our contemporary dating ritual, eventually leaving
together to go to her room.
Traditional sex is, of course, impossible for the
dead, so they pleasure themselves in the only way
possible, by beginning literally to eat one another.
The two individuals are becoming one in a way
that is impossible to the living, but at the moment
of their consummation they are caught up in a ter-
rible storm that fuses them together and finally
stills their unnatural lives forever. Another of their
kind stumbles over the remains and realizes that,
through their final act of love, they finally escaped
the world of the living dead into one of the truly
dead. “Eat Me” won the Bram Stoker Award.
Eddings, David and Leigh (1931– )
Although all of David Eddings’ novels prior to
1995 were listed as by David Eddings alone, his
wife Leigh was reportedly involved in his writing
from the outset and has been retroactively credited
as a collaborator. The early novels are almost all
part of one series or another, sometimes interre-
lated. Although they are invariably variations of
familiar plots and themes, Eddings employs a light,
anecdotal, sometimes whimsical style that gives
them a distinct flavor.
His first sequence of novels was the Belgariad
comprising Pawn of Prophecy(1982), Queen of Sor-
cery(1982), and Magician’s Gambit(1983). The
central plot is a quest to prevent villains from neu-
tralizing the power of a magical artifact that holds
an evil god at bay. The story wanders a bit but usu-
ally entertainingly, and the trilogy was very favor-
ably received. Two sequels followed, Castle of
Wizardry(1984) and Enchanter’s Endgame(1984),
in which the heroes are compelled to battle evil
once again and thwart the warped deity for the
final time. Another sequence with many of the
same characters followed, known as the Mal-
loreon. In Guardians of the West(1987) the now
firmly established king is troubled by portents of
danger. He pursues his son’s kidnappers in King of
the Murgos(1988), struggles with plague and im-
prisonment in Demon Lord of Karanda(1988), and
eventually rescues the boy before he can be sacri-
ficed in the final two volumes, Sorceress of Darshiva
(1989) and The Seeress of Kell(1991).
As the Malloreon was drawing to a close, Ed-
dings shifted locations for another sequence that
opened with the Elenium trilogy, The Diamond
Throne(1989), The Ruby Knight(1990), and The
Sapphire Rose(1991). The plot is very similar to
that of his first series of novels. A knight and his
companions seek a magical cure for their princess,
who is locked in a mystical coma that will result in
her death if she is not freed within a year. A sec-
ond linked trilogy followed, Domes of Fire(1992),
The Shining Ones(1993), and The Hidden City
(1994), but most of this quest sequence consists of
a repetition of incidents from earlier titles.
Belgarath the Sorcerer(1995) is the first of two
belated prequels to the Belgariad, chronicling the
youth of the powerful magician who will take a
central part in the battle against the sleeping god.
Polgara the Sorceress(1996) follows the career of a
shape-changing sorceress in the same setting. The
Redemption of Althalus(2000) is a more ambitious
and frequently witty novel about a thief recruited
by a goddess to do her bidding and his subsequent
exploits. Despite some occasional redundancies in
the plot, the novel is quite amusing and often clev-
erly done. Two novels using contemporary settings
are less successful. The Losers(1992) is awkwardly
constructed, and Regina’s Song(2002) is a painfully
inept novel of the supernatural whose plot is de-
pendent on major misunderstandings of how the
legal system functions. Their most recent fiction
consists of the opening volumes of a new series,
The Elder Gods(2003) and The Treasured One
(2004), a story of high adventure set in a magical
world torn by warfare.Eddison, E. R.(1882–1945)
Eric Rucker Eddison was a contemporary of J. R. R.
TOLKIENand C. S. LEWIS, but his very idiosyncratic
fantasy fiction little resembles theirs, although the
scope of his imagined worlds is as great and his
gift for creating larger-than-life characters rivals
Tolkien’s. His first and most famous novel is THE
WORM OUROBOROS(1922), a story filled with heroes
and villains and some of the trappings of main-
stream fantasy, but whose cast of characters is en-
tirely human and whose world is uniquely his own.
The frame story in the opening chapter is extremelyEddison, E. R. 103