Books you never read: Chronicles of an Age of Darkness

It feels a bit hubristic to call these entries "Books you never read", but I did (and do) read a lot of books so its no surprise that many of them never made it to mainstream popularity. And most of these were published a long time ago so they may never be seen again.

Chronicles of an Age of Darkness was 10 book series that is fairly unusual in that it made it to 10 books without the author dying or having an editor dick around with the format. I see that Wikipedia says it was meant to be a 20 book series, but at 10 books, it felt complete.

I can see why it never took off - if I hadn't been working in a bookstore and consuming every generic fantasy product of the day, I probably wouldn't have picked up the second book. The first book - The Wizards and the Warriors was good, but not spectacular. It had your standard Fantasy Adventurer Protagonists and a quest to save the world, etc. It did have a certain gritty style about it that I liked, but aside from that it was nothing special.

The second book, The Wordsmiths and the Warguild, was hilarious. The opening passage describing Sung had me laughing hysterically, and the characters had changed from standard swordsmen and wizards to gormless idiots flailing around trying somehow to survive. It was a complete surprise, and I'll bet a lot of people who read the Wizards never went on to Wordsmiths.

And then I hated The Women and the Warlords. I can't really remember what it was about now, or why I disliked it - I've been meaning to give it another try now that I'm older. The memory of Wordsmiths stayed with me though, and I bought The Walrus and the Warwolf (Have you noticed the style of the titles yet?) Walrus was much like the first book, allright but nothing like the Wordsmiths.

I kept with the series despite its spotty nature. It seemed like each new book was probably going to be allright, maybe really bad, maybe really good. I liked those odds. With the next two books, The Wicked and the Witless and The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers I lucked out. Even funnier than Wordsmiths! Hints at forgotten technology! Death, mayhem and excitement! They were so great. But who was going to read them?

The rest of the series never managed to hit the heights of those two books, at least as far as I was concerned. But he never hit any lows either. Each book, with a few exceptions, had completely different characters, but the story seemed somehow to lurch along each individual story somehow connecting into a greater narrative. With the final book telling the story of Guest Gulkan, a background character in every book so far, you had a sense that at last this anarchic storyline was going to conclude. And so it did, not with a bang or a whimper, but somewhere in between.