the family and disguises the fatal wound, but the
innkeeper suspects something of the truth and asks
him to leave.
The story is of interest because none of the
parties involved is entirely evil or entirely guiltless,
and the analogy to warfare is strong. The age-long
enmity between the Polleaus and the forest has be-
come a reason in itself for their continuing strug-
gle, and McKay’s reluctance to participate mirrors
the acquiescence of soldiers in a conflict that may
not directly concern them.
The World of Darkness Series
Although there are many shared world universes
for fantasy game players, most based on role-play-
ing games such as WARHAMMER, FORGOTTEN
REALMS, and DRAGONLANCE, the same is not true
for horror fiction. By their very nature, horror sto-
ries are not usually amenable to becoming parts of
series, even within the output of single writers, be-
cause normally either the evil or the protagonist is
vanquished in the end. Those that do exist are
usually based on movies or television shows such
as Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Charmed,and
The Crow.The one exception to this rule has been
the World of Darkness series from White Wolf, al-
though even in this case the treatment of the nov-
els, despite the inclusion of vampires, werewolves,
and other supernatural creatures, is more that of
fantasy than horror.
The central premise of the World of Darkness
is that vampires, werewolves, and other supernatu-
ral creatures exist in our world and have since his-
toric times, hidden from us and living in their own
elaborate societies. They are neither all evil nor all
good, and there are frequent tensions and battles
among their factions, which are generally arranged
in tribes or clans. Some of the novels are set in the
past, most notably a trilogy set in Victorian Europe
by Philippe Boulle consisting of A Morbid Initiation
(2002), The Wounded King(2003), and The Mad-
ness of Priests(2003), which features vampires as
well as a coven of evil sorcerers, but most have a
contemporary, urban setting.
As with most fantasy tie-in series, the novels
are written primarily by authors who specialize in
that setting or who write otherwise only in simi-
larly constructed shared universes. The World of
Darkness has attracted several writers who have
proved successful outside the genre, including Edo
Van Belkom, David Niall Wilson, Richard Lee
Byers, Scott Ciencin, James Moore, Tim Waggoner,
and Owl GOINGBACK, although they are generally
newer or young writers just beginning to establish
themselves. The best single World of Darkness
novel is Beyond the Shroud(1996), by Rick HAU-
TALA, an atypical story in which a man visits the
land of the dead and a novel that may not origi-
nally have been written for this market at all. A
large subset of books is named after specific vam-
pire clans, including Ventrue(1999), by Gerhod
Fleming, Tremere(2004), by Sarah Roark, and La-
sombra(1999), by Richard Dansky, but the individ-
ual titles vary considerably in quality and not
widely in plot. They do not need to be read in any
particular order.
There have also been several anthologies of
stories using the same general setting. Like other
shared world universes, the restrictions imposed by
the frame create something of a handicap for the
writers, but in this case they are loose enough that
there remains the potential for original and more
impressive work in the future.The Worm OuroborosE. R. Eddison(1922)
The least-remembered of the British academics
who wrote fantasy novels during the middle of the
20th century is E. R. EDDISON, known to J. R. R.
TOLKIENand C. S. LEWISand in many ways their
literary superior. Eddison’s masterpiece is The
Worm Ouroboros,an unusual epic fantasy, although
his other three fantasy novels, a loosely organized
trilogy, are distantly related. The frame story for
Wormis awkward and is dropped after the opening
chapter, in which the observer, Lessingham, is mag-
ically transported to the planet Mercury, where all
of the action is theoretically set.
The world is divided into nations, Demon-
land, Pixyland, Impland, and so forth, although
the inhabitants are all human, and the names are
essentially meaningless except to distinguish one
from the other. Witchland is the major power but
is ethically compromised, while Demonland is
home to most of the heroes and is clearly morally390 The World of Darkness Series