I love Raymond Feist. At the same time, I find his later books regularly peppered with continuity errors (was the the elf or the dwarf talking? Who was it getting punched that time?), and large sections of seat-of-the pants writing that belongs in a first draft. Pug and his crew are supposed to be really smart, but they fall backwards through obvious clues, and in the final battles, wander from place to place with no plan, depending on Pug's super-magic to save the day. This book was one of the worst.I like the premise of the star elves running from a hoard of demons and landing on Midkemia. I like the magician elf brothers, the new characters, the old characters returning. They are all interesting enough, and the potential for a story is there, but really, this book was just tossed together with entire, large plots dropped on the floor after being half developed. I think Feist didn't really know what to do with them, so fobbed them off to either another book (I haven't read any later than this), or just decided to drop them.There has been more and more of this sort of thing after his first set of books, which were classics. It's not uncommon to see spelling mistakes (waste instead of waist), weird inconsistencies within what Pug and other magicians can do with their magic, random, off-screen deaths of former major characters and so on. This was amateur hour for a writer who has written some of the very best fantasy in his original Magician series.I will continue reading, since I am only three more books away from the end of the Midkemia saga. I hope the last three are better orchestrated and not cobbled together in a brain dump of half thought out ideas. This and the first volume were excellent set-up novels for what's coming in the final trilogy of the epic. It was a nice change of pace to follow some of the high-powered characters rather than flipping back and forth between magicians and country-bumpkins turned soldiers. With the previous trilogy and continuing into this two-book sub-series, I thought Feist was very much back in top form as a writer and storyteller. Wonderfully epic moments combined with more personal ones are what Feist does best and he did so again with the Demonwar books.
What do You think about At The Gates Of Darkness (2010)?
Fantastic! Exciting! Could not put it down...
—heartofageek
