The Dark Tide

A fine and well-written book for what it is. What is it? It's Middle Earth fan fiction (no, I am not kidding), written in a very convincing Tolkien style. Let me be clear: unlike the early eighties work of Stephen R. Donaldson, Terry Brooks, and David Eddings that merely borrows races, artifacts, or whole plots from Tolkien, this book is written as if it were Tolkien. Donaldson, Brooks, and Eddings wrote in a far more modern style than Tolkien (and so did Robert E. Howard), but McKiernan successfully imitated Tolkien to the point where I couldn't believe this was written around the same time as anything by David Gemmell. But it was.

While I'm impressed with McKiernan's ability to imitate Tolkien's style, and even to create his own interesting characters, I don't find this style particularly enjoyable. I honestly don't even enjoy it from Tolkien. It's just too far from the character's point of view to make the characters real. As interesting as some of the characters are, they aren't particularly human. While I imagine other readers especially in 1984 were reading just to hear about elves, ghuls, high-speaking superhuman “Men” and various kinds of short people, I read to get in touch with real (fake) human characters. If you want the best of both, Brooks and Donaldson are the way to go.