Pagan rituals, visions and prophecies; commingling of myth, religion and history; poets, princes and perpetually plotting monarchs; sibling rivalry; siege and conquest. In her new novel Upon the Corner of the Moon (Regal House 2025), veteran North Carolina writer Valerie Nieman uses all this rich material—and more—to dramatize the backstory of two of Shakespeare’s most famous co-protagonists, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. It’s an amazing tour de force combining a fictional imagination honed over a long career alongside meticulous scholarship.
According to the book’s acknowledgements, Nieman spent thirty years reading, writing and researching this first volume in the Alba series (Book Two, The Last Highland King to be released in Fall 2027). Alba is the pre-Scottish Celtic kingdom formed by the union of the Picts and Scots in 843, ranging across much of southern and central Scotland. The Picts were a fierce people who remained unconquered (even by the Romans). Following union with the Scots, they were eventually assimilated. Nieman’s research is apparent throughout, from her use of Celtic names, customs, gods and goddesses to the Machiavellian geopolitical world she brings to life. For example, the practice of kings fostering other kings’ children, protecting them from those who’d ruthlessly kill the heirs to thrones they themselves would lay claim to.
Alongside history, the period’s rich mythology affects the characters and plot as much as politics. Macbeth becomes devoutly Christian, due to his education at the hands of a monk employed by his foster father, the wily King Malcolm. However, Gruach (her “ugly church-name”) maintains allegiance to The White Lady, whose power inhabits her foster mother, Alpia. During Gruach’s ritual initiation, involving both Mary-of-the-Sea and Christ, she receives the grand prophecy that will govern her life: “Marry in fire, bear in fire, lose in fire.” This commingling of pagan and Christian demonstrates how, before the latter devoured the former, both existed side by side. In many of the novel’s most dramatic scenes, the co-protagonists make crucial choices based on their spirituality.
As compelling as the plot is, the characters, major and minor, are extremely well-developed, providing deep backstory to Shakespeare’s play. When I learned that Nieman, whose writing I’ve admired since reviewing Blood Clay back in 2011, had written a novel based on the early lives of the Bard’s arguably most fascinating characters, I was eager to discover what they were like as children, adolescents and young adults, what enabled them to commit their bloody deeds. To her outstanding credit, Nieman delivers that and much more.
Well before she became Lady Macbeth, Gruach was given by King Malcolm in marriage to his right-hand man and the novel’s villain, Gillecomgan. When Gruach ventures an opinion on a minor matter before other noblemen, her husband delivers punishment demonstrating that the same cruelty making him a brutal warrior also makes him a perfect husband: he’s total master of his wife, who is, as her brother Nechtan later explains to Macbeth, a “hostage.” However, Gruach’s strength, bestowed by her re-birth years ago at the hands of The White Lady, helps her survive in this distinctly man’s world.
Macbeth lives constantly in the shadow of his foster brother Duncan, who exceeds Macbeth in the warrior skills that easily make him a favorite with King Malcolm, ensuring his succession to Alba’s throne when Malcolm eventually dies. Though Macbeth chafes under his brother’s arrogant superiority, he never totally gives up trying to befriend Duncan, whose reaction is mixed at best. While we know from Shakespeare’s play where this blood rivalry is leading, the effect is heightened rather than diluted.
Nieman’s novel is, thankfully, not one battle after another, though it could’ve been, given the period’s constant wars, where a king’s best ally one day will kill him the next. But almost all the fighting (until the exciting climax) occurs off-stage, focusing instead on how impossible it is to trust anyone, even your extended family, in this warrior culture. Somehow love still exists, as shown by Gruach’s deep affection for her foster parents and her brother Nechtan. Macbeth even loves his foster father, King Malcolm, who had Macbeth’s real father killed for political reasons. Because Nieman has penetrated (and dramatized) the culture’s psyche so deeply, I can understand, if not sanction, such complicated love.
Language plays a huge role in a novel set in the first century, and while there’s always a hint of the dramatist Shakespeare in Nieman’s dialogue, she mostly employs standard modern English with occasional flavorful archaic words mostly clear from context: kist, derbfine, cro, jarldoms. But the author, a published poet, can’t resist utilizing that particular skill to great effect. The praise-poet (and master manipulator) Lapwing’s point of view sections are entertaining exercises in poetic voice. Complete poems and songs not only provide exposition essential to the plot but characterize those who employ them.
Furthermore, great metaphors abound, always home-grown from the world in which they arise: “Duncan flew into a rage, spitting like fat meat on the fire.” And here is Macbeth, witnessing the council of King Malcolm and Cnut, come to receive tribute after defeating Malcolm’s army: “When the crowns were on their heads, they were not men but forces, like high tides or wind or the tremors that shook the earth.” And in a fateful scene near the conclusion, Gruach says of Macbeth: “Honesty crackled in him like lightning.” Content and style are perfect mirrors.
While the book is dense with meaning, character and event, the story of Alba is off to a grand start. Book One ends powerfully, with stirring events that will resonate throughout the next (and final) volume. Such is the magnitude of the story Nieman’s undertaken that, with her powers at their peak, the climactic coming events will shake the very heavens. As a result, we might never see or read Shakespeare’s masterpiece in quite the same way.
Valerie Nieman
Nieman is the author of seven novels. In the Lonely Backwater was honored with the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for the best book of fiction by a North Carolina writer. It’s an official International Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys Book Club pick, won the Mystery/Suspense category prize from American Writing Awards, and was a finalist at Forewords INDIES for YA fiction. She has held grants from the NEA, and the North Carolina and West Virginia arts councils. She earned degrees from West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte and worked as a reporter in coal country and a writing professor at NC A&T State University.
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