After the mare & foals barn at Hopeful Farm burns down, the Black returns to racing to win enough prize money to rebuild.

One of the hardest things about these books is the wildly divergent quality. For every The Black Stallion Revolts, there’s a Black Stallion and Satan. The pendulum swings with no pattern and no warning.

Which is how we end up here, one book after The Island Stallion Races, with a legitimately great book.

I KNOW! Rest assured, I’ve still got some snark, because there’s a lot in here that’s nuts, but honestly? I really, truly enjoyed reading it. It had interesting characters, a good plot arc, reasonable tension, and some terrific race scenes. Definitely a top 5 for me.

We open the book on Alec waking up in the middle of the night because something indefinable is wrong. He gets out of bed and for plot reasons cleans out his coat pockets before going to find out what’s wrong.

The letter was from the insurance company. Opening it he found that as of three days ago, when final payment on the fire insurance policy had been due, all the barns and other buildings of Hopeful Farm were unprotected in case of loss or damage! Furious with himself, Alec shoved the letter into his pocket. It was inexcusable that he should have forgotten to give the premium notice to his father, allowing the policy to lapse.

HERE HAVE SOME FORESHADOWING, says Walter Farley. Honestly, though, would you expect anything else from Hopeful Farm, site of some of the most bizarre business practices in the Thoroughbred industry. (See about thirty pages later, where Alec is utterly horrified at the idea that he might have to sell some horses!!! NO!!!! NOT THAT!!!!)

If you missed the big, glaring hint, the weird feeling that woke Alec up was some kind of psychic premonition that the foaling barn was going to burn down. But here’s what actually happens.

• Alec goes to the barn, where he finds a mare named Miss Liz ready to foal
• He finds the foaling manager up in Henry’s apartment smoking a pipe and cooking bacon
• They get into a fight that leads to the foaling manager – who sounds like an incompetent asshole? – storming out
• At that moment the mare goes into labor and Alec helps her foal out but for some reason she tries to murder her foal and that’s like a known thing that she does and yet they keep breeding her???

  • “Old mare, why do you make these moments, which should be the best of all, so terrible? I’m not going to let you kill him as you did another of your sons. Nor will you kill me as you did old Charley Grimm. I’m not afraid of you, old mare, just very sad for you.”

• Just after the foal is born Alec’s father arrives and says oh hey THE WHOLE TOP OF THE BARN IS ON FIRE
• And they realize that Alec and the foaling manager both stormed out of the apartment without taking the bacon off the stove

Alec has to break the news to his father that there’s no more fire insurance and the farm has suffered a $100,000 loss (at least it’s a nice round number?) but he conveniently leaves out at this moment and frankly for the rest of the book that the fire is mostly his fault.

Alec’s father is bummed out, obviously, but it’s fine, really.

“Of course, Black Minx,” Mr. Ramsay said quickly and simply. “I should have thought of her immediately. But then you and Henry have told me so little of her chances in the coming Preakness.”

HOLD UP.

HOLD ON JUST A MINUTE.

We need to have a conversation about timeline, people.

The Black Stallion’s Filly was four books ago. In between, I think we can yank The Black Stallion’s Sulky Colt and The Island Stallion Races out of the timeline because they don’t deal directly with the ongoing narrative. But you know what happened in between Filly and this book? The Black Stallion Revolts. You know, when the Black caused a plane crash and Alec wandered around the desert with amnesia for how many weeks?

Not that many weeks, apparently, because it happened in between the Derby and the Preakness! There are context clues later on that indicate that Revolts did indeed happen in that ~5 weeks (people remark on the Black’s scars, which are a major part of the narrative of Revolts, but no one mentions “that time that Alec and the Black vanished”?).

SO THAT’S INSANE.

Anyway, Alec doesn’t have all that much confidence in Black Minx – he’s never been her biggest fan – so he decides the Black is going to come back to racing. Gone are all the concerns about trivial matters like “not being a registered Thoroughbred” (though I guess they got over that one in order to breed him?) and “he tries to murder other horses.” Like totally gone. Not only does no one mention them, the Black never puts a foot wrong in this entire book. He is totally devoid of personality. It’s one of the biggest flaws in this otherwise pretty good book.

Black Minx is not trending well, which is exasperating Henry, who keeps stomping around insisting that he’s going to figure out what’s wrong.

It wasn’t really the filly’s loafing through her works that bothered him. And it had nothing to do with her legs, her speed or her stamina. It was her eyes. They told him, just as if she’d spoken, that she was bored with racing, that anything after her glorious win in the Kentucky Derby would be an anti-climax. But how int he world could he have explained that to Henry?

The book continues to juggle two narratives from now on. The first is what exactly is going on with Black Minx – why isn’t she racing the way she did in the Derby? The second is bringing the Black back to the racetrack when the handicapper keeps putting more and more weight on him. A major subplot of both narratives is the three year old champion Eclipse who everyone thinks is the greatest thing since sliced bread for no discernible reason, and the five year old champion Casey.

Farley actually juggles these two narratives with a fairly deft hand, though Henry doesn’t come out of it looking like roses – mostly like an asshole who yells a lot. It moves back and forth constantly, and there’s enough racing action to balance out the endless “But whyyyyyyyy won’t Minx just run?” whining and the everyone freaking out about how much weight the Black is carrying.

A lot of the suspicions about Black Minx are weirdly gendered.

[Alec] took a large silk handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed her coal-black coat. Like a lady, she seemed to love the touch of silk, too. He had found that it pacified her more than anything else.

Grossssssss.

I feel at this point, though, that I should mention that poor Satan is basically chopped liver in the background of all of this. Seriously, you guys, you have the TRIPLE CROWN WINNER in your barn and you are so broke you need to rely on winning races to earn money? WORST BUSINESS PLAN EVER. All indications are that they’re not studding Satan out. They’re using him only on their own mares. And so literally the only horses they have that can race are Minx and the Black. Can you imagine if his owners had taken American Pharoah back and said “nah, we’re good, gonna use him on like 12 mares a year that we own personally”? NUTS.

So you see what I mean by a genuinely enjoyable book with total insanity going on in the background? Come to think of it, that’s the same thing you could say about The Black Stallion and Satan. I think Walter Farley might have a winning formula here.

Black Minx runs third in the Preakness after running a mediocre race and getting beat by Eclipse, and Alec floats his theory of why she’s not running well: he thinks she’s in love with Wintertime, a bay colt that featured in her book as a competitor. They do some experimenting over the course of the book and not to spoil you, but Alec turns out to be right. Minx won’t pass Wintertime, and she only works well when they’re worked together. He also goes off his grain when she’s stabled too far away. TRUE LOVE.

So of course Henry decides to buy Wintertime for $20,000, or almost exactly the sum of money they’ve managed to earn so far, because…they need another stud? FUCKING TRIPLE CROWN WINNER IN YOUR FUCKING BARN, HENRY.

You guys, I’ve been on the fence but I’d like to announce that I am 100% on Team Satan from now on. It started with the insane breaking and continued with the fat-shaming and the daddy issues and now he is just getting shat on by exclusion constantly.

Ugh. Anyway. While they’ve been trying to figure out Black Minx (those women, you know, you just never know what’s going on in their brains! is not too much of a stretch to read into her whole subplot), the Black has been humming along.

First, he crushes the field in a race of seven furlongs, because remember how Alec told Black Minx her sire was the best “distance” racer of all time? Oh yeah, he’s a sprinter too. But that win sets him up to carry a lot of weight in his future races, and Henry stomps around and yells a lot about how unfair it all is.

I feel like I should also mention that Casey (the champion five year old) is ridden by some kind of extra from The Quiet Man who is one of Henry’s besties.

“‘Tis likin’ the ride I gave him they are and no one else will sit on him but me. Now ’tis later in the mornin’ than I like to be gettin’ to work even for a Sunday. So please get on with you.”

Vaguely racist stereotyping aside, his name is Michael Costello and he’s kind of great when he’s not talking. Some of the best scenes in the book are him strategizing the race and being wayyyyyyyyy smarter than Alec.

There are a couple of other interesting themes in the book, like:

• Henry getting older, and feeling both fragile and overlooked; he clearly gets angry a lot of the time because he’s worried about his relevance.
• Billy Watts, Wintertime’s jockey, burning out on the danger of being a jockey and there was a bit with him in a race when I almost couldn’t bear to read because I was so terrified that Walter Farley would kill him, but no fear, he retires and becomes Hopeful Farm’s new foaling manager. He’s a nice guy and all but the fuck does he know about mares and foals?
• What makes a great horse? Is it speed or a way of going or a type or a certain look or the competition he faces? There’s a lot of debate about this and it’s good!
• What is a handicapper’s job and how does he do it? There was a chapter in the head of the handicapper that everyone was railing against as he thought about why he gave Eclipse basically no weight and the Black an obscene amount of weight (146 pounds in his final race).

I know, right?!? There’s a lot going on in this book!

The book leads, as we all knew it would, to what is basically a match race between Eclipse, Casey, and the Black. It’s a GREAT race. It’s just as exciting and well-written as the Black’s original match race with Sun Raider and Cyclone. (Haha, remember them? No one else does!)

The Black wins, of course, but he’s pushed HARD to do it, both in terms of Alec’s strategy and his own physical endurance. You’re left feeling for maybe the first time ever that the Black was stretched to the absolute limit. Which is a really cool thing.

So there you have it! Maybe not as much snark as usual, but I actually had a lot of fun reading it, so there’s that.

Do you remember this book? Do you also think it’s dumb that Black Minx started refusing to race without her boyfriend? Are you on Team Satan with me?

Two aliens from another world enter the secret valley of Azul Island and offer Steve an opportunity for Flame to compete against the world’s fastest race horses.

Okay. Here we go, people. This is what we’ve been training for. *cracks knuckles*

This is the third Island Stallion book, and the third summer that Steve Duncan is spending on Azul Island. This year, Pitch is off in New York working on his endless hero-worship Conquistador research, so Steve is alone on the island, which as far as he’s concerned is the way life should be: just him, Flame, and the weird Blue Valley herd of horses.

Speaking of the horses, the colt that we agonized over so much in the last book never did end up going home with Steve or more accurately his parents gave his dumb plan a giant thumbs down and said they were either paying for a horse or for him to jaunt off to the Caribbean every summer and Steve chose the latter. Honestly that is the best parenting so far in the entire series. Bravo, Mr. and Mrs. Duncan!

Speaking of the magical Flame:

As always, Flame marveled when after a few swallows, Flame left the pool to rejoin his band. Hot as he was, thirsty as he was, this wild stallion would drink very little when overheated. Steve wondered how many domestic horses would have left the cool water as Flame had done.

Remember in the last book when the Black drank cold water and colicked so hard he caused a plane crash? I can’t tell if Walter Farley is trying to tell us Flame is smarter than the Black or if he even thinks his plots/story arcs through that much?

On the other hand, Azul Island sounds PRETTY GREAT.

It was a world free of every care except the care of horses.

Yes, please.

So, Steve swans around the island getting settled into his campsite, thinking a lot about what he’s going to eat and when, and riding Flame around very fast and thinking about how very fast Flame is. Late in the day, a weird golden light appears and Steve jumps to the most obvious conclusion.

A sun where there had been no sun. The end of the world had come!

The world, unfortunately for the readers, does not end but there’s a weird sequence where Steve sort of…blacks out while seeing his life flash before his eyes. When he wakes up, he convinces himself the light was a meteor and runs to the top of the cliffs to see if the ocean is boiling. Which it is not. Because that’s not really a thing that happens after a meteor strike.

What he see is a complicated and poorly described thing that is either a flat metal disc on the surface of the ocean, or a glowing light, or a needle-shaped floating object, or maybe a combination of two or three of those things depending on the moment in the narrative.

Clearly it’s not that exciting, though, because he goes to bed and then wakes up the next morning thinking again about Flame and how very fast he is and how there was a poster he saw advertising a race in Havana that was “OPEN TO THE WORLD” and how that really should mean Azul Island, too! Steve has little to no concept of hyperbole.

All this playing around isn’t enough to entirely distract him, though, and he returns to the cliffs to stare at the thing in the distance a bit more, but gets scared and returns through the caves and has a weird…sort of…hallucinatory experience. He hears voices. He follows the voices and in the Conquistador dining room he finds two men in business suits.

“Come in, Steve,” one voice said suddenly. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

And this is when the book goes completely off the rails.

The two men are named Jay and Flick and they are both kind of insane. They’re pretty clearly aliens, to the reader anyway, but Steve is either too stupid or too traumatized to realize this and we have to read an awful lot of weird banter between the two men that is frankly somewhat confusing and annoying to follow, like, Walter Farley, if you’re going to have two aliens randomly show up on Azul Island GO BIG OR GO HOME.

Anyway, they’re not just aliens, they’re creepy telepathic aliens who kind of spend the rest of the book mind-raping Steve. I’m not really kidding.

How long it was before he could see their faces again, he could not have told. But suddenly he was asking himself how anyone could look at these two men and think anything but good of them. Flick was smiling, pleased and happy that Steve trusted them completely, that he now felt confident no one, no country, had anything to fear from them.

Steve goes from so scared he’s catatonic to happy-go-lucky about aliens in the space of that one paragraph and I think it bears saying that THIS IS NOT OKAY.

I also feel like I need to say that: I am not opposed to science fiction. The vast majority of what I read for pleasure falls into the science fiction/fantasy category. I am totally down with aliens. I am totally down with moral gray areas, clashes of interstellar ideology, and general weirdness.

This is not really that; we never get a sense of a truly alien presence in either Jay or Flick. They’re just annoying creepos who descend on Steve and all of a sudden he is doing things that are TOTALLY INSANE. Honestly, given the way Jay and Flick mentally manipulate him from their first meeting I think there’s a good argument that nothing that follows is really consensual.

But I digress. Back to Azul Island, where Jay natters on about anything and everything and how he’s such a big horse racing fan except he’s also kind of an idiot? He lacks any kind of powers of observation and yet thinks he’s an expert and keeps showing up and saying things like

“But let’s talk about horses, Steve. Flame is a very beautiful animal and you sit him well.”

It’s kind of hard to explain in a recap like this how supremely weird everything Jay says about horses is. It’s all just off in a skin-crawling kind of way. Like he has this whole rant about the way jockeys ride their horses, standing up in their stirrups, that is supposed to be the narrative’s clue that he’s accidentally been away from Earth for 50 years, but it’s just so weird and oddly delivered.

Jay is constantly proposing things that make Steve really uncomfortable.

Still eager and with overwhelming curiosity Jay asked, “Would you like to fly, Steve? It’s the easiest thing and the most fun of all. Listen to what I have to say now. You must relax a bit more and help me. Make your mind a blank. Forget everything you’ve ever known in this world you call Earth. Forget all you’ve ever seen and been told. Now, Steve…”

Steve felt a heavy blackness come swiftly to his mind, claiming it for its very own. He fought it as he had never fought anything before. There was no pain but he writhed in agony and his arms flayed the air fighting nothing. He opened his mouth to yell, but no sound emerged.

You may ask yourself, why is Steve still hanging out with these creepos? GOOD QUESTION. NO ANSWER. The whole next chunk of the book is Steve trying to return to a semblance of normal life for an hour or two, and then one of the aliens – mostly Jay – popping up to do skeevy things. He even blackmails poor Flick into letting him do all sorts of things that keep escalating. (Apparently Flick went to some other planet he wasn’t allowed.)

Escalation reaches fever pitch when Jay decides he’s going to the international race in Havana that Steve was thinking about earlier, and then he comes up with his most batshit insane idea yet.

“Why don’t you and Flame come too, Steve? You can race him! That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? We’d have plenty of room in the ship.”

Jay’s words couldn’t be shrugged off as sheer folly! For how often had he dreamed of racing Flame?

NO, STEVE. WAVE OFF. BAD IDEA.

“I accept Jay and Flick from [Alula], not as deadly, threatening enemies to our very existence, but as good and kind friends touring other worlds in much the same manner as we visit other states and countries. I accept all this, and having accepted it I have nothing to fear except what I’ve learned to fear in my own world.”

That last sentence is like the perfect example of something someone writes to sound smart but on the tiniest examination is just DUMB.

Steve writes down everything he’s seen and done with Jay and Flick and Jay gaslights the everloving fuck out of him. Steve asks him if he minds writing and Jay says no! it’s adorable that you write things! you know no one will ever believe you, right? tee-hee!

In case you hadn’t noticed yet JAY IS A FUCKING SOCIOPATH.

Steve announces that he doesn’t want to race Flame after all, because he’s worried about taking the stallion out of his natural environment, which is the kind of intelligent, sensitive, and mature decision that has NO place in these books, so of course within a page or two Jay has talked him into it after all.

Well, first he makes sure that Steve has seen a few races (he has) and that Steve knows Flame is faster.

“After all, we wouldn’t want to go to the work of getting him there and then have him lose the race. It would be a terrible disappointment for both of us.”

Yes, Jay, the worst thing that could happen when two aliens take a wild stallion from his isolated island and drop him into the middle of a race is for him to lose and embarrass you.

Of course they decide to bring Flame to the race, but it turns out that Flame has “closed his mind” to Jay and Flick, and they can’t mentally manipulate him, so they enlist Steve’s help to make them seem like best buds and…I don’t even know, you guys, this whole thing makes zero sense. I guess it works, though, because then the aliens give Steve a magic bridle.

Yup. You read that right.

Only it wasn’t a rope at all. It was as soft as flesh and just as pliant. It had no weight and yet there was a great deal of it, fashioned in the shape of a hackamore, complete with reins. It had no color at all, and yet contained the most brilliant of all colors. The fibers pulsated beneath his fingers, seemingly alive and warm.

Anyone else feel nauseated at the idea of reins that are a) warm, b) pulsating, and c) “soft as flesh and just as pliant”?

Steve keeps trying to bring up logic and Jay keeps gaslighting and/or manipulating him.

“If it’s an open race, it’s open to any horse in the world which may want to race in it. You have every legal right to race Flame. You can demand it!”

“But I still have to answer their questions. And they’ll ask where we’re from.”

“You and Flame are from this world, aren’t you?” Jay demanded. “That’s all that is necessary to tell them.”

…yes, that’s all it takes to enter a horse in a race HOW DOES THIS KEEP GETTING CRAZIER.

Off they go to Cuba, which requires the following steps:

• get Flame into the launch, the small boat that Steve used to get to the island
• get Flame into the larger ship
• get Flame into a smaller cruiser that then flies to Cuba
• settle Flame into a stall for the first time

Yeah it’s just as bizarre as it seems. Flame refuses to eat hay, for example, which – I honestly can’t figure out if that’s just dumb or not? I feel like it is, but maybe a horse that’s never ever seen hay really wouldn’t get it at first?! Please help me figure out where to land on this one!

Jay heads off to Havana to enter Flame in the race and…I can only guess continues to use his telepathy to manipulate people because he has a whole series of conversations like this but gets into the race anyway:

“If you won’t tell me what time they go to the post, I’ll get the information from your secretary,” he said curtly.

“But this race is by invitation only,” the man said.

“Your posters made no mention of that condition,” he said sternly. “No mention that you’d only the horses you wanted to race in the International. You advised the public that the International Race was Open to the World.”

That is a loophole you could drive a Mack truck through. “Oh, it didn’t say I couldn’t do this on the poster, so therefore I can do it!”

Go ahead, try it! Show up at Kentucky and say “Well there was nothing on the poster that said I couldn’t come so LET ME AT THAT HEAD OF THE LAKE!”

Somehow, though, the race organizers think this will be a great publicity idea. Just splendid! Think of all the attention it will get them to have a rando horse that they’ve never laid eyes on show up at absolutely the last second and race! Jesus. At least the Black ‘s match race had months of build-up and hype!

Meanwhile, Steve is pondering things like “how am I going to control Flame in this race?” and “what if people recognize me?” and “how do I even ride a horse in a race?”

Wasn’t it the most natural thing in the world to wonder if every move he made in the race would come instinctively, without thought or plan?

WHAT THE FUCK, STEVE, NO. “Gee, I wonder if this insanely dangerous and stupid thing I’m about to do will just come instinctively to me? Or should I put some thing into what I’m doing? Nah. Let’s just let nature do its thing.”

They get to the track at the absolute last second, sort of after the post parade, at which point Jay announces that the alien ship has to leave very soon so unless Steve hurries it up Jay is going to abandon him and Flame in Havana. Like this race needed any more tension.

The starter gets so close to being the first sane character in the book but then veers off.

[Flame] wore nothing but a rope hackamore with two long golden tassels hanging from it. His rider was sitting bareback and wore no silks, just T-shirt and jeans. Strange, very strange indeed.

“Strange.” Yes. You could say that.

Somehow Flame gets into the gate and they are off and holy mackerel, people, this race is an absolute shitstorm of insanity.

First things first, Flame isn’t interested in running fast so much as he is in killing all the other horses in the race. Pretty explicitly.

[Flame] hesitated a second, wondering why the other stallion did not turn upon him so they could rise together in deadly combat.

Steve then realizes the only way to make Flame run is to keep redirecting his attention on the next horse ahead of him in hopes that his horse will want to run them down and murder them.

“Go, Flame!” he screamed, kindling the fire of Flame’s natural hatred for his own kind, encouraging him to run the others down! Only by taking advantage of the generations of breeding behind Flame could he hope to make a race of it.

…He was encouraging Flame to attack and attack again while they went ever closer to the front.

In.fucking.sane. Somehow, Steve keeps Flame focused on the next horse, and the next horse, until suddenly they’re in front and uh-oh, no more potential murder targets! Whatever will they do? Luckily, there’s an outrider ahead!

If the spectators had not known previously that they were witnessing the furious charges of an unbroken stallion, they were aware of it immediately following the end of the race. For the great red horse who had won surged past the finish line like a raging demon. They saw the object of his attack, for the outrider’s pinto horse was rearing high in the air while his rider sought to take him off the track.

All the other owners have to be furious, right? They all shipped their horses to Cuba and entered this race in good faith and at the last second the organizers sprung an unbroken murder machine on them that won the race and then tried to kill an outrider’s horse and WHAT THE HELL.

They won, so I guess Steve should be happy, except he’s really not because the race was a total nightmare. It’s not fun to revel in how fast your horse is going when you’re mostly thinking about whether or not it will slaughter the other horses.

Somehow, he directs Flame off the track, and they basically sprint to the horse van and drive back to the farm they leased. They lead all the reporters who were at the race on a merry chase through the woods and all the reporters watch as they all go into an invisible something and then vanish themselves. Yeah.

Well, they get back to Azul Island without further incident, and just before he heads off into the sunset Jay tells Steve that part of the reason he likes visiting Earth is that the aliens have somehow gotten rid of all animals on their planet which…like…are they all vegetarians now? do they even have an ecosystem? how do you get rid of ALL animals? all of them? what.the.fuck?

Ugh. Anyway. Jay and the spaceship vanish and…the next morning Steve wakes up and decides it’s all been a dream. Way to gut the consequences of your whole book, Walter Farley.

BUT WAIT!

Remember Pitch, who’s off in New York researching and being his usual weird self about how great the Conquistadors are?

He held the book close to his thin chest thinking how little Ray must know about Spanish-American history to believe anything in New York could be as interesting. Why, nothing could be so exciting as reading about those Spanish conquests!

I feel like I hammer this point into the ground with every Island Stallion book but: rape! genocide! cultural destruction! imperialism! none of these things are cause for excitement, Pitch!

Anyway, Pitch stops to buy a paper and lo and behold! Steve and Flame are on the front page, winning the International! It did happen after all! Pitch heads straight to the airport and back home without even returning his library book, he’s so shocked.

And that’s how we end.

Whew.

Well? Did you remember the aliens? Do you think redirecting murderous impulses is a good race strategy?