to escape. Physically and by nature, they are a
cross between a vampire and an angel, seductive,
powerful, and mercilessly cruel.
A handful of fairly long supernatural stories
were collected as Scare Tactics(1988), but with the
exception of “horrorshow,” they are inferior to his
longer work. Farris recently returned to dark sus-
pense and horror with two sequels to The Fury,al-
though like the original, they are fundamentally
action adventure stories. The Fury and the Terror
(2001) examines the results when a psychic dis-
covers that elements within the U.S. government
are secretly conducting a terror campaign to influ-
ence public opinion. The Fury and the Power(2003)
is more overtly supernatural. A woman who can
voluntarily generate her own doppelgänger, or du-
plicate, battles an evil entity. Some of the stories in
Elvisland(2004) also involve fantastic themes. Al-
though Farris has not written consistently in the
genre, his most cohesive body of work lies within
that field, and it is most likely the fiction for which
he will be best remembered.
Feist, Raymond E.(1945– )
Raymond Feist started his career as a novelist and,
with the exception of a very few short stories start-
ing in 1995, has written exclusively at book length.
He is primarily an adventure story writer and uses
mostly familiar plots, settings, and devices, but he
manages to rearrange them in patterns that seem
fresh, peoples his work with unusually resonant
characters, and employs a lively and smooth prose
style that distinguishes him from most of his con-
temporaries. Most of his novels to date are set in
either the Riftwar or Serpentwar sequences, both
sharing the same magical alternate reality although
remote from each other in time.
Feist debuted with Magician (1982), which
was so long that it appeared later in two volumes
as Magician: Apprenticeand Magician: Master.The
conflict lies in the interface between two universes,
one resembling medieval Europe and the other
feudal Asia. The Riftwar continues in Silverthorn
(1985), a quest story involving a poisoned princess,
A Darkness at Sethanon(1986), which expands the
conflict to include the basic forces of Order and
Chaos, Prince of the Blood(1989), set just after the
war ends only to segue into a civil war, and The
King’s Buccaneer(1992), one of Feist’s best, a story
of pirates and derring do.
His second series was a trilogy written with
Janny WURTScomprising Daughter of the Empire
(1987), Servant of the Empire(1990), and Mistress
of the Empire(1992). The sequence is a well writ-
ten but very derivative story of the battle for the
succession to a throne, mixed with court intrigues,
foreign invaders, and liberal doses of sorcery. Much
more significant is the Serpentwar sequence by
Feist alone, a series set some time before the
events chronicled in the Riftwar books. Shadow of
a Dark Queen(1994) sees Midkemia facing inva-
sion by a mixed force of humans and intelligent
reptiles from another universe. Although the rulers
and people are ill-prepared for war, a small group of
businessmen start setting the framework for a
major military buildup. Their efforts begin to bear
fruit in Rise of a Merchant Prince(1995), and the
war finally erupts in Rage of the Demon King
(1997). The leader of the enemy force is killed, but
her still-powerful army remains as a threat in
Shards of a Broken Crown(1998). The series is par-
ticularly realistic in establishing the economic re-
quirements for conducting a major war, even in a
relatively primitive economy.
The Riftwar novels led to the development of
a role-playing computer game, which then led in
turn to a new trilogy set in the years following the
war. This new sequence consists of Krondor: The
Betrayal (1998), Krondor: The Assassins (1999),
and Krondor: Tears of the Gods(2000), which fortu-
nately are considerably more substantial than most
game-inspired fiction, presumably because the au-
thor was still developing his original vision. Al-
though collectively known as the Riftwar Legacy,
the novels are generally independent, describing
separate crises that arise, including a potential war
with evil dwarves and a rebellion among the crimi-
nal class.
Feist later returned to the Riftwar universe for a
trilogy written with three collaborators, consisting of
Honoured Enemy(2001) with William R. Forstchen,
Murder in Lamut(2002) with Joel Rosenberg, and
Jimmy the Hand(2003) with S. M. Stirling, but they
are peripheral adventures of only passing interest
and have not as yet found a publisher in the UnitedFeist, Raymond E. 115