TV #52 of 2023: Fantasy Bedtime Hour, season 1 Okay, this is probably the most obscure show that I’ll ever review, but here goes. Fantasy Bedtime Hour was a public-access cable television series that aired in San Francisco and a few other California markets from 2002 to 2007. It consists of its two hosts, Heatherly …
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Book #47 of 2022: The Last Dark by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #4) The grand finale to the Thomas Covenant saga moves slower than one might predict, given the apocalyptic atmosphere and scant amount of time remaining for the Land. The sun and stars have all gone out, the Worm …
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Book #35 of 2022: Against All Things Ending by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #3) This penultimate volume has perhaps the slowest start of any Thomas Covenant story, with literally the first five chapters — one hundred full pages, almost a fifth of the whole text — spent on an extended …
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Book #23 of 2022: Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2) This sequel is rather cleanly bifurcated by a development midway through, and although both of the resulting sections have their strengths, I think the opening is more successful than the close. (Call it a five-star passage followed by …
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Book #12 of 2022: The Runes of the Earth by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #1) While I think the first trilogy of this fantasy saga remains its most thematically brilliant segment, and the second neatly integrates a new co-protagonist for a different perspective and set of psychological issues to work …
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Book #213 of 2021: The Atlas of the Land by Karen Wynn Fonstad This reference book is a true labor of love for the first six volumes in Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant fantasy series. (It was published in 1985, well before the final quartet arrived. And it’s been out of print ever …
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Book #153 of 2021: White Gold Wielder by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #3) A satisfying conclusion to this second trilogy in the Land, that mystic realm that can be understood as either a real place to which denizens of our world are magically summoned or an internal dreamscape in which …
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Book #127 of 2021: The One Tree by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2) A thoroughly excellent nautical fantasy, fleshing out the wider landscape of this setting, adding fascinating new wrinkles to the series lore, and finally introducing readers to beings like the sandgorgons and Elohim who had been briefly mentioned …
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Book #111 of 2021: The Wounded Land by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #1) In the first Thomas Covenant trilogy, the titular antihero resisted the appeal of the fantasy realm that summoned him from our reality, but gradually came to decide that its ideals were worth fighting for even if he …
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Book #246 of 2020: Daughter of Regals and Other Tales by Stephen R. Donaldson Stephen R. Donaldson is one of my very favorite authors, and although I don’t remember liking this 1984 collection of fiction as much as his novels or the later Reave the Just and Other Tales, my current reread through his oeuvre …
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