Admittedly this was some of McKiernan's earliest work, but come on.

Unfortunately, copying various things that were in the book doesn't make your book even nearly as good - the hero is wimpy, the action is strange, the moral messages make you want to stick a fork in your head, and the poetry is horrendous. So this is basically Lord of the Rings, Dennis McKiernan style. What To Read Instead of Dennis L.Lord of the Rings needed more Suey hobbits, sugary love interests and COMETS OF DEATH

The Halfling House - A supposed tribute to Tolkien that isn't anything of the kind, in which in a lot of tiny people go on an unsatisfying adventure through time and space.

Think a not-very-good RPG game combined with the off-brand 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Caverns of Socrates- It's got fantasy, but it's actually sci-fi.

Once Upon a Dreadful Time - Time for happily ever after! Or whatever!.

Once Upon A Winter's Night - A fairy tale adaptation, with some fairly explicit sex, a Purity Sue and much meanderings around in Faery.

Tolkien's estate, McKiernan turned it into a purely derivative work.

The Silver Call Duology - Originally written as a sequel to Lord of the Rings,but when it was shot down by J.R.R.

Voyage of the Fox Rider - In which elves, dwarves, faeries and a wizard sail around doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

The Iron Tower Trilogy - Think Lord of the Rings, but whinier and weirder and with more crying.

Also, the plague may break out at any random time.

Into the Fire - Apparently war is long, boring, and repetitive.

Into The Forge - A halfling goes across the world with a tiny round object that may or may not be able to save the world.

Hel's Crucible Duology -No, that is not a typo.

The Dragonstone - Some incredibly tiny elf chick foresees that she has to get a bunch of cliched people/objects together or the world is going to end.

Plus the bad guy is carved out of Cheez.Īnyway, he wrote some actual original stories after that, but whatever. and then wrote a prequel trilogy with the same basic plot but a few new details, like a sugary princess and a COMET OF DEATH. Shockity-shock-shocks, you can't actually publish a literal sequel because the Tolkien estate will shut you down so fast your head spins, so he changed the names and a few details. Okay, backstory: Dennis McKiernan apparently began writing when he was in a bad motorcycle crash and was immobilized for some months, so he wrote a sequel to Lord of the Rings. In a world whose name means 'middle world.'

Dennis McKiernan - The Lord of the Seeing Crystal, um, Magic Arrow, uh, oh forget it.Ī band of tiny but strong halflings from an idyllic little land join up with a human king-in-waiting, an elf archer and a doughty axe-swinging dwarf who are trying to stop the Evil Dark Lord from taking over the world and enslaving or killing everybody.

The dark tide dennis l mckiernan