You can never go home.

Oh, I try.  Every six months or so I buy some fantasy books from my teenage years.  The first one is always great.  The nostalgia hit is immense and rewarding.  But I don’t stop there.  I always read another one.

The King Beyond the Gate is January 2015’s “another one”.  I should have stopped at Waylander II, but I didn’t.  The book is fine, I suppose, but it’s 400 odd pages I didn’t read of something else.

The plot – it’s all plot – is telegraphed and obvious, but that’s okay.

The characters are thin and their problems are either weak or overblown.

The setting is nothing much.

And the ethos behind the book is basically that men enjoy killing and women enjoy men who kill, and sometimes it’s complicated, but, really, it’s not.  And that’s about it.

And I suppose all of that is fine, really.  But it’s not why I read.  And I should have stopped at just one.

I went home.  It was a mistake.

The Books, Read page contains a list of all of the books I have read this year.