Covenant snatched at her wrist. “Listen.” His voice must have held emotion—urgency, anguish, something—but she did not hear it. “This you have to understand. There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.”

Rating:

In this first book of The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen R. Donaldson, it has been ten years since Covenant’s last trip to the Land.  During that time, he gets control of his leprosy and begins writing again.  His life reaches a certain level of peace until Lord Foul is able to use someone close to him to pull him to the Land again, to give Foul another shot at using Covenant’s ring to escape the world which is his prison.
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The Giant glanced up at the chill sky, then looked at Covenant’s gaunt face. His cavernous eyes glinted sharply, as if he understood what Covenant had been through. As gently as he had spoken to Lena, he asked, “Do you now believe in the Land?”

“I’m the Unbeliever. I don’t change.”

“Do you not?”

“I am going to”–Covenant’s shoulders hunched–”exterminate Lord Foul the bloody Despiser. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“Oh, it is enough for me,” Foamfollower said with sudden vehemence. “I require nothing more. But it does not suffice for you. What do you believe–what is your faith?”

“I don’t know.”

Foamfollower looked away again at the weather. His heavy brows hid his eyes, but his smile seemed sad, almost hopeless. “Therefore I am afraid.”

Rating:

Through these first three books, Covenant keeps trying to find the answer to Lord Foul and to his own relationship with the Land. Refusing to believe or get involved didn’t work in the first one; and deceit and bargains failed in the second; so this time around, he tries hate. As you might expect, that doesn’t go so well either. Eventually he finds an answer that works, for him.

At the same time, Mhoram is finding his own answer as he realizes the Lords’ Oath of Peace is just as damaging in its own way as the violent destruction it was created to prevent. Just as Covenant has to find the balance between wild magic and impotence, Mhoram has to find the sweet spot between passion and restraint, to battle an even greater army than the people of the Land faced in the last book. Mhoram nearly steals the show in this book, as the Land’s tremendous need pushes him to feats he never thought possible.

And Foamfollower is back! After disappearing for a while, he’s back here, and he’s not the smiling optimist he was in the first book. He’s carrying a load of guilt for the terrible things he’s seen and done, and may need redemption as badly as Covenant does. He again becomes Covenant’s best friend in the Land, and is there to make the difference in Covenant’s final battle with Despite.

There are so many good stories here that I can’t get into without spoiling it. The Bloodguard react to their failure in the only way they know how. Triock, even though he hates Covenant, helps bring him to the Land when he realizes the white gold is the Land’s only hope. The Ranyhyn are still keeping their pact with Covenant, even though it’s slowly killing them. The jheherrin are one of my favorite parts of the book: creatures discarded as the waste of Foul’s failed experiments over the years, they live in fear of him; but they find the strength in themselves to help redeem Covenant and Foamfollower.

This book wraps up all the threads from the first two very well; and, for me at least, it makes all the bleakness and setbacks and wrongs that went before worth it. In the end, Covenant is still a leper and evil still exists, but he’s learned to deal with it without self-hatred and has found a sort of peace.

It may seem from my descriptions and quotes that these books are nothing but anguish and talking, so I’ll wrap up this review with a piece of an action scene from this book (one that would look great on screen). The next review will be the first book of the Second Chronicles, which I think is even better.

With all his strength, [Mhoram] leveled a blast of Lords-fire at the Raver’s leering skull.

Satansfist knocked the attack down as if it were negligible; disdainfully, he slapped Mhoram’s blue out of the air with his Stone and returned a bolt so full of cold emerald force that it scorched the atmosphere as it moved.

Mhoram sensed its power, knew that it would slay him if it struck. But Drinny dodged with a fleet, fluid motion which belied the wrenching change of his momentum. The bolt missed, crashed instead into the creatures pursuing the High Lord, killed them all.

That gave Mhoram the instant he needed. He corrected Drinny’s aim, cocked his staff over his shoulder. Before samadhi could unleash another blast, the High Lord was upon him.

Using all Drinny’s speed, all the strength of his body, all the violated passion of his love for the Land, Mhoram swung. His staff caught Satansfist squarely across the forehead.

The concussion ripped Mhoram from his seat like a dry leaf in the wind. His staff shattered at the blow, exploded into splinters, and he hit the ground amid a brief light rain of wood slivers. He was stunned. He rolled helplessly a few feet over the frozen earth, could not stop himself, could not regain his breath. His mind went blank for an instant, then began to ache as his body ached. His hands and arms were numb, paralyzed by the force which had burned through them.

You’ll have to read the books to see how it turns out.

Sometime later, Covenant climbed to his feet, hugging the pain in his chest. His voice was weak from the effort of speaking around his hurt. “Bannor.”

“Ur-Lord?”

“Tell the High Lord about this. Tell her everything–about Trell and me–and Troy.”

“Yes.”

“And, Bannor–”

The Bloodguard waited impassively.

“I wouldn’t do it again–attack a girl like that. I would take it back if I could.” He said it as if it were a promise that he owed Bannor for saving his life.

But Bannor gave no sign that he understood or cared what the Unbeliever was saying.

After a while, Covenant went on, “Bannor, you’re practically the only person around here who hasn’t at least tried to forgive me for anything.”

“The Bloodguard do not forgive.”

“I know. I remember. I should count my blessings.” With his arms wrapped around his chest to hold the pieces of himself together, he went back to his rooms.

Rating:

When I first read these books as a kid, The Illearth War was my least favorite. Middle books of trilogies are rarely the strongest anyway, since you don’t get the excitement of meeting a bunch of new characters or the climax of the ending. I didn’t like the fact that the main character from the entire first book disappeared for half of this one; and I didn’t like Hile Troy in the position of protagonist. Most of the interplay between Covenant and Elena went over my head at that age (probably a good thing). Foamfollower, one of the best characters of the first book, is missing in this one. All in all, I found it a disappointment.

Reading it now, I like it much more and find it just as strong as the others. Hile Troy is the perfect contrast to Covenant: a man who was also whisked away from our world to the Land, but who embraces everything about it and wants to be a hero. He has none of Covenant’s fear of power, and dismisses Covenant’s prediction that he’s setting himself up for a fall. If you spent the first book wishing Covenant would stop crying about stuff and start blasting bad guys with his ring—well, Hile Troy is your guy.

Bannor really starts to comes to life as a character here, as he’s forced to take a more active role between Covenant and the Land. The scene I quoted above sums up Bannor and the Bloodguard: they’re completely devoted to their honor and the Vow they made to the Land, and the power of that Vow has given them a nearly unstoppable ability to keep it. But if it is ever broken, how will they handle that?

Mhoram starts to shine here too, especially when Troy puts the survival of the army on his shoulders. A main theme of these first three books is the balance between passion and control—Covenant’s wild magic and Elena’s desperation versus the stoicism of the Bloodguard and the Lords’ Oath of Peace. That develops further in the next book, but Mhoram starts to see the possibilities here.

There is also more action in this book than the first one, with two armies on the move and other things going on elsewhere. That partly reflects Hile Troy’s influence, as he’s very much a man of action who makes Covenant look like a man of sitting around and fretting. By the end of the book, I like Troy a lot. He may not always do the smartest thing, and definitely not the safest thing, but he always has the right intentions.

Covenant knew that he was going to pass out—wanted hungrily to pass out—but before he lost consciousness, the hurt in his chest made him say, “Giant, I— I need friends.”

“Why do you believe that you have none?”

Covenant blinked, and saw everything that he had done in the Land.  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then you do believe that we are real.”

“What?”  Covenant groped for the Giant’s meaning with hands which had no fingers.

“You think us capable of not forgiving you,” Foamfollower explained.  “Who would forgive you more readily than your dream?”

“No,” the Unbeliever said.  “Dreams—never forgive.”

Then he lost the firelight and Foamfollower’s kind face, and stumbled into sleep.

Rating:

I’ve always loved to read.  When I was a kid, our mom had to limit us to five books per library trip, because we’d disappear into our rooms until we finished whatever we brought home, and she wanted us to get some sunshine too.  It’d be hard for me to pick out a favorite single book; one day I might say Monte Walsh, another day Atlas Shrugged, and another day The Stand.  Different moods bring to mind different books.

Picking out a favorite series is much easier.  I love the Belgariad, and I think it’s long overdue to be turned into a TV series or miniseries (the dialogue is perfect for it), but it’s a little too light to call my favorite.  I’d have to give that honor to Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Chronicles (and Second Chronicles) of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.”  Like a lot of Covenant fans, I first read the books in high school when some of the language and topics were honestly a bit over my head, but I stretched to understand them and loved what I could absorb.  I’ve reread them every couple years since.  The Land, the Giants, the Haruchai, the Lords, the Ranyhyn, Andelain, Revelstone—all the characters and places are incredibly vivid and deeply explored.  Even today, my computers are named Bannor and Brinn after two of the Haruchai, and my usual Internet pseudonym is my favorite character from the books.

People often report either loving or hating Donaldson’s books, and the reason seems to be that he explores his characters in such emotional depth.  He takes interestingly flawed people, puts them through hellish circumstances, and shows how they can conquer those circumstances (or not), chronicling every drop of blood and sweat along the way.  Some people get bored with that—stop talking and obsessing and do something!  But some of us love it.  I’ve rarely felt like I knew characters as well as these, even some that only appear in a single book of the series.  With a few paragraphs, Donaldson can make a person come to life: not just the way the person looks, but his hopes and fears and personality.

In the first book, Lord Foul’s Bane, Thomas Covenant is an author whose first book becomes a best-seller, soon after which he is diagnosed with leprosy and loses two fingers and the feeling in his hands and feet.  His wife takes their infant son and leaves him, and the townspeople ostracize him.  After an accident, he wakes to find himself in another world where his leprosy is healed and he’s hailed as a returning hero who will save the world from its ancient nemesis, Lord Foul the Despiser.  His white gold wedding ring, which he still wears in defiance of his divorce, is considered the ultimate magical talisman, with which he will “save or damn the Earth.”

His doctors at the leprosarium warned him against this very thing: when a leper is completely cut off from society, he may begin to have delusions of grandeur and begin to think he can have an ordinary life again—or even a heroic one.  If he accepts the delusion, he won’t be able to handle waking up to his real existence, and he’ll fail to maintain the careful life that keeps his disease under control.  So Covenant insists that the “Land” isn’t real, that he’s dreaming or hallucinating, and names himself “the Unbeliever.”  From then on, he’s torn between the Land and its people which he comes to love, and his absolute need to believe they aren’t real.  In trying to maintain that insistence, he makes mistakes that hurt the people around him, and the more he tries to atone for those mistakes, the deeper in he digs himself.

I won’t go into it any further and spoil it, because it really is a great story, and I hope anyone who likes epic fantasy will read it.  It was shopped around Hollywood for a while and some big names wanted to make a series of movies out of it, but all the studios thought it would be too much like Lord of the Rings because there’s a magic ring in it.  (That’s just stupid; when a teen slasher movie is a hit, all the studios line up to copy it!)  I’m still holding out hope for a mini-series someday, though; it’s really too deep for movies.  In the meantime, I’ll review all six books.  Then there are four more coming in the “Last Chronicles,” but they won’t be finished until 2013, so we’ll have to wait a while on those.

Rating:
I’m usually not into horror novels or movies, but Stephen King is one exception. His books are just so readable, with a conversational style that’s effortless to absorb, that almost anything he writes is a pleasure to read. I’ve also found that many of his books aren’t really horror, at least the way I think of horror, as in the gore and shock-value of horror movies. They have a spookiness about them, a feeling that there’s *something* out there we’d rather not look at, but that’s often combined with a good mystery or science fiction type of story that’s good in its own right.

That’s certainly the case with From a Buick 8, where much of the creepiness comes from the unknown and unknowable. When an old Buick Roadmaster—or a sort of model of one—is abandoned at a rural Pennsylvania gas station, a group of state troopers take charge of it and do their best to contain the dangers it represents. Over many years, they gradually discover that the Buick is some sort of a conduit to and from another place, drawing in and spewing out things that may not actually be evil but which sure feel like it.

A nice touch is that the story is told to the son of one of the state troopers who originally discovered the car, and several of the troopers take turns telling the story, offering different perspectives. There’s no one hero, and in fact nothing really heroic happens, which is one of the main points of the book: In real life, problems that come along aren’t always fought and defeated like they are in the movies. Sometimes they’re simply contained or dealt with, and life goes on as best it can. Not exactly a climactic concept to base a plot on, but it works well here.

Despite what I said earlier, there are a couple of unpleasantly gory scenes reminiscent of more typical horror novels of King’s like Carrie, so don’t read this book if you’re very sensitive to that sort of thing.

Rating:

I only recently discovered Leonard’s books, after reading quite a few by other authors in the same genre (what I think of as “tough guys who do what needs to be done without whining about it”), like Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, John Sandford, and Ed McBain. Leonard seems to tend toward the “edgier” end of the spectrum, with plenty of truly unsavory bad guys and heroes with plenty of flaws themselves. The world of these books is a seedy place, where very few people put anything else ahead of their own immediate gratification.

This book, and its protagonist,named Stick, are better than most. Stick, recently released after serving seven years on an armed robbery charge, has enough doubts to make him seem more real than the unreasonably confident James Bond types. He seems to want to go straight, but honestly isn’t sure how that’s done. (His first impulse, when trying to figure out how to go visit his little girl, is to steal a car.) He ends up (mostly) doing the right thing because the bad guys are so stupid and offensive, not because that’s how he plans it. It’s a good mix that makes him a likable character and more memorable than most in the genre, who are easily forgotten when one puts the book down.

The other characters are also well-drawn and easy to keep track of–something that’s important in pulp novels a reader can devour in a long afternoon. Chucky, Moke, Barry, and Nestor are all complete individuals; sometimes a bit over the top (or a lot in Chucky’s case), but always interesting. The women are fairly one-dimensional, which is typical in these books that are clearly written for men.

This is my first review, so I may decide on a different scoring system eventually, but for now I’m giving this one 3.5 out of 5 points. That’s pretty good for this kind of book: an adventure/thriller that’s only trying to be a fun, engaging read, and not trying to make any big points or do a ton of character development. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the authors I mentioned above; but if you think Bond movies are macho and violent, take a pass on this one.

(Whatever scale I use, I’ll use it all. This won’t be like the Olympics, where even the guy who falls down gets a 9.3 on a 10-point scale. Whenever possible, I’ll include a link to buy the book, which will pay me a few cents if you use it, so feel free to do so!)