And so it ends. The Last Dark was good. Vastly better than the last few books. Covenant and Linden return to figures of power and more closely resemble their former selves. The mishmash supporting cast has a few people step forward and stand out from the crowd. Great powers come to a head. And while the Creator remains missing in action, The Despiser returns for a nice cameo appearance. There are still long passages chronicling impossible battles between god like enemies and heroes. Still a lot of noise that signifies nothing. But hey, it’s a novel, so wrapping up a…
Tag: stephen r donaldson
The Runes of The Earth
It’s hard to know exactly where to start here, which seems to be how Stephen R Donaldson felt when he decided to take one more trip to the well for The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The Runes of the Earth is filled with the retelling of tales any fan of the earlier books already know-and surely no one would pick this up and start reading here-so why all the backstory? The Runes of the Earth is a pretty bad book on countless levels. It follows in the tradition of the Second Chronicles-give the readers something broken-by allowing long years…
The One Tree by Stephen R Donaldson
The Matrix lost it’s way once the Wachowski Brothers decided the machines were the good guys and humans didn’t matter. Once the Programs took the lead, the story was doomed. In The One Tree, Stephen R Donaldson starts down the same dark path that the Wachowski Brothers took-he begins to make mere humans irrelevant. The fruit of his love affair with demi-gods will not ripen until the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but the seeds are planted here. I still loved The One Tree, for all it’s nonsense about Elohim and The Worm of The World’s End and The Guardian…
Lord Foul’s Bane Book One of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever
There are now almost ten books set in the universe of The Land. But it all started in 1977 with Lord Foul’s Bane. I just finished re-reading Lord Foul’s Bane for the first time in many years-it’s one of a handful of books that I’ve read more than once-and it seems both just as good as I remember it, and kind of silly. We open up with a grumpy man stiffly waking two miles into town to pay his phone bill. Along the walk he thinks about how much his life sucks since he came down with leprosy. His wife…
Against All Things Ending
Stephen R Donaldson writes about people you don’t like doing things you don’t understand. But I still have a soft spot for him. Among the first books I discovered on my own were the three books of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever. These were kind of a cross between Alice in Wonderland, Lord of The Rings, and Dune, with a touch of The Wizard of Oz tossed in for good measure. I loved these stories. The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant were a little less cheery than the first, and the first were about as cheery as a…