They are called The Dreamers. They look like sleeping children. They are, in fact, Gods.

There are eight elder Gods, four awake, four asleep, by turns. When they sleep, they sleep for eons. The only time the Gods are vulnerable is when the sleepers awake.

Knowing this, the Ruler of the Wasteland, ambitious to become a god by destroying gods, watches and waits, marshalling troops for war. So it is that the coming of the Dreamers passes unnoticed in the wasteland. But the world is soon out of kilter, it is being dreamed, and the awakening of Gods is no simple transition.

The sleeping Gods are stirring.

When they wake, the battle will begin.

There will be trickery and deception. Tribes of humans, creatures of the deep, the sea itself and the earth, the weather and the divinities, all will play their part in the epic struggle against the Ruler of the Wasteland. 

Rather than review each book in the series and any other series of books I review, I decided that I would review the series as a whole, if necessary breaking down the review into individual books as they fitted into the fabric of the series.

That was the intention, but I have to be honest about this time because, truly, this series is the largest and most smelly pile of rubbish I have ever seen committed to print.

I was wandering through a bookshop one day and saw with delight that David Eddings had published a few more books, which strangely, I didn't know about. Purchasing the first one, I rushed away and read it.

I wasn't terribly impressed by it, but because it was Eddings, I went back the next day and got the next two in the series.

I learnt a valuable lesson that day. That lesson was "Just because an author has been consistently fantastic over every other book of his you have read, doesn't mean that the next one will be as good". Or in this case, the next four.

I haven't bothered to buy the fourth book. If I do, I will either get it from a charity shop or I will find it at a car boot sale. Even then, I will think carefully before spending a quid on it.

If you read the introduction above, which is the blurb on the back of the first book in the series, you will begin to get a sense of what I am talking about.

The story is thin, the plot is ill developed and the fantastical element is badly presented. There is potential there for a good story, but on the whole, The Dreamers is very poorly executed. Dialogue is stilted at worst and reptitive at best.

For some reason, Eddings finds it necessary to retell the entire story so far every time another character is introduced, which to me made reading three of these books a damn chore and made the thought of devoting a day to reading the fourth absolutely insupportable.

This series came as a great disappointment to me, since it came on the back of me rereading one of his better series, The Tamuli (soon to be reviewed) and loving every beautifully crafted word of it. Unfortunately The Dreamers has none of this artisanship and subsequently, I would be remiss in recommending it to anyone at all. However, I'll put the links up below for any of you who might suffer masochism.