Dark of the Gods - Hardcover

Hodgell, P. C.

4.52

247 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1892065258 ISBN 13: 9781892065254

Publisher: Meisha Merlin Pub, 2000

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Whether you are meeting the Kencyr Jame for the first time or reawakening an old friendship, Dark of the Gods is the place to start. Dark of the Gods is an omnibus collection of P. C. Hodgell's first two books God Stalk and Dark of the Moon, along with her short story "Bones", which takes place between the two novels. Jame is a Kencyrath, the chosen people of the Three-Faced God, who fights the demonic entity called Perimal Darkling. At the same time she fights an internal battle for her honor, because three thousand years ago the leader of the Kencyrath betrayed his people to the Darkness for his own immortality. She also must find her ten year older twin brother Tori and return to him the sword and ring of their father. If that is not enough, she has to kill a god, resurrect a god, stand before the rathorns, wear the cloak of living snakes, and visit a council room ablaze with stained glass.

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Review:

God Stalk and Dark of the Moon are the first two books in P.C. Hodgell's acclaimed series about the noblewoman/thief Jame the Talisman. These classic novels of high fantasy have been out of print and hard to find since they appeared in the early 1980s. Now, Meisha Merlin has reprinted them in the omnibus volume Dark of the Gods, which also includes the short story "Bones."

Jame is one of the Kencyrath, a race of magically gifted mortals bound to the Three-Faced God in the millennia-old struggle with the evil and immensely powerful being known as Perimal Darkling. God Stalk tells how the child Jame wakes to find herself a young woman wandering in the Haunted Lands, badly wounded and pursued by the undead, and how she becomes involved with thieves, rulers, inn-keepers, and divine powers in the gods-haunted city of Tai-tastigon.

The second novel, Dark of the Moon, finds Jame leaving Tai-tastigon in the company of her blind, mind-linked cub, Jorin, and the giant Kencyr warrior Marcarn. They seek Jame's twin brother Torisen, who instead of being a 10-year-old boy, is older than Jame, and the Highlord of the Kencyrath. Torisen is far away in the Riverland, where he is unpopular with his nobles, and embroiled in deadly serious intrigues that will soon reach out to enmesh his unsuspecting and politically naive sister.

Jame's adventure continues in the sequel to Dark of the Gods, Seeker's Mask. --Cynthia Ward

About the Author:

Pat Hodgell can't remember a time when she wasn't passionately interested in science fiction and fantasy. "‘David Star' Space Ranger by Paul French was the first novel with which I fell in love, so much so that I started making my own copy of the library book, long-hand in a spiral notebook, complete with a carefully drawn facsimile of the frontispiece. Long afterward, I cam across a paperback reprint and learned that my beloved ‘Paul French' was none other than the ubiquitous Issac Asimov."

Over the years, as her interest grew, Pat collected piles of paperback science fiction and fantasy novels and comic books. Soon, however, reading and collecting genre fiction wasn't enough for her and, after college, she began to write it as well.

"It would be nice to say that, after the long suppression of the writing impulse, the dam burst—but it didn't. Due to lack of practice, I simply didn't know how to put a story down on paper." Pat began to learn, however, and by the next summer she had several stories finished and an invitation to the Clarion Writer's Workshop. "There, for the first time, I found a whole community of people like me—storytellers, wordsmiths, an entire family I never knew I had," Pat says of the Clarion experience. "Even more wonderful, here suddenly were professionals like Harlan Ellison and Kate Wilhelm telling me that I could indeed write. I could hardly believe my luck." She made her first professional sale two years later. Since then, she's sold stories to such anthologies as Berkley Showcase, Elsewhere III, Imaginary Lands, and the Last Dangerous Visions. Pat has also published three novels: God Stalk, Dark of the Moon, and Seeker's Mask, all part of an on-going fantasy saga concerned not! only with high adventure, but also with questions of personal identity, religion, politics, honor, and arboreal drift.

Both of Pat's parents are professional artists. Other reputed ancestors include a decapitated French Huguenot, a sheep thief tried by Chaucer, and a "parcel of New York Millerites who in 1843 sold their possessions, put on white nightgowns, and sat on the chicken coop waiting for the world to end. When it didn't they moved to Wisconsin out of sheer embarrassment."

Pat earned her Master's in English Literature from the University of Minnesota, her doctorate at the University of Minnesota with a dissertation on Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, and is a graduate of both the Clarion and the Milford Writers Workshops. In addition to her work with WDS, she is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in modern British literature and composition, and teaches an audio-cassette-based course on science fiction and fantasy for the University of Minnesota.

Pat lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in a nineteenth-century wood-framed house, which has been in her family for generations. In addition to writing and teaching, she attends science fiction conventions, collects yarn, knits, embroiders, and makes her own Christmas cards.

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