Well, folks, it's finally here. One year and three books later, we've reached the last of Leigh Brackett's amazing Eric John Stark novels, which began with our introduction to the wildman-turned-mercenary in The Secret of Sinharat and continued in her epic Skaith trilogy. In The Reavers of Skaith, her final installment on the world of the dying ginger star, Brackett doesn't pull any punches. Not only do we get more strange landscapes, more epic battles, and more alien cultures (such as the vicious Kings of the White Islands, with their seal-towed iceberg ships containing the frozen corpses of their ancestors), but Brackett gives us something that few authors of her era were willing to: a sense of fear.
While I wouldn't dare give out spoilers, I have to say that I respect an author who can, after multiple novels with the same characters, allow some of them to fail in their quests or die for the good of the story. All it takes is one quality death scene to break through the reader's warm sense of security, and after that it's a nail-biting page turner as you suddenly realize that the author could kill off anybody she wants to. This is her world, and there are no rules. No one is safe. Complacency is a terrible thing in a story, and it's fabulous to see a sword and planet author that isn't afraid to toy with the reader's emotions a little.
Some series lurch to a halt, others grind on long after the magic is gone. In The Reavers of Skaith, Leigh Brackett shows her chops by bringing more than a thousand pages of adventure to an elegant, satisfying close. It's not saccharine—Brackett's too much of a realist for that. As with our world, some people win and some people lose, and those results don't always line up neatly along the axis of good versus evil. But there can be no question that, as you turn that last page, you come away with a new world that is all the more real for its grittiness—a living, breathing place. This is the gift of Leigh Brackett, and a fitting end to the Eric John Stark books.
