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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780765351791
ISBN number: 076535179X
Label: Tor Fantasy
Manufacturer: Tor Fantasy
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 432
Printing Date: May 30, 2006
Publishing house: Tor Fantasy
Release Date: May 30, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 230598
Studio: Tor Fantasy
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The Chronicles of Everness continue.
Young Galen Waylock is the last watchman of the Dream Gate, beyond which the ancient evils wait, hungry for the human world. For a thousand years, Galen's family has stood guard, scorned by a world that dismissed the danger as myth. Even Galen's father deserted their post. Discarding his belief in the other world, he left Castle Everness and the lonely coast of Maine to travel the world as a soldier.
But the warning bell has sounded in the dream world, unheeded. Now, the minions of Darkness have stirred in the deep and the long watch is over. An army of mythic monsters has invaded our world, and Galen and his friends have begun to fight them. To join the battle with universal darkness, even his father returns. The forces of light have gathered in Castle Everness, which must stand, or all is lost.
John Wright has been called the most important talent of the new century, and received rave reviews for each volume of his debut SF trilogy, The Golden Age. Now, in Mists of Everness he continues the towering fantasy begun in The Last Guardian of Everness, a stirring epic that will inspire readers everywhere.
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Rated by buyers 
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Ok. Yeah, you're gonna have to read the very first book, but this pair of novels is heads and sholders above the fantasy pack. Lots of action and plenty of imaginative ideas. The author does seem to let a wee bit of right wing/libertairian ideas knock about. And I sort of got the feeling toward the middle of the book that this was turning into a Christian Apocalypse idealization, (which almost made me put it down) but the sense of fun and myth as well as a equal dose of pagan spirit won me over by the end. I think the author has done a good job stiring up old and diverse mythos into a tastey new cocktail.
Rated by buyers 
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This is one of those books that receives an average rating even though nothing about it is average. Rather, it features a combination of several above-average qualities with much that is unfortunately below.
What is there to like? First of all, the sheer inventiveness of the plot. Wright is well aware of his antecedents -- including Zelazny's Amber chronicles and Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels -- but has crafted a thoroughly contemporary take on some of the same building blocks, one outside the realm of cookie-cutter conventional fantasy. What if, the story asks, a family with a generations-old task is finally called upon to perform the task and fulfill a prophesy...but they stop to think about it, and decide that performing their task may not be the best solution for the world after all? That's the question that defines the surface of the story told by the Everness books.
The other chief aspect I enjoyed was the style of writing. Wright has a unique and distinctive writing style. Nothing is ever described in detail, yet Wright chains together great masses of words and concepts to shape the mood of each scene. Consider the following sample, wherein Raven, one of our heroes, travels through a city of torture on the dark side of the moon to the rescue of another character:
"There were barred gates hanging open at each crossroads, with lines of heads on spikes above, mummified by the lunar air. The subsequent street was lined on both sides with starvation cages, and the one beyond that was lined with impaling screws.
They turned again, passed a gate hung with severed hands. In the near distance was the central dome. The archstone of the main gates had the head of a medusa hanging from it, with hair of snakes and eyes of viper-hate.
Even the shadow of the medusa in the mirror was almost too much for Raven; there was a stinging pain in his eyes, and he felt faint. [...] When he recovered, they crossed over a moat filled with blood into the shadow of the central dome."
Not all or even most of the book is this grim, but this gives you an idea of what the writing is like: ideas like a lunar city, a moat filled with blood are just casually tossed out, and while the level of detail is minimal, the quantity of things mentioned is unrelenting. Some readers may not like this -- certainly I wouldn't like all books to be written this way -- but I enjoyed the writing for its uniqueness and audacity, and for the way it conveyed mood by constant reinforcement of concepts.
I must also say that I found the selkie to be the most entertaining villains since Croup and Vandemar in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere: in many ways the addition of humour makes the horror of the selkie actions that much more real and terrible.
Unfortunately the unrelenting action of Wright's style of writing does highlight one of the books main shortcomings: the characters, or rather the lack thereof. Characters young and old do not really develop over the course of these books; they are presented with little or no background or personal information, act according to a fairly narrow set of characteristics, and finish the book much as they began. Fantasy of course is ripe for symbolic characters, but those here are more stereotypes than symbols, because we never see enough of them, get to know them well enough, to see them as human (or as close to human as they're meant to be). As has been pointed out in other reviews, this is particularly true of the female characters, who appear to want nothing more out of life than to be interrupted and kissed senseless (Wendy is bad enough, but there is also a scene with Titania that was just silly).
The other big negative, also mentioned by other reviews, is Wright's tendency to preach his philosophical ideals and political-economic ideas. Preaching, to me, is when characters make speeches unasked for and unnecessarily: when Anton explains why he has no wish to be President is a perfect example, as his speech doesn't really answer the question at hand. The sad thing is that Wright maintains a proper narrative distance for the very first book and a half in this series, with ideas present but not preached. The tone only becomes preachy in the last 100-200 pages, but because the ending is our final experience of the work and presents the solutions on which the story hinges, that preachy tone really damages the impression of the work as a whole. It is especially an issue because the characters are so underdeveloped: they are such figureheads, it's impossible to see their words as coming from their own personal belief systems, as opposed to mouthpieces for the author. And of course the lack of characterization also damages any points the author wishes to make, because if the only people who could thrive in the world he desires are magic-wielding archetypes as opposed to normal humans, that's not a world ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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This second half of the Everness story lived up to the very first half in terms of originality and imaginative storytelling, but I was left feeling strangely flat by the end of it.
One of the things that bothered me was the character of Wendy, a half-mortal, half-fairy girl who, I guess, was meant to embody the feminine virtues. My problem with Wendy was that Wright made her far too childlike. I get the whole free-spirited, honesty/wisdom-of-a-child thing, I really do. And Wendy's character was certainly imbued with admirable courage and a great zest for life. But you can't give me a character who naively skips around talking about "mommy" and "daddy" one minute and then expect me to turn around the subsequent minute and embrace the idea of her doing the wild thing in the Oval Office on her way to becoming the mother of Humanity v2.0. It was completely unconvincing, because there simply was no woman in Wendy -- she was all precocious little girl. And if sexually charged little girls are supposed to be the standard for admiration...well, I don't even want to think about the kind of message I'm supposed to take away from that.
So I ask, why were there no mortal female counterparts to the heroic Waylocks and Pendrake? Were there no parts for rational, serious, and mature mortal women to play in mankind's battle against tyranny? I would have liked to have seen at least one mortal woman who, if not necessarily heroic, was at least worthy of respect. Instead, I was left with the feeling that only goddesses and fairy girls were good enough to stand alongside mortal heroes in their fight to save humanity.
One of the other issues I had with this book was that the text was in need of better editing. Normally, I can get past small mistakes without too much irritation, but in a story that relies so much on symbolism, subtext, and allusion, each word is important. Not only were there too many typos, but I found myself brought to a screeching halt by such lines as: "She dreamed of a dark and windowless city drowned beneath the waves, seven towers of imperishable metal rising into the sunless gloom of the abyss, while blind and transparent fish sported among the tombs and windows...." I read this and thought to myself, if the city was windowless, how could the fish be sporting among the windows? Was this just careless writing, or was the wording intentional? Either way, the flow of the story was interrupted, and I found it harder and harder as I encountered more mistakes to trust either the author or my own interpretation of his words.
Finally, I found the ending to be a little too pat, a little too neat. It was almost painful in its wishful contrivances (though I really did enjoy the introduction of Prometheus near the end -- he was a fun character). Between the instant creation of a "controlled" Big Bang, and Pendrake's "magical means of discovering the perpetrators of any crime committed at any time anywhere in the world," my reaction by the end was little more than a resigned sigh.
Rated by buyers -
This is the conclusion of the story begun in The Last Guardian of Everness. There is no easy way to summarize the plot, but the struggle to prevent the Darkness from taking over the Earth without calling in the Armies of Light (thus creating a "perfect" pastoral and static world), continues. Peter, Raven, Galen, Wendy, a brave little mouse, and other unlikely characters, all learn new things about what they are and aren't capable of. (Raven also discovers the great advantages of consulting a librarian, but nobody cares about that so I won't mention it at all.) Oberon and Titania get their licks in, and Wendy's finally puts in an unambiguous appearance, scrambling to prevent the start of a nuclear war in the Pacific and then to prevent (or undo) a coup by the tools of the Power of Darkness in Washington. And those aren't even the important battles.
It's all very exciting, and, as always with Wright, very beautifully written-wonderfully easy to lose yourself in.
Highly recommended.
Rated by buyers -
The very first book in this series was brilliant. Unfortunately, in this volume, Wright (who is apparently some species of libertarian) feels compelled to preach at us constantly, to the point where halfway through the book his villians are driving about in armored vehicles, cackling "Thank God for gun control -- now we can RULE THE WORLD! Heh heh heh." I happen to agree with most of the opinions Wright expresses, but I'd really rather not be slapped in the face with them as a substitute for good story telling. If you think Atlas Shrugged is a brilliant novel, you'll like this a lot. If you prefer actual literature, you'll be disappointed. Ah, well.
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