Lancelot Du Lethe
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The Arthurian epic that began in Mad Merlin continues in Lancelot du Lethe, the story of the greatest knight, paramour, and traitor the Round Table has ever known.
The story of Lancelot is one of striving for perfection only to fall short due to the sins of the flesh. But in Lancelot du Lethe the knight is only partially of the mortal realm. He and Guinevere share a mystical bond of which Arthur cannot be a part, for they are both of the bloodline of the fey, immortally destined to be betrothed. This ensuing war of loyalties and love threatens the uneasy peace not just mortal realm but of the entire netherworld of the multipantheons of gods as well.
Drawing from Joseph Campbell, and from sources both historical and literary, this is a new take on the story of Camelot's most famous knight, told as only the author of Mad Merlin can.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sir Thomas Malory meets Marion Zimmer Bradley head on in this unfocused retelling of the Arthurian legends. King began his version of the tales in Mad Merlin (2000); here, amid much gratuitous bloodletting, he finishes the job. As the title indicates, the book adopts the perspective of Lancelot, Camelot's greatest knight. Son to the king of Benwick, he loses parents and kingdom while still a child, and is reared by an "Aunt Brigid" of Avalon. Lancelot's capture by the Four Queens, his rescue of Guinevere from Meleagaunce and other familiar adventures are intermixed with a mishmash of Roman, Celtic and Christian mythology, loosely glued together by a paramysticism reminiscent of Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Malory's and Bradley's works brilliantly exhibit their respective visions. Sadly, King's vision is less clear. In attempting to draw on Malory's heroic chivalry and Bradley's revisionist mysticism, he seeks the best of both worlds and ultimately achieves neither. King's flashes of brilliance, frequently found in his descriptions of natural images, don't compensate for a choppy, movie-influenced style that renders even potentially stirring scenes in laundry-list prose. Furthermore, too much of the book is devoted to a convoluted justification for Lancelot and Guinevere's betrayal of an unsympathetic King Arthur. Lovers of "The Matter of Britain" would do better to turn to King's sources rather than his results. FYI:King has won an Origins Award for his gaming fiction.
