Fatal Revenant

It's the second book in the last Thomas Covenant trilogy!

Good grief.

Fatal Revenant suffers from the normal second-book-in-a-trilogy problems (i.e. you have to remember what happened in the first one, which is important since Donaldson keeps referring back to it; and you don't really get any resolution yet.)

Against that, you get some genuinely-interesting historical stuff. (Some!) We find out more about Berek, Demondim, the Forests, and so forth. Donaldson doesn't mind retconning his previous writing for the sake of moving the present story forward; sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't.

The notion that no one knew about the Despiser until Kevin's reign is a little jarring; but it mostly works. The Insequent are another matter; they're so prominent that you have to wonder where they've been before this trilogy.

Decent, but not marvellous. On the other hand, I'll definitely read the last book.

Tonight's Geek Pleasure

Fantasy Bedtime Hour, a public access show in which two nude women lie in bed discussing Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane. They're completely clueless, and it's hilarious watching them try to interpret Donaldson's overpurple prose.

They also have action sequences!

Donaldson's Next Book

Fatal Revenant, the new Thomas Covenant book, is out on Amazon. It's officially coming out on October 9th. From the Booklist review snippet:

The second volume (after The Runes of the Earth, 2004) of the final Thomas Covenant tetralogy takes place entirely in the Land, to which Linden Avery has gone in search of her missing autistic son, whom she finds, completely cured and even outspokenly brash, in the company of a hale and hearty Thomas Covenant. The hitch, however, is that they now must find a hidden store of Earthpower, after which Linden may have to choose between using it to return herself and her companions to Earth, health, and happiness or to save the Land from its enemies. Donaldson maintains his propensity for forcing his female characters to jump through flaming hoops, but here the women are more modest, at least physically. Linden's dilemmas and choices are less athletic and more of the ethical variety. Should saving her son, now of sound though rebellious mind, override her duties to the still direly periled Land? The time it takes her, with some counsel from Thomas, to reach a compromise solution and to attempt to carry it out involves much pace-slowing angst, even if it further develops Linden's status as the new saga's real protagonist. The ending is the kind of cliff-hanger that should have readers returning to see how it and the remaining adventures play out. Green, Roland

I'm not sure what I think of that. One of the most jarring and novel things about Runes of the Earth was that Linden Avery really seemed to have her head together. That set her apart from virtually every other protagonist Donaldson's ever written; and it was both refreshing and humorous to see her shrug off Lord Foul's manipulations by simply refusing to listen to him.

From the sound of it, she's going back into a slough of self-doubt and angst. Which could be really annoying; though I doubt that she'll get anywhere near Covenant's exasperating qualities in the first trilogy.

But of course all this is vapor. There's nothing to do but wait, read, and see.