Comments on: Why does epic fantasy have to be so epic …

By: Jennifer Estep

Jennifer Estep — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:18:32 +0000

Heh. I don’t know about that. You’d think publishers would encourage even epic fantasy authors to write shorter to save paper/money these days.

By: PurpleRanger

PurpleRanger — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:58:12 +0000

I think the publishers and writers have decided that they want to give the readers their money’s worth, and the best way to do that is with lots and lots of books that can also serve as doorstops.

By: Jennifer Estep

Jennifer Estep — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:06:51 +0000

I’ve never heard of Jones before, but that’s exactly what I mean. All those pages just for a staircase, yikes!

Warded Man is another one that I’ve been meaning to pick up since I saw it on your blog a while back. 😉

By: Tia

Tia — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:40:59 +0000

I recently tried to re-read the first novel in J.V. Jones’s second epic series. (The one after the Baker’s Boy trilogy — I forget the name.) I was wondering why it was moving so slowly for me when I got to this scene where this villain is climbing down a long set of stairs.

It’s an interesting set of stairs, because it goes from a tower down into the bowels of the earth. But the scene went on for pages and pages and pages as the guy thought his evil thoughts. Where was the J. V. Jones who wrote The Barbed Coil, one of my favorites of all time? Not in that book.

Recently, I’ve enjoyed Liane Merciel’s The River Kings’ Road, Peter Brett’s The Warded Man and David Anthony Durham’s Acacia trilogy. Oh! and The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.