Title Dragonsbane Author Barbara Hambly Cover Art Michael Whelan Publisher DelRey - 1986 First Printing DelRey - 1985
	Title Dragonshadow Author Barbara Hambly Cover Art --- Publisher DelRey - 2000 First Printing DelRey - 1999
	Title Knight of the Demon Queen Author Barbara Hambly Cover Art Donato Giancola Publisher DelRey - 2000 First Printing DelRey - 2000
	Title Dragonstar Author Barbara Hambly Cover Art Mark Garro Publisher DelRey - 2002 First Printing DelRey - 2002
	Title Damselblossom Author Barbara Hambly Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Title Shadowbaby Author Barbara Hambly Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Title Princess Author Barbara Hambly Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Category High Fantasy Warnings The middle two books are really, really dark Main Characters Lord John Aversin, Jenny Waynest, Morkeleb, Garreth, Zyerne, Ian, Aohila, Amayon Main Elements Dragons, demons Website barbarahambly.com

Dragonsbane

Dragonshadow

Knight of the Demon Queen

Dragonstar

I could probably write for pages and pages describing all the things I love about the first book in this series. So I'll start with the most important one, the characters.

John and Jenny are the two most real characters I have ever read. John wears glasses, aspires to be a scholar, but is in fact a knight protecting his people. Jenny is middle aged and fighting the effect of menopause, she's a mage but not a very powerful one. They aren't married but they have three children. This sets up some complex characters having to make some hard decisions because they are also limited and flawed. Jenny could have more magic if she spent more time studying but she also has children and a home to take care of. Sounds a lot like modern day women that have to choose between love and their career. It's a very hard choice and I sympathize with her, even as she accuses herself of being "lazy" when she spends time with her family instead of working on her magic. A common thing an employer would call a woman who has to stay home with a sick kid and miss a day of work. Sure she does some complaining from time to time, but don't we all do that about our life choices? Wouldn't it make her less real if she didn't have doubts?

They live a fairly mundane life, not in the sense that the Winterlands aren't dangerous, there are Ice Riders and wraiths and simple brigands hiding in the woods such that John and Jenny are often riding out to protect the villages. But at the same time they are country bumpkins compared to the royal courts. They name their pets in such creative manners as "Moon Horse" for Jenny's white mare, or "Skinny Kitty" for their skinny cat. Oh, there's also a "Fat Kitty" and I can't recall the exact names but there was a Dumb Gelding and a Dumber Gelding or something like that too. Ok, the war horse got the name Osprey to be fair.

When put together, between the fact they are middle-aged, down to Earth, in love, and bookish introverts, I felt like I really connected with these characters. They just felt so real, so human.

And this comes as a surprise to Gareth, having a bit of a dragon problem in the capital city, he comes to find the one man fabled to have slain a dragon. Indeed John did slay a dragon, with some poisoned spears and other tricks that got the dragon on the ground long enough for him to take an ax and hack it to pieces while at the same time mourning its beauty. Gareth expected something from a fairy tale, instead he got a regular run-of-the-mill human male. He didn't wear glittering armour on a glorious destrier, he didn't have a magic sword that glowed in the sunlight, he didn't ride out all by himself and called the dragon forth from it's lair to do glorious battle. Heck, knights can't even put on their own armour by themselves in the real world, and this knight is shortsighted!

So not only do we have wonderful characters, but we're also thumbing our nose a bit at other fantasy novels with heroic characters. John is just a dude who likes reading books and had to fight a dragon or else it would kill a whole bunch of people. It wasn't for glory but rather out of a sense of duty. And he'd really REALLY rather not have to do it again, he'd rather tinker in his workshop and build a flying machine. But Gareth gave him an offer he couldn't refuse.

And so we go to Court where we find our more about this world. Like Hambly having a bit of fun with us and having the nobles all dressed in the most recent fashion, which includes dying their hair green or lilac! I'd never encountered hair dye in a fantasy before, not unless it's to make your hair black as a disguise. She also gives us some humour, like the scene where John plays up his accent (he uses terms like "gar" among others) and his hairy woodsman country-bumpkiness to the snobby amusement of the court (of course we enjoy his cleverness at making fun of their ignorance, like convincing them he didn't know what a fork was).

I could keep on going about detail after detail but perhaps I should jump to the dragon. Hambly did a beautiful job with Morkeleb, described him as a magnificent but terrifying creature, all black and spiked, thorned and scaled spitting burning acid. But it was his mind that was beautiful, that dragons think in music, that they love gold since it reflects their thoughts back at them, sings to them in their dreams. An immortal creature that wasn't native to this world, having travelled across the stars millenia ago. She created a truly magical and alien being. Her words are as close to real magic as we can get in our world.

Dragonsbane is in my top 10, if not my top 5 favorite books. It's not really about the plot (man goes to fight dragon), that's common enough, but rather everything around it. The careful details that make up the world and the people in it. I mean come on, John wears glasses! How often does the hero get to do that (without being a nerdy kid in a coming of age story where he can throw away his glasses and come forth as a man (e.g. Harry Potter)...John has no shell, he's a strong confident mature adult...he just can't see his hand in front of his face without some lenticular help)

And then came the next two books.

I can't say they are bad. Hambly writes beautifully. The characters are still John and Jenny. But wow...Hambly writes too well and her characters are too real. She literally writes such that her worlds dig into your soul and leave you wondering if life is worth living. There's grimdark fantasy, but this goes deeper, this literally goes to the depths of Hell by riping out the souls of some of your favorite characters. Martin may kill off your favorite characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, but Hambly does much much worse than death to hers.

SPOILER ALERT

I'm going to say a bit more about what happens because, well, I'm actually going to recommend that unless you are grimdark fan, that you actually DO NOT read any of the other books in this series. They are excellent in their own way, but oh...oh...how hard it was to get through them. See, she made these two characters you don't just care about but you actually love, and then she tore them to shreds but left them alive before your very eyes. It was the most horrible thing I'd ever read. Frankly if her characters weren't so real, we wouldn't have cared about their plights so much. But we love them, and we suffered with them.

Jenny's son gets possesed by a demon, his soul trapped in a jewel. Long story short, they try to save them, along the way Jenny herself loses her soul and a demon takes control of her body. She has full awareness of what it's doing, but is unable to stop it, and somewhere deep down in there, maybe she kind of likes it. The power she always craved. The strength to tell other people what to do. To have sex with whomever she wants, to kill whomever she wants. She cringes away as much as she is drawn to it, and when the demon is exorcised and her soul returned, she knows she's been corrupted in a very deep way. She longs for the demon's return. She'd always been somewhat abivalent about her love of John, but now she blames him for taking her powers away, for she had to sacrifice those to get rid of the demon. And she lost her hair. And she crippled her hands. And she's a middle-aged woman suffering from hot flashes and migraines, and dreams of a demon lover who truly understands her, is a part of her. She's suffering from PTSD, from the effects of being raped, of a drug addict, of Stockholm syndrome. She's broken and torn apart, she can barely be bothered to live anymore, let alone get up in the morning. Sure her son and husband are suffering too, but there's just nothing left inside of her to care. John of course is instrumental is saving her, but to do so he had to bargain with the Demon Queen, to get the only kind of help that could defeat other demons. He may not have lost his soul, but he too is tainted. She haunts him with dreams of love that his wife Jenny no longer can give him. But his story is not of a rapist but of a stalker. She never really leaves him, and when she needs help in the human realm, well, she just reaches out and says "Do this or I will kill your people" and he has to do it. He ends up agreeing with the sages on the capitol city that condemned him to death for dealing with demons. Not because he wants to die, in fact he's the only one that doesn't want to at this point (his son tries to commit suicide) but because he knows he's a pawn the demons can use in the future. Whether they trick him or force him, they will use and manipulate him in the future. Death really is the only way to deal with people that dealt with demons, even if they did so with the best of intentions. He admits that if there was a man in the Winterlands that had dealing with demons, he would not hesitate to burn him at the stake. But oh so hard to turn that accept that sentence for yourself, even if you know its the right thing to do.

Even John's journeys through the various hells could have been interesting, but again, were depressing. He had to ride a naked dead bird thing till it collapsed into decomposing goo beneath him. He found a Hell of beautiful butterflies that when they bit you, inject something with teeth and claws into your body that rips you up from the inside. I've read a lot of books tagged as horror and didn't even shudder once. Hambly gives me nightmares, what she writes feels so real, especially the demons. You almost feel tainted by having read the books, that maybe the demons could start whispering your name at night just because you now know they exist. Oh, and Gareth doesn't get away free either, his pregnant wife dies, and in his despair he finds a wizard who can raise the dead...only he finds out that means inserting a demon into the corpse of his lover. His father gets possessed too. Most of the city dies in a plague, and half of those wandering around are resurrected corpses. The other kingdoms are testing the borders. Even the gnomes are infested with demons. No one gets through Hambly's hands without being gutted to their very cores. It's really, really hard to read.

The one part I did really enjoy was when John came out in a human world that was, ok, a kind of dark dystopia with the majority of the inhabitans constantly on drugs, where it constantly rains, and where the demons have also found a foothold. But it's a weird SF world, where everyone has a TV screen with the sound turned on showing ads in their bedrooms, and where the waters are slowly rising and slowly drowning the city. In many ways it's a world familiar to ours, but instead of electricity they use something call ether. And John must find a man who is an expect in this ether techonology and trap him in a box for the demon queen, before the other demons get their hands on him first. It's a little bit like the world of Blade Runner, a disconcerting SF moment in an otherwise fantasy series. But remember this is John, no matter how horrible this world is, his curiosity allows him to be fascinated rather than defeated by what's going on around him. Heck, Hambly has him working as a barrista for a chapter! It was actually funny!

END SPOILER ALERT

Then we get to the last book where Hambly restores a little bit of joy in the world, the characters start to come to terms with their experiences and heal their wounds and their relationships, and the lose ends are all tied up, perhaps a little too perfectly considering what they just went through (John and Jenny are actually discussing plans to explore the weird worlds John has visited). It's a good wrap up to the series. But yeah, given what I know now I would stop at the first book, it wraps itself up quite nicely by itself, without the psychological damage the next two books inflict on their readers!

BTW, I just have to comment on Michael Whelan's cover. There's an artist that pays attention to the author's descriptions of characters and creatures. I've always loved the Dragonsbane cover, and he also did an amazing job with Anne McCaffrey's Pernese dragons. Two wildly difference styles of dragons but he managed to capture each of the perfectly.