Beyond the Pale: Book One of "the Last Rune" - Softcover

Anthony, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684851679 ISBN 13: 9780684851679

Publisher: Earthlight, 1998

Synopsis

Travis Wilder, bar-owner and drifter, is given a mysterious stone by a friend. Grace Beckett, ER doctor, finds a gunshot victim with a heart of iron. Both Travis and Grace must step beyond the pale and enter Eldh, a world where they are caught in a battle between good and evil.

About this title

Review

To go through a portal, from the towns and cities of mundane reality, to some place where we do not know the rules, is not just a handy way of dumping your central character in a difficult situation. It is also a way of saying something about the provisional nature of the reality we already know--in Anthony's tale of high adventure and menace, it is clear that the plague of heartless supermen that is afflicting the realm of Eldh is also present in our own world. A bar owner and a doctor are shanghaied to Eldh--he does no more than cope, while she talks her way into Court and finds poised intrigue even more to her taste than Emergency Room surgery. This is standard wish-fulfilment stuff, but Anthony does it, at his occasional best, with real verve and invention. Part of the charm of stories of strange lands is traveller's tales of our own world-- Anthony does not stint in that estrangement which comes of bringing mundane skills to this new world. This is, among other things, a detective story in which Travis and Grace find quite simple knowledge of investigative technique puts them ahead of the game in a mediaeval world. --Roz Kaveney

Edition details

• Publisher: Earthlight
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684851679
• ISBN 13: 9780684851679
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 544