sword that instills its bearer with a kind of immor-
tality, although the spell has several unexpected
surprises and consequences. The Ethshar books
share a common setting but rarely common char-
acters. With a Single Spell(1987) provides a new
version of the story of the ill-prepared apprentice
wizard and the consequences of his blunders. The
Unwilling Warlord(1989) is the best of the early
Ethshar novels. A merchant is kidnapped and told
that he must arrange to win a war against a supe-
rior force or forfeit his life, a task at which he
eventually and creatively succeeds. After failing to
find a vocation as a wizard, a young man takes up
dragon hunting and almost loses his life in Blood of
a Dragon (1991), and another innocent out to
make his fortune spends time with a winged girl
who appears to be more experienced than she lets
on in Taking Flight(1993). A thief tries to imitate a
wizard’s spell and gets unexpected results in The
Spell of a Black Dagger(1994).
By the early 1990s Watt-Evans was well estab-
lished as one of the leading writers of light fantasy
adventure as opposed to the multivolume disguised
historical epics that dominated the field. He
demonstrated his willingness to experiment with
another cross-genre trilogy, Out of This World
(1994), In the Empire of Shadow(1995), and The
Reign of the Brown Magician(1996). The story this
time spreads across three different realities, our
own, one in which a comic-book style galactic em-
pire rules the universe, and a third that is a typical
fantasy world except that it has been overwhelmed
by an evil supernatural force that wants to extend
its rule into the other universes, even though the
laws of nature act differently in each. There are
times when the anachronisms are quite amusing,
but overall the trilogy is too inconsistent in tone to
be entirely successful.
His more recent work has been more serious
in tone and more technically impressive. Touched
by the Gods(1997) follows the exploits of a man
literally chosen by the gods to lead his people to
victory over an invading army of the undead.
Night of Madness(2000) is an Ethshar novel. All
of the magic in the world is divided among vari-
ous schools of study, all of whom are outraged
when a mysterious phenomenon allows some in-
dividuals to practice multiple forms. Ithanalin’s
Restoration(2002) is Watt-Evans’s most humorous
book, the story of a curse gone wrong and the dif-
ficulties involved when a house full of furniture
becomes animate.
By far his most impressive series of novels is
the trilogy Dragon Weather(1999), The Dragon So-
ciety(2001), and Dragon Venom(2003). The only
survivor of a village whose residents were massa-
cred by dragons escapes from slavery, grows to ma-
turity, then launches a long-term plan to wreak
vengeance on an elite group of powerful humans
who are responsible for the death of his family and
who have entered into a bizarre magical pact with
the dragons, ensuring their own extended
longevity in return for protecting the creatures
from human interference. The protagonist is the
most skillfully drawn of all the author’s characters,
and the ethical problems he faces in his quest are
genuinely thought provoking.
Watt-Evans’s only horror novel, The Nightmare
People(1990), is unusually original, but unfortu-
nately it appeared just as the horror market was col-
lapsing. The protagonist suspects that all the other
tenants in his apartment building have been re-
placed by a new kind of supernatural creature, and
he is right. Watt-Evans also collaborated with Esther
FRIESNERfor the humorous fantasy novel Split Heirs
(1993). His short stories have tended to be science
fiction rather than fantasy or horror, although “The
Frog Wizard” (1993) is quite clever, and “Worthy of
His Hire” (1995) is a good vampire story. A recur-
ring theme in his novels is the loss of innocence, ei-
ther through corruption or through experience, but
his characters always emerge as winners, though
sometimes they are embittered by the process.“A Way of Thinking”Theodore Sturgeon
(1953)
This particularly biting story achieves most of its ef-
fects by suggestion rather than the explicit descrip-
tions found in splatterpunk but is no less powerful
because of that. The narrator starts by describing
an acquaintance, Kelley, whose mind works very
differently from that of most other people when
faced with a problem to be solved, usually ap-
proaching from a direction directly opposite the
usual one. Whereas most of us would see a wheel“A Way of Thinking” 371