Don't Warrior Pretty Little Head

I've blogged before about how, after discovering Terry Brooks in an impressible teenage phase, I've been unable to "quit" him, even as I've long since realized his strongest writing is now three decades old. He's always been a steady writer, publishing a new book each and every year. But 2018 was an unusually prolific year for him: he continued his current four-book set of Shannara books, tried his hand at science fiction (with a book I have yet to read), and released a novella, Warrior.

Warrior marks a return to Brooks' series "The Word and the Void," a pre-apocalyptic fantasy trilogy set in the real world. That trilogy itself was inspired by a 1991 short story called Imaginary Friends, in which Brooks tested out a new mythos with the tale of Jack McCall, a 12-year-old boy facing a cancer diagnosis and finding solace (and a second, external threat) among the fantastical creatures living in a park near his house. Though the ensuing trilogy told a story separate from young Jack's, Warrior circles back to his story, with him now in his 40s, a married man with a child. He's pledged himself to serve a magical force for good, and has been promised his service will be called upon one time only in his life. That day has come.

It's nice to see Brooks step away from the Shannara books that have dominated his career, and nice to see him attempt a short and simple little story. In this more compact format, he doesn't really have the space to fall as deeply into the cliche traps he often resorts to, the well-worn character archetypes he uses in most of his stories. At the same time, there's stronger visual imagery here than he's had in his recent writing. Perhaps because he's not describing a world he's defined so thoroughly in several dozen books, he feels the need to be more evocative with his language. In any case, Warrior is filled with many intriguing images, effectively painted in the mind's eye. (There are also a handful of illustrations peppered throughout the story, though these hardly seem necessary.)

That said, not everything Brooks tries here is successful -- particularly when it comes to character. Jack is a painfully patriarchal hero. His attitudes and choices make him hard to like, a throwback to much older fantasy writing and not the sort of protagonist you can easily root for today. His demonic nemesis, the story's other significant character, isn't really any more interesting. He's shallow and one-note. That note is "menacing," and I'm afraid it isn't even struck all that convincingly.

Also of note is that this story, published in e-book format, is conspicuously peppered with typos and grammatical errors. This is a knock more on Brooks' editor than on the writer himself. (I'm sure now to make typos and grammatical errors myself in this post, now that I've called them out.) When the work is, at most, a third as long as a novel, it feels especially shoddy to see such poor proofreading of the finished product.

All told, though I like some of the things attempted here, I'm no more impressed by Warrior than I've been of any other recent Terry Brooks writing. I give it a C+. Perhaps one or two more books at this level, and I'll finally be able to move on to other fantasy writers.