LOTS happens in this one. Woof. ( )

Deze serie leest heerlijk weg, maar moet het vooral hebben van de karakters. De plot is en blijft een tikje ongeloofwaardig. Maar de vaart zit lekker in het verhaal en ik heb me prima vermaakt. ( )

A fun book, but nothing transcendent about it. This is basically the climax of two books of buildup in the Serpentwar series: the long-feared massive army finally arrives for a colossal invasion.

Though the army in question includes hundreds of thousands of people, almost none of them are actual characters. The plot in this book is not so much "man vs. man" but "man vs. nature", with the invading army as a faceless, implacable horde against which the heroes must simply resist. Feist justifies this approach by literally removing agency from the invaders: they're thralls to a demon, either literally through magic or indirectly through coercion.

The struggle against overwhelming force is fun enough to read: the heroes have prepared for this for two and a half books before it arrives, and use both cleverness and determination to hold the day. But I can't help but feel that a massive war like this would have been more interesting portrayed as a struggle between two different groups of people, with their own motivations, even if one was more evil than the other. Feist did this in his initial book(s), "Magician", where the Tsurani were first introduced as faceless enemies but then humanized as rational people responding to real social, economic and political incentives. As it is, "Rage of a Demon King" is merely enjoyable, not transcendent.

Complicating things further is that the bulk of the book — the months-long last stand — is ultimately trivial. The battle is settled in an epic clash between the demon and a group of wizards and warriors; the outcome of this fight determines the physical war we've spent so much time following. It's something of an anticlimax, and in this is a precursor to the far more disappointing sequel. ( )

This book really ends with a bang. The first half continues to build the preparations for the big war to come, fulfilling the promise of the first two books in the Serpentwar Saga, but it really goes above and beyond after ALL the great heroes and magicians band together to figure out what the hell is going on.

Gods. Lots of great worldbuilding happens here. :) Gaimanesque, elemental, and very cool.

I admit I've missed seeing so much of Pug and he takes a big role here. Thomas, too. And all the oddball magicians we've grown to love. But the tragedy is real, too. Pug loses the most. He also gains a lot in the end.

What can you expect in this novel aside from the magics?

Oh, just a nasty war and the destruction of Krondor. It has everything you lovers of mayhem might want. The stakes are the death of universes and the defeat a mad god, after all. All hands on deck! Expect a lot of deaths. Expected and unexpected.

Quite good. Quite enjoyable. Enjoyed this more than the last two. :)

( )

Rage of a Demon King is the third out of four books in Raymond E. Feist’s Serpentwar Saga, one of the subseries in the much larger Riftwar Cycle.

This one was a little uneven for me. The story focuses on a variety of characters instead of focusing primarily on one. I enjoyed the ensemble feel and I was interested in all the characters, but some sections were more interesting to read than others. It wasn’t always the same characters I was the most interested in; sometimes I was bored and interested by different sections about the same sets of characters. I did really like how some major plot threads were resolved or at least significantly advanced, not just from this subseries but from the larger story.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this in any of my previous reviews, but I’ve noticed several errors in most of these books. A lot of them look like OCR-type errors such as oddly placed or missing punctuation, or letters that aren’t quite right. I’ve faithfully reported each one I’ve caught on my Kindle, something I only take the time to do if I feel some investment in the author and/or the book, but I have no idea if such things ever get fixed. Most of these books have been on the Kindle for quite a while, so I’m surely not the first to report them. My thoughts are that probably a traditionally-published e-book can only be updated when a new edition with a new ISBN is published? It doesn’t seem like that would happen often for e-books. So I have no idea how any of that works, but I report the errors anyway in the naïve hope that it might make a difference.

The reason I bring up the errors is because this book had a couple that made me laugh, although they were overly distracting at times. I went on a small Google adventure trying to figure out if “puffing a bow” was really a thing. I didn’t want to report an error that wasn’t actually an error just because I’m ignorant about the finer points of archery. I had images of somebody smoking a bow like a pipe. Although I learned that there are apparently puffy things that can be used to silence a bow, that didn’t really fit the context, so I finally concluded the author did in fact mean “pulling a bow”, which was what I had guessed from the beginning since that phrase had already been used a handful of times throughout the series. Another error that really cracked me up was when the word “barricade” (I think, based on context and similar phrasing in the surrounding paragraphs) was accidentally replaced with the word “bather”. Apparently, some invaders were about to overrun the “second bather”. After that, every time the invaders were advancing, I wanted to yell out, “Somebody warn the bathers!” I feel sort of like I’ve been ruined for life, because I suspect that one is going to stick with me for a long time and infect other books I read.

Yeah, that’s pretty much all I have. A general summary and some silly comments about errors. Well, I do have a couple spoilery comments too.

The below spoiler is for just this book:
This is the book where Duke James, previously known as Jimmy the Hand, is killed. His death wasn’t as heroic as I had remembered it. He did die while doing heroic things, but it seemed like he could have escaped in time if his guilt hadn’t made him reluctant to escape when others would die as a result of his actions. Also, I had forgotten his wife was killed with him because she wouldn’t leave him while he was being reluctant to escape. I didn’t think the way it all played out was necessarily wrong for the characters, just that it wasn’t quite how I remembered it and I have somewhat mixed feelings.

The below spoiler is possibly a spoiler for the entire larger series, but it’s only speculation based on content in this book and the title of the final book.
There’s an ominous warning to Pug in this book regarding what would happen if he chose to live his own life versus accepting godhood: ”…you shall know the loss of those you love, the pain of thousands, and the sting of bitter failure at the end of your life.”.

I hope this doesn’t mean the end of the series is going to be terribly depressing with lots of death and destruction of characters I’m attached to. I’ve long suspected that Pug would die at the end, based on the title of the last book, Magician’s End. I wouldn’t be upset by that because, while I like the character, I’m not that invested in him on an emotional level. But if all those things are going to happen to him at the end of his life, and if the end of his life is in the last book, that sounds like a pretty bleak ending! ( )