Author Gush: David Eddings and The Dreamers

I'm Walking In The Rain, Chasing After Rainbows I May Never Find Again

This was difficult for me, dear reader.

Long time perusers of this little blog may or my not be aware that David Eddings has a special place in my heart.

The Elenium and Belgariad are some of my all time favorite series. A solid go-to when I'm in a drought of needing something to read. Old reliable, if you will.

I’ve read the sequel series to each, dabbled in the prequels, and dove into a charming little stand alone called The Redemption of Althalus and found them all possessing that much-cherished charm found in the OG works I first discovered oh so long ago.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found out Mr. Eddings has written yet another series I'd never heard of.

Even now it's rarely mentioned online so I was curious. Not only that, but I was on a quest for completion given I’d pretty much read everything else ever written by the author.

Well, authors.

You see in what is entirely a gangster move dear old Dave decreed that since he's relied on his wife so much in his writings it was high time she got her name on the title page as well and so they both appear on the cover of The Dreamers.

Well done, David. Well done indeed.

This piqued my curiosity still further especiay since so far as I could tell The Dreamers was somehow the most recently written series while also being damn near out of print.

How could this be? I wondered.

After some intense spelunking on eBay I found someone willing to part with the books and gave it a go.

So let's not beat around the bush, dear reader.

Is The Dreamers as good as their other works? No.

Is it bad? Also no.

The story itself is a really cool concept and one that is executed about as well as could be hoped, but it's still...out there if you know what I mean. The term "experimental" comes to mind and for good reason.

Imagine, if you will, a story where there are two sets of gods. One set operates for eons until it's time to go to bed and then the other set wakes up to take over in a constant game of vigilance against an insect-queen that's trying to wipe out all of humanity. All's going well for countless centuries until suddenly people all over the world start having visions of The Dreamers- children who's Dreams will foresee the future and who's appearance will herald the Final Fight to determine the fate of the world.

Our story begins when the currently awake set of gods get a feeling the Dreamers time is at hand. The "oldest brother" summons his siblings and informs them he played fast and loose with reality to give them an edge in the coming fight by physically manifesting the sleeping gods into the bodies of the children who will Dream. Each god is assigned to watch over their "alternate" as they grow and we're off!

Now if you're like me you're thinking "oh, hell yeah, we're going to follow these kids as they discover they actual have the latent abilities of the divine!" And, like me, you'd be wrong.

The Dreamers and really the gods themselves, while being critically important to the story, are somehow background side characters we never really spend too much time with. The real main characters of the story are actually the soldiers the gods hire to fight their war for them (there's a rule that prevents gods from killing creatures).

A bit of a shift you might think, but ok, we could work with this.

Now here's where things get weird.

There's simply a metric fuck ton of characters in this series, dear reader. There are four awake gods, for sleeping gods (with two names each and who eventually split their psyche from their child host), and then a multitude of other characters from no less than eight different countries/armies and that's all BEFORE you get tossed into a fantasy equivalent of Pangaea where bug-snake-man hybrids stalk the natives through primordial woods and deserts.

Like fuck man I just got here.

Before you can even figure out how to say Tonthakan you're getting a speed run on tribal politics and Trogite-Maag relations and that's on top of trying to figure out which character is which.

Furthermore the expanded roster leads to a lot of repetition with characters reiterating plot points and information we already learned to another character that wasn't there to hear it the first time.

I don't recall ever seeing this in the Eddings other works, nor the italicizing of words to the point of distraction (which was admittedly charming in certain instances, but still).

That all being said, while The Dreamers is not as tightly focused as the other series I still found myself enjoying things immensely. Rabbit and Keselo are standing out favorites and how can you not love Narasan and Sorgan Hook-Beak? Book One was a little hard to get into, true, but by the time we got to Book Two we were *rolling* dear reader, with all the classic Eddings charm on full display. Book Three admittedly took the foot off the gas pedal a little but it also receives bonus points for being one of if not the only books I've ever read to employ the atlatl. And Book Four? There's lies, deception, intrigue, romance, and no small amount of wit- you could really see the Eddings were having fun with this one.

And then it just ends.

People suddenly don't give a shit their family member just died because they were a dick even though they know they were being mind controlled (so fuck her I guess) and then a literal Deus ex machina comes out of left field and everything you've read- every plot beat and character arc- is undone in a matter of pages as time itself is rolled back so the solution the characters found at end of book four takes place in the past.

This makes it so one famously tragic character gets a happy ending, but all others are erased, with only a vague promise that now the gods that are left can manipulate their happy endings into technically taking place sooner in their lives off screen.

Alright, look, all cards on the table here the Eddings are rather famous for their poignant endings. Bittersweet, sure, but more often sweeter than not. This one...I dunno man I get what they were going for but in my opinion it doesn't quite stick the landing.

Maybe they were planning on a sequel series (as was their custom) where we'd see the younger versions of these characters interact but sadly we will never know.

Dave and Leigh are tragically with us no more so we may never know what they had planned for the land of Dhrall.

Far be it for me to bash a couple that inspired me to read and write at such a young age, but as it stands The Dreamers feels like a fever dream.

Again: is it bad? No. It just makes me a little sad as I would have some massive qualifiers in recommending this series to anyone where I have none in everything else they wrote.

Maybe if you're looking for something a little different or are overly curious you’d be willing to give it a try. If you're a fan of Eddings I'd still consider it a must to at least read through once.

If you arent though, or if youre looking for something less opaque...well I'm sorry to say it may be best if you let sleeping Dreamers lie.