Book Review: Sword of Truth 10 - Phantoms

Have you ever seen a link or video that you KNEW would be disturbing, yet you felt some compulsion to check it out anyway? That is basically how I feel about the Sword of Truth series of fantasy novels; I know at some point I'll be bothered by what happens in the book, but I'm still compelled to check it out. At least now I just go to the library instead of plopping down $24.95.

For the uninitiated, Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series is fairly standard Tolkien-esque high fantasy: magic swords, wizards, monsters, heroes and beautiful maidens; all set against an unimaginable evil that threatens to consume the entire world. The big difference between SoT & LoTR? Graphic, brutal and lurid scenes of sex, violence and sexual violence are prevalent throughout the entire series. In fact most of the last third of the first book, Wizard's First Rule, is really just one long S&M session. Now I'm not a prude, but this was a little offputting at first. That said, the first 2-3 books in the series were actually pretty good; the main characters were more fleshed out than in most genre novels and their motivations were fairly realistic; brutally so at times. There was still a lot of sex and brutality, and sometimes sex & brutality, but the world Goodkind crafted was engrossing with lots of new and interesting concepts. It wasn't as good as the great fantasy epics, but I looked forward to new iterations of the series.

Things began to go downhill from there. All the charm and innovation of the earlier books had been leeched away, replaced by flat characterizations and gore by the truckload. The two main characters, Richard and Kahlan, were great; the rest of the cast was mostly boring and one-dimensional. To make things even stranger, at some point the books morphed into polemics against Soviet-style communisism. Now I have no love of Stalinism, but the subtext and metaphor became about as subtle as a hammer and sickle over the head. Still I stuck around, mostly because at the end of every book there was a sense that the climax was just around the corner. That changed with book 7, The Pillars of Creation, a book in which the series' two main characters don't appear until the last 40 pages. In their place is a character that, by the middle of the next book, has been all but written out of the series.

It's with all of this in mind I headed out to pick up Goodkind's newest book: Phantoms. However I headed not the bookstore, but the library, because by now I don't even want to spring for the paperback. How was it? Pretty much exactly what I expected. Richard, Kahlan and a couple of other characters are well written and interesting, everyone else is flat, dull and irritating. Like every other book in the series it boils down to Richard knowing what to do, but all of his friends and allies spend most of the book disbelieving. He's proven right in the end, but not before the lack of faith makes matters worse. Having a formula while writing can be good, but this just comes off as repetitive.

According to several sources this was the penultimate book in the series, to which I say: thank God.

2 out of 5

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