Customer Reviews

Twilight of the Gods, No. 3: Three Trumps Sounding

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With THREE TRUMPS SOUNDING, author Dennis Schmidt had a rare opportunity to put Ragnarok to fiction in all its epic glory.

Too bad he forgot the EPIC.

[NO SPOILERS]

Despite the fact that I just finished this book a few minutes ago, many of the details of the first 100-150 pages are almost completely forgotten. I read every word, to be sure, but I'm afraid that the first half of the book is not that memorable. Mostly it just comprises of one-on-one fights, prophecy and the occasional planning of future military and magical undertakings.

About halfway through is when the book starts to get more interesting. Although "The Black One" Surt and his sidekick Jormungand are the "bad guys" we see the development of another character unrelated to these two in a great nod of the head to Norse mythology.

That character is Lao-Kee, although you might better recognize the name in its form of LOKI.

Loki, the trickster.

As promised I won't spoil anything, but for me the high point of the book was seeing Lao-Kee change as a character. Also, in terms of motive, I found that Lao-Kee had far better motives than the touted "ultimate bad guy of the series" Surt. You could almost call Lao-Kee the HANNIBAL LECTER or KEFKA of the fantasy-genre. Not because Lao-Kee is particularly violent, but because Lao-Kee knows how to make violent things happen.

While we're still on the positives, I also want to mention that the dialogue in this book has improved greatly from the campy dialogue of the first novel in the series. In a nutshell, Surt repeats himself less and uses fewer exclamation points when he's talking.

Closer to the end of the novel, armies start massing and the final battle draws near. Unfortunately, the god-grand battles between man and monstrous demons that I remember from the previous books are practically nonexistent in this one. I wanted to see Voden (Odin) and the other Norse characters fight more like gods and less like men.

To further disappoint me, the last two sections of the book felt extremely rushed, as if the author was more interested in bringing his trilogy to AN end instead of bringing it to a SATISFYING end. You can't describe an epic battle between characters X and Y using just a single page! But unfortunately that's how the last part of the book is: A page describing the events over here . . . a page describing the battle over there.

Yawn.

One last thing to point out: the scene depicted on the cover art--a woman chained to a tree while Odin fights some other scepter-wielding foe--isn't even in the book.


With all that being said, is this series as a whole worth reading? In general, I'd say yes, for the simple fact that although it doesn't do everything exactly to my liking, it does do a few things that I haven't seen elsewhere in fantasy. If you can name one other fantasy series that gives more than mere nods and cameos to the mythology of the world, I've love to read it. Sure, you can read a book of Norse Myths and Legends, but even when it's not as epic as I hoped, it's still fun to read in fictionalized form the stories behind some of the greatest characters in mythology.