, and structured like a puzzle box that clicks together in the final act. Readers who loved it tend to rank it among their favorite standalones in all of fantasy.

What defines Hawkins as a writer is tonal control. Mount Char swings from genuine horror, and it earns its content warnings, to deadpan comedy about a barbecue or a pair of tutu-wearing lions, without ever losing the thread. His characters are damaged in ways the plot takes seriously. The siblings are a textbook dark mirror of the found family trope: bound for life, shaped by shared abuse, and still capable of loyalty that lands like a gut punch. Carolyn herself is one of the great morally gray protagonists, a heroine whose plan is monstrous and whose reasons still break your heart.

The long silence after Mount Char became its own running joke among fans, but it is finally over: his second novel, Blacktail, is scheduled for September 2026. Expectations are enormous, which tells you how much trust one debut bought him.

For romantasy readers, be clear about what this is and is not. There is no romance arc driving Mount Char, and it sits at a 0 on our spice scale, though the violence pushes the content intensity far higher than the heat. Think of Hawkins as a palate cleanser between romance-heavy series, the book you hand someone who says nothing surprises them anymore. If your favorite part of dark romantasy is the dark, the atmosphere of power, cruelty, and strange tenderness, Mount Char scratches that itch harder than almost anything on this site. If your favorite part is the love story, borrow it from the library and keep your expectations calibrated.

It is also worth knowing what kind of reader falls hardest for this book, because the fan base has a type. Mount Char rewards people who like being disoriented on purpose. The first hundred pages withhold almost everything: why the siblings dress in strange costumes, why a normal guy named Steve is being blackmailed into a burglary, what happened to the neighborhood they grew up in. Hawkins trusts you to hold the confusion, and the back half pays every question off with interest. If you have ever loved a book more on the second read, this one was built for you. The Reddit and BookTok threads about it are full of people rereading the opening chapters immediately after finishing, because the same scenes read completely differently once you know what Carolyn knows.

Where to start is easy, since for now there is one novel. Go in as blind as you can, push through the brutal early chapters, and trust that every strange detail is load-bearing. Then join the rest of us waiting for Blacktail, and if you need something to read in the meantime, our reader quiz can find you another standalone with teeth.