Chia Black Dragon

Chia Black Dragon is the eponymous anti-hero of a dark fantasy series of novels written by Stephen Marley. Chia is identified in the novels as "The most dangerous woman in the history of man". The term "Chinese Gothic" was coined to describe the world of Chia Black Dragon.

Chia is a part-human, part-demon Chinese woman. She was born on the shores of north China in the 3rd millennium BC. Her mother, Chi, was human but her father, Glak, was the last of a monstrous prehuman race who possessed the capacity for "infinite flesh", i.e. the ability to transform into a bewildering variety of Lovecraftian metamorphoses. This ability has passed on to Chia in the modified form of "wild flesh" which rejuvenates her every few years, with the result that she ages about three years in every thousand (after having aged normally up to her twelfth year). In the months leading up to her wild flesh rejuvenations she becomes increasingly deranged and dangerous. At the time of the first Chia novel, Spirit Mirror, she is twenty years old in appearance but almost three thousand years old chronologically.

Chia, whose name means Twilight in a pre-Chinese language, and who later gained the title "Black Dragon" from her valley-home on Black Dragon Mountain, is very much a dark and light character, her spirit blighted in infancy by her father whom she later kills with the aid of her twin brother, Nyak. She and Nyak soon take different paths, Chia struggling (and constantly failing) to become fully human, Nyak aspiring to inherit the full powers of his father. As the centuries progress the twins become the bitterest of enemies.

Chia Black Dragon was brought up as a cannibal and psychic vampire by her father, and although she rejected the cannibalistic rituals of her childhood she still reverts to vampirism at times throughout her life, sometimes by choice. She never does quests but is spurred into action only by the desire to help a close friend or (more usually) destroy an enemy. Chia's lesbian nature is clearly stated in the novels but, with the exception of a scene in Shadow Sisters, there are no outright sexual encounters.

Although the Chia series definitely belongs in the darkest of the dark fantasy genre, the stories, and Chia herself, abound in quirky black humour that counterbalances the frequent eruptions of horror and violence. Chia is, for example, deliberately written as an anachronistic character, in speech and also in appearance (she strolls around ancient China and Rome in a modern black overcoat and wears sunglasses - both of her own design). She is, essentially, a modern character set in the past. Despite her daunting history as a former cannibal, sometime vampire, assassin etc., Chia nevertheless comes across as vulnerable as well as formidable. Self-loathing is a permanent feature of her personality. The other characters in the stories rarely see Chia's vulnerable side but the reader is frequently afforded an insight into her self-doubt and fears even as she is putting on an arrogant front to those around her.

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