Book #120 of 2019:

Seventh Decimate by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Great God’s War #1)

Stephen R. Donaldson has long been one of my favorite authors, so I’m disappointed to confirm that this 22nd published novel is possibly his weakest yet. The early worldbuilding is sparse to the point of feeling allegorical, and the tone more closely resembles his short stories than his longer published works like the Thomas Covenant or Mordant’s Need series.

Those are both portal fantasies in which characters from our world pass into other realms and meet people ruled by oblique moral strictures, and it’s a very different sort of writing to be rooted inside such a figure’s alien perspective instead. The technique works great for Donaldson’s shorter fiction, but it becomes more of a struggle at this length. Only in the last 75 pages or so, when the hero indignantly confronts powerful sorcerers whose motives are inscrutable to him, does the author start to seem like his usual self.

The other major fault of this book is that its protagonist is knowingly ignorant about the wider world and plots around him and presumably misinformed about the little he takes as certain. As a reader I’ve spent much of the narrative impatiently waiting for those pennies to drop, and it’s a relief that matters do finally clear up by the end. I have higher hopes for the sequel(s), and I expect that this first volume of The Great God’s War in retrospect may seem like Stephen King’s The Gunslinger or Donaldson’s own The Gap into Conflict: The Real Story — a somewhat clumsy extended prologue to a deeper and richer world. I’ll have to read on and see!

For all my nitpicking, there are moments herein that are quintessential Stephen R. Donaldson, and I’m glad I risked its low critical reception to check it out for myself. Without yet seeing what’s next I’d maybe only recommend Seventh Decimate to other diehard fans of this writer, but it isn’t quite as bad as the typical rating would suggest.

★★★☆☆

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