Deadhouse Gates

Originally this book was a computer game, but Raymond Feist decided that he wanted to make a novel about it. He took the core story, eliminated some of the sillier side quests that RPGs are known for and wrote the book. The book has turned out to be the weakest in the world of the Riftwar. The characters, including those that were favorites and well known from the Riftwar Saga, just feel to be flat and not nearly as interesting as they were in the earlier novels. The time frame of this book comes about ten years after A Darkness at Sethanon (Princess Anita is pregnant with Nicholas) and several years before A Prince of the Blood.

Krondor: The Betrayal introduces two new characters that will serve as the protagonists: Owyn, a magician and Gorath, a Dark Elf. We also get to revisit Locklear, Jimmy, Pug, and Arutha and other minor characters who appear in the Riftwar Saga. Locklear is on patrol in the Northern lands of the Kingdom and comes across a band of moredhel chasing someone. Upon being rescued, that someone turns out to be Gorath, a moredhel himself. He has an urgent message for Prince Arutha: Murmandamus lives! Murmandamus was the big bad in A Darkness at Sethanon and was killed at that city. The threat, rumor, risk that he might be alive, or that the moredhel could believe that, is cause for alarm and Arutha immediately sends Jimmy and Locklear (with Owyn and Gorath) to investigate while Arutha marshals the armies.

This is a book filled with action and not so much with character development or even much characterization. I can imagine that this book would only appeal to fans of the Riftwar Saga as we get to see favorite characters in the prime of their lives (and still alive, for some of them). The book still reads like a video game and you are going from place to place with lots of small battles and several bigger ones and as a whole, this was a much weaker offering by Raymond Feist. I blame this on the fact that he is converting a game to a book and it just didn’t work extremely well. I enjoyed getting to see my favorite characters again, but they didn’t feel as real or as well drawn as they are in other novels.