The Dark Lord of Derkholm
I'd been meaning to read more Diana Wynne Jones for a while, so when I found this The Dark Lord of Derkholm
for $0.65 at a used book store I couldn't pass it up. It was really
enjoyable, written for a younger audience like most of her work. The
premise was definitely original, and it was a lot of fun to see how it
played out.
The world in the book is a fantasy land where magic is real and dragons and elves and dwarves roam the countryside. It's under the control of a man from another world, who makes everyone do his bidding with the aid of a demon. His will is to turn the world into a tourist trap that he can make a ton of money off of. He has all sorts of demands, including a dark lord, several battles, and the kidnapping of some tourists, so make these vacations more authentic. Or at least more in line with what he considers to be authentic.
However, the tours are taking their toll on the local economy and everyone's getting sick of them. Who wants to spend several months of the year pretending to be in an army or living without electricity just to meet the demands of some foreigners? So they start plotting to find a way to get rid of the tours once and for all, by making everything go horribly wrong.
The book moved really quickly; I was occasionally surprised by just how much ground was being covered. There were a lot of familiar tropes, along with send ups of those tropes. However, like the last Jones books I read, the ending came together a bit too neatly. Each dangling plot thread was tied off one by one as every character congregated in a single place to finish the story. That's not to say the everything ended perfectly, or that there weren't a few dangling threads to be handled in the sequel, but for the last several pages it almost felt like the story was checking things off on a list. Maybe that's just an effect of it being a rather long and complicated book aimed at children, but I would have preferred for things to stay a little messier.
The world in the book is a fantasy land where magic is real and dragons and elves and dwarves roam the countryside. It's under the control of a man from another world, who makes everyone do his bidding with the aid of a demon. His will is to turn the world into a tourist trap that he can make a ton of money off of. He has all sorts of demands, including a dark lord, several battles, and the kidnapping of some tourists, so make these vacations more authentic. Or at least more in line with what he considers to be authentic.
However, the tours are taking their toll on the local economy and everyone's getting sick of them. Who wants to spend several months of the year pretending to be in an army or living without electricity just to meet the demands of some foreigners? So they start plotting to find a way to get rid of the tours once and for all, by making everything go horribly wrong.
The book moved really quickly; I was occasionally surprised by just how much ground was being covered. There were a lot of familiar tropes, along with send ups of those tropes. However, like the last Jones books I read, the ending came together a bit too neatly. Each dangling plot thread was tied off one by one as every character congregated in a single place to finish the story. That's not to say the everything ended perfectly, or that there weren't a few dangling threads to be handled in the sequel, but for the last several pages it almost felt like the story was checking things off on a list. Maybe that's just an effect of it being a rather long and complicated book aimed at children, but I would have preferred for things to stay a little messier.
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