Three Fantasy Novels from the Del Rey Hegemony

So I'm going through several old 1980s fantasy novels, primarily from Del Rey Books (DRB), and wanted to jot down thoughts on a few. Here, we'll be tackling three different books: one surprisingly good, one surprisingly real good, and one terrible awful bad book that could have used a few more rewrites.

1983 Del Rey Edition

So which is which? For that, my friends, read on.

The Surprisingly Good

Katherine Kurtz, High Deryni (1973).

Okay, this one's cheating slightly: Kurtz was discovered by Betty Ballantine, not Lester del Rey. But he inherited Kurtz, and her line of non-mythopoeic high fantasy certainly aligned with his editorial tastes. For my part, I wasn't quite sure what to expect with High Deryni. Back as a kid, I read either Camber of Culdi (1976) or Saint Camber (1978), but it didn't leave much impression. Later, I remember Kurtz being politely criticized for her pedestrian prose by Ursula K. Le Guin in "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" .... and except for true Celtic fantasy fanatics, I suspect that's how most academic critics now remember Kurtz, if they remember her at all.

Maybe that's a shame. Granted, when Le Guin critiques Kurtz for a flat non-literary style, she's being fair. Notably, however, Lester del Rey didn't give two hoots about style. If a writer could compose great prose, fine ... but Lester's insight was that most readers didn't care. They read for plot, not style. Only high-minded critics and literary authors read for finely crafted sentences, which partly explains why so many high-minded critics and literary authors looked down their noses at "commercial" DRB.

But is Kurtz's novel any good? Kind of, actually.

Now, it's easy for modern fantasy readers to be spoiled. Kurtz's good guys are all Aragorn-level noble, and her bad guys are all massive puppy-kickers. None of the nuance you find in Game of Thrones. At one point, one villain helpfully says to another:

"Come now, Bran. You know Kelson better than that. You or I might threaten a man's family to force his obedience, but this Gwynedd princeling is not of that mettle" (234).

Which, well, gee, thanks, Mr. Villain. I almost accidentally stepped into a gray area; I appreciate you setting me a-right.

Anyway, plot's almost fully war-driven. No actual battle per se, but plenty of marching armies & political wrangling & secret councils. A zillion characters are name-dropped early on, forcing me to flip frequently to the glossary. Plus the one female character, Lady Richenda, exists mainly as a love interest for the hero, Alaric Morgan. 

Still, Kurtz handles her plot well and her pacing nicely, and she concludes High Deryni with a genuine banger of a plot twist. I can see why Deryni has developed a small but devoted fandom, especially among the Neo-Pagan crowd. Among literary critics, though, I'm surprised at how forgotten Kurtz seems to be. She had a long and successful career, and her Celtic world-building (she has a Master's in medieval English history) certainly deserves more comment.

The Surprisingly Real Good

Dave Duncan, A Rose-Red City (1987)

Okay, I admit it: I'm a major Dave Duncan fan. He's another good DRB author whom no one remembers, but as a kid I devoured his two epic fantasy tetralogies, A Man of his Word and A Handful of Men . When I reread the latter in my thirties, it held up quite well. (They also have a simple yet surprisingly interesting magic system, which I wrote about in "PYRZQXGL: Or, How to Do Things with Magic Words".)

All this made me excited to try A Rose-Red City (1987), Duncan's first novel, a slush-pile discovery by DRB assistant editor Veronica Chapman, and I wasn't disappointed.

Even more than High Deryni, Duncan's novel is non-epic high fantasy. It's not even Tolkienian. For his premise, Duncan posits a fabulous city of eternal youth, Mera, that exists somewhere out of time; the plot revolves around Jerry Howard performing a "rescue" of Ariadne, a woman from the real world trying to flee her ex-husband with her children.

There's several nice moments throughout. The climax involves Ariadne pulling an "Eowyn" move (the cover art shows a woman -- fully clothed! -- in her "action" shot), and her ex-husband, Graham Gillis, while clearly a jackass, is also sincerely devoted to his kidnapped children. He also disparages Mera as a city full of "Lotus Eaters," which brilliantly highlights Graham's own crass American materialism as well as Duncan's ability to insert a surprisingly apt literary allusion.

But the highlight of A Rose-Red City, for me, is Duncan's portrayal of "Killer" (aka, Achilles), an aggressively bisexual Greek warrior in the mold of -- you guessed it -- Achilles. I love ancient Greek history and apparently Duncan does too. His portrait of Killer as both childlike, brutal, yet fiercely loyal, is super fun. Plus, Duncan handles Killer's bisexuality decently well for the 1980s, when barely a handful of such representations existed in SFF. Alongside Duncan's nuanced portrait of Ariadne, a female character with some real depth, A Rose-Red City is a great lost find. Here's a longer review by PekoeBlaze.

... and the Bad

Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, The Land Beyond the Gate (1984)

From what I can tell, Lester and Judy-Lynn apparently hoped Eshbach's series would become the Next Big Thing, another The Sword of Shannara or The Belgariad. That, however, never happened  -- one of their rare editorial stumbles.

If you don't know Eshbach's name, he's old school SF (b. 1910, three years after Heinlein). His biggest claim to fame is launching a short-lived but important specialist press in the late 1940s and 1950s, Fantasy Press. Then, after a 20-some year hiatus from writing, Eshbach was lured back to writing by his close personal friend Lester, for whom he wrote the Lucifer's Gate tetralogy.

Lester edited Eshbach himself, which was getting rarer for Lester even during the early 1980s; he was already past 65 at that point. But his buddy Eshbach was a special case. The Del Reys gave The Land Beyond the Gate strong promotion. It received a Darrell K. Sweet cover, whom Lester loved (Judy-Lynn even stopped other publishers from using him by hiring Sweet full-time as staff), and she also -- in one of her innovations -- started printing Eshback's name on the right-hand side of the novel's pages. Judy-Lynn believed that readers saw headers on that side more, so this was one of her small tricks for marketing the author, rather than the author's book. 

Unfortunately, The Land Beyond the Gate just isn't very good as a novel. Its pacing is close to Robert E. Howardian, which tends to pall at novel length, and especially when the need for constant action overwhelms basic characterization and world-building. For instance, this is telling:

Refusing further speculation, [Alan] MacDougall turned his back on the incredible scene and strode down the ramp. (p. 76)

The context doesn't matter, but clearly Eshbach believed having his protagonist genuinely think about this secondary world would damage the non-stop action. Which is a shame, because his "land beyond the gate", Tartarus, actually has a slightly interesting premise. Apparently, back in olden days, Lucifer had created this place for the Daughters of Lilith, who died out, and were replaced by real-world people after their deaths; for instance, MacDougall's Gandalf-like bestie is Taliessin, the famous bard from medieval Welsh legend.

In Tartarus, though, people are immortal ... and really, really bored. Insofar as Eshbach has a theme, this is it. When MacDougall arrives from our primary world, that shakes things up, and then the Tartarians try starting a random war to relieve the monotony. I can see where that sort of theme would appeal to someone of Lester's worldview: the dullness of immortality without variation.

Nonetheless, Eshbach's writing leans heavily on the wrong side of terrible. He creates an awkward and heavy-handed romance between MacDougal and Darthula (predictably one of the few female characters), and his Conan-pacing renders MacDougal a rather conventional muscle-head. We get a generic historical infodump starting about page 50, plus your standard Magical Artifact that Explains Everything ("the Scroll of Lucifer"). 

Moreover, since Lester insists that first novels in a series always end with some measure of optimism, Eshbach has his hero conclude with the thought, "despite all its shortcomings ... [Tartarus] was a wonderful place" (208). But that isn't earned; Eshbach is too enamored of mind-numbing action to spend any real effort on having created that "wondrous" effect.

The novel's absolute dumbest moment, though, arrives when MacDougal is suddenly granted temporary god-like powers by the demon Ahriman, so he uses those powers to ... well, dump one of his rivals, the goddess Morrigu, into a steaming pile of manure (140). It's the wrong kind of humor for the wrong kind of audience. Otherwise, nothing about Eshbach's book codes as YA or children's; not in the same way as Brooks or Eddings consistently do.**

Either way, The Land Beyond the Gate is deservedly forgotten. It represents a clear miss for the del Reys at a time when everything else they touched was turning to gold.

Conclusion

On a final note, let me say that none of these titles, including A Rose-Red City, were unjustly neglected potential award-winners. Don't write strongly worded letters to the World Fantasy or Mythopoeic Society awards committees! However, during the Del Rey Hegemony, they introduced fantasy to a wide, non-niche audience for the first time. What's hard for academic critics to recover, though, is an adequate hermeneutics for distinguishing a "good" book for the time period from a "bad" book ... to rise beyond the label of "category fiction" to recognize the virtues (and the vices) of the great mass of books that created our first mass fantasy readership.

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** And neither of them ever lower their texts to second-grade sorts of humor. In fact, Eddings is genuinely funny -- much funnier than most of the comic fantasy of that time (a subgenre in which he, notably, did not write).