THE RIVAN CODEX

Already a smash hit in the UK, this latest addition to the Belgariad and Malloreon cycles (most recently, Polgara the Sorceress, 1997), featuring evil gods, kings, sorcerers, orbs, and whatnots, comprises a wretched jumble of unreconstructed notes together with gnarled, gnomic utterances—that is to say, background material accumulated before the authors wrote the stories themselves. It consists of an introduction, a preface, six headed sections, and an afterword (“This collection provides a kind of running description of a process”) that’s a sort of “how-to” for budding fantasists. The headed sections weigh in, variously, as: “The Holy Books” (of Alom, of Torak, etc.: “And so passed the companions again unto the north and returned they unto the west”); “The Histories” (of The Alorn Kingdoms, of Sendaria, of Ulgoland, and so forth—luckily, “The caves of the Ulgos are naturally heated by geothermal forces”); “The Battle of Vo Mimbre” (“And great was the wrath of the Accursed One, and fire was in his right eye and also in the eye that was not”); “Preliminary Studies to the Malloreon” (“When speaking of this era, some confusion is possible”); “The Malloreon Gospels” (“Sit no more upon the earth in vain and foolish lamentation”); and “A Summary of Current Events.” Fanatics only.