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Welcome to StephenBarkley.com. This is where I post all the stuff I've been thinking, praying, speaking, and writing about. Thanks for reading.
Phoenix In Obsidian © 1970 Grafton: Collins 127 pages Second volumes rarely live up to the first. Setting aside some obvious exceptions (like The Empire Strikes Back), you expect sophomore efforts to lack the originality of the first. In the first volume you build the world, in the second volume you work within it. Fortunately, Phoenix in Obsidian bucks this trend. [...]
The Eternal Champion © 1970 Mayflower: Granada 159 pages It was only a matter of time before I started exploring Michael Moorcock’s works. Just listen to the list of people he is compared to: Tennyson, Tolkien, Edgar Allan Poe, William Burroughs, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw [...]
A Memory of Light (Wheel of Time) © 2013 Tor 912 pages When I started reading The Wheel of Time, the Internet didn’t exist. I used my telephone modem to connect to a local BBS for ASCII art and other meaningless diversions. You might wonder at the foolishness of starting an unfinished epic. In my defense, [...]
Deadhouse Gates © 2000 Bantam 943 pages “Keep reading, try book two,” they said. “It gets easier!” Pffft. I read The Gardens of the Moon carefully, knowing its reputation for being thorny. The end result was rewarding. I must have let my mental concentration lapse sometime during the second book because it was full of moments when I [...]
The Infernals © 2012 Atria Books: Simon & Schuster, Inc. 311 pages I’ve thought about reading more Connolly ever since The Book of Lost Things. In Lost Things he treats fairy-tale motifs with terrifying realism. In The Infernals, he travels the opposite direction, treating the idea of Hell as a big joke. The Infernals is the story of [...]
Gardens of the Moon: A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen © 1999 Bantam 729 pages I’ve often flipped through Erikson’s books while browsing the fantasy section at my local bookstore. This month I took the plunge and started book 1 of 10 core novels in Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series. [...]
The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel © 2012 Scribner: Simon & Schuster, Inc viii+309 pages They’re back—almost. Sure, Stephen King manages to insert his Dark Tower oriented multiverse into most of the novels he writes, but this one’s different. In the introduction, King suggests shelving it between Wizard and Glass and Wolves [...]
The Light Princess and Other Stories © 1980 Eerdmans 171 pages This is the third of four volumes Eerdmans put together in 1980 to collect all the short fantasy works of George MacDonald. I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that MacDonald, whose Victorian novels span six to eight hundred pages, is able to develop [...]
The Golden Key and Other Stories © 1980 Eerdmans 165 pages Eerdmans has done the modern world a fine service by collecting the short fantasy stories of George MacDonald into four volumes. The Golden Key and Other Fantasy Stories is the second of the four I’ve read (Here’s my review of The Wise Woman and [...]
The Fantastic Imagination: An Anthology of High Fantasy © 1977 Avon ix+325 pages This is the good stuff. While I admit enjoying the odd swords & sorcerers style of pop-fantasy, it’s work like this that really inspires me. This is more than mere genre-fantasy—it’s literature in its own right. Boyer & Zahorski’s collection is broad. [...]
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