The Last Star at Dawn

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 1. NOV. 1999

The concluding volume of the Lightbringer Trilogy (The Forging of the Shadows; The Nations of the Night) transports the venerable theme of an Olympian war into a fantasy-medieval setting. Reh, the god of light, and Iss, the god of darkness, are the last survivors of an ancient war among deities. Now they face each other through the battles fought by their human champions. If Iss and his champion, Faron Gaton, win, the world will be swathed in eternal night--and all human beings will be transformed into vampires. But their victory is by no means assured; the forces of virtue have assembled a powerful defense that includes Thalassa the Lightbringer, the warrior Jayal Illgill, the mage Urthred, the adolescent werewolf-prince Fazad and plenty of potent talismans. Good and evil confront each other in a series of battles, journeys, discoveries, revelations and twists of fate, but most of these encounters are driven by plot rather than by character. The warriors' motivations are often so slightly sketched that it is impossible to tell if they are logical. Nonetheless, Johnson's description of the dark, dying world and his above-average battle scenes (particularly the clash of the dragons) make the novel memorable and occasionally lend it an almost Wagnerian grandeur.