T1B

Just picked up the used PB editions for $5.

I read 'em back in high school and, for some reason, recalled liking them.

Now that I'm re-reading them for the first time in about 25 years...I'm convinced that I was doing some good weed back in the early 80's.

van Lustbader's writing is so frigging, laughably bad that I can't picture anyone possibly considering this series as "classic." The convoluted battle scenes are gratuitously graphic, the conversations between characters are full of faux-depth (everyone speaks cryptically and with "Asian" inscrutability), and on top of the "ancient evil arising in the land" sword-and-sorcery bullshit plot, the editors apparently were on good drugs also, since misspellings and random punctuation crop up frequently. I needed an Excedrin to get through a couple of pages in which quotation marks sprouted up randomly....I gave the pages to my wife to look at to make sure that it wasn't just me, and sure enough, quotation marks pretty much just cropped up in inappropriate places.

I think I'm gonna donate the books to the local library so that some D&D-playing kid can have some summertime reading.

I remember reading those back then also. They seemed pretty slick at the time.