A review by takumo_n
Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson

3.0

Derivative from Tolkien, at least in this first entry. It start with Covenant, a best seller author, with a wife and a baby son, living in the real world. He hasn't written anything for a long time, so his wife leaves with their child to visit some relatives, so Covenant can have some quiet and start writing something. He gets inspired and writes non stop with no regard of a strange feeling in his fingers and toes. The next day his wife has to take him to the hospital because she smells something weird that comes from him. The doctor tells him that he has leprosy. His wife with their child leaves him. Anonymously the neighbours pay for his groceries and electric bills so he doesn't appear around town. To get back a little of his personhood Thomas Covenant goes to pay his own bills, a police car hits him and he wakes up in another world where a creature name Drool has summoned him with a magic staff. Then he gets transported into another place where a more terrifying and evil entity gives him an apocalyptic message to send to the Lords of that land. He then wakes up in the edge of a peak and meets Lena, a little girl, who mistakes him with Berek, a saviour of the world thousands of years ago. She shows him aliantha, a berry that can fill your hunger, or hurtloam, mud that can heal your injuries, and tells him the earth has power of health and life. She introduces him with her family. Thomas Covenant thinks he's dreaming, or even hallucinating. Something that his doctor said keeps him from believing that anything in this world is real: "Most people depend heavily on their sense of touch. In fact, their whole structure of responses to reality is organized around their touch. They may doubt their eyes and ears, but when they touch something they know it's real." Him being a leper thinks he's dreaming because he doesn't have a sense of touch in his world. Then he tells Lena's family about the message of Lord Foul, and terror and despair starts to spread throughout the village. Then Covenant realised that he isn't impotent anymore and asks Lena to take him somewhere desolate, he starts by asking her how the people in this world get married, as she's telling him he gets more frustrated and angry and hits her in the face and rapes her. Lena doesn't tell her parents, but she dissapears, and Lena's mother, who studied (without finishing) one of the seven wards, with the Lords of the land, starts taking him upon his quest, and then it becomes The Fellowship of the Ring more or less. But I liked it, even though the protagonist is very whinny and snarky, and he nevers stops believing he is dreaming. It made the story pretty interesting. Donaldson's prose is very purple sometimes, and it's something to get use to. Sometimes is pretty bad, though.