YOU FOOLS THIS ISN’T EVEN AN ANIME REVIEW

Yeah, I know this blog is supposed to be reviewing shows about cute girls doing cute things, but watching the same old shit being rehashed over and over again becomes tedious very, very quickly. Hell, the last two shows I watched both contained cute girls and demons. Silly Elevens, so lacking in creativity (although, Noragami was a pretty decent show until the last few episodes; Hiyori best girl etc.). But anyway, I’m sure my loyal readers (all three of you) are wondering why I’m doing a book review, of all things. Aren’t books for nerds or something?!? Actually it’s mostly because I’ve developed weekend insomnia and can’t sleep before 5am. And I’m sure you’re all very kinninarimasu about which book I am reviewing.

The book I’ll be talking about today is The Time of the Dark, by Barbara Hambly. It’s a book that I have a bit of history with, and a fair amount of nostalgia attached to.

So 80s it hurts, doesn’t it.

At first glance, the book is nothing special. One of the dime-a-dozen 80s paperback fantasy fictions, filled with cardboard cutout stock characters and wizards and magic and other related bullshit. And what’s up with the name? The Time of the Dark? The dark what? Probably the dark age of creativity that was the 80s, or something. And if I were to be completely honest, as far as fiction goes this book is probably only slightly above average. But what makes this book so special are the circumstances in which I encountered, lost, and rediscovered it.

I first encountered this glittering jewel of 80s fantasy in my 10th grade English teacher’s classroom. Mrs. Frederickson (god it’s been almost 10 years how the hell do I still remember her name) had a sizeable bookshelf, most likely from her personal collection, from which she’d loan books out to her students. It was this same teacher who’d introduced me to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (which had just been published for a few years at the time), so clearly her taste in literature was beyond reproach. I don’t know what drew me to the yellowing, musty original 1982 copy of Hambly’s novel, likely purchased by my teacher first-hand. In any case, I picked up the book, and several chapters in I was hooked.

A very loose summary of the book is as follows: Gil and Rudy, a PhD candidate and a biker respectively, are transported from what is presumably 1980s California to a parallel universe by the wizard Ingold, a place that was home to humans, neanderthals, and the Dark. Based on Hambly’s description of the Dark, they were likely plagiarized wholesale from Ridley Scott’s Alien, which was released in 1979. Whether or not the Dark are based upon or a homage to Scott, I do not know. But for our purposes, let us just imagine the Dark as Aliens.

So like this, but…darker.

15-year-old me reading the book was actually quite terrified of Hambly’s description of the Dark. It was mostly the way Hambly loved to describe the sounds and smells of her settings, providing the reader an almost visceral experience of the events transpiring in the novel. Anyway, let us just say that the Dark were bad news and reading about how these things stripped flesh from bone etc, etc. alone at night was apparently quite a lot to handle for a 15-year-old boy.

Anyway, Gil and Rudy eventually settle in to their new world, due to some malarkey about pathways through the void being found out by the Dark or some other irrelevant reason (note: not so irrelevant in book 3). Gil becomes a guard, and Rudy bangs a girl named Alde who turns out to be the queen. Whose husband is dead and whose son has magic memories that might hold the key to defeating the Dark.

In the end, our characters putter about for 350-odd pages, escape the doomed city of Gae (GAAAAAYYYY), and end up at the Keep of Renweth. At which point 15-year-old me realized, “hey, this book is part of a trilogy, and the teacher doesn’t own books 2 and 3!” I searched through the local library’s wholly inadequate catalogue, and to no surprise discovered that the series, some twenty years out of print, was nowhere to be found. In time, I moved on to other books, including series such as A Song of Ice and Fire which will never be finished because George RR Martin is a lazy shit. And so Hambly’s series sat in the back of my mind for nine-odd years until, several weeks ago, I stumbled upon an ebook set of the trilogy on the Internet.

Reading The Time of the Dark again, after so many years, was a surreal experience; like encountering an old friend after a decade of no contact. It was just a great a read as the first time, though my fear of the Dark were much diminished. With no small measure of excitement, I opened The Walls of Air following my reread of Book 1.

Though I finished that book in less than a week, and the ending to the trilogy, The Armies of Daylight, in a little less than 3 days, the ending simply could not live up to my expectations. In my mind, years before, I had already concocted endings for Gil, Ingold, Rudy, and Alde. While the speed with which I finished the book are a testament to their enjoyability, they were not perfect. Characters that I had grown to like in the first book, were discarded or merely mentioned in passing. Throughout three books, Rudy remained a passive character, leaving Ingold and Gil to do the problem-solving. A character pronounced dead in book 1 reappears in book 3, deus ex machina style. Book 2 is spent with Rudy and Ingold performing an ultimately pointless quest. And the ending, the solution to all of the conflict, was essentially just about climate change and the Dark just…leaving. No epilogue for our beloved characters, although we did get two more books written in the Darwath universe in the 90s (I have yet to read them, but judging by Goodreads reviews their quality seems suspect).

To cut this rambling “review” short, I guess my sadness lies not with a butchered ending, not like how the Bioshock: Infinite games ended (Ken Levine is the fucking devil). Nor is it the bittersweet taste of the ending of a beloved series. For me, The Time of the Dark was a sort of grail, one drawn from the less complicated, carefree times of my youth. And now that the grail has been found again, and tasted, one cannot but feel a slight sense of regret at its passing.