Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Hour of the Gate [Book Review]

"The Hour of the Gate" is the second novel in the "Spellsinger Saga" written by Allan Dean Foster. It was published in 1984. I reviewed the first book ("Spellsinger")  a while back.

If you tried to read this book without reading the first one, then you'd be 100% screwed. This does not feel like so much of a sequel as it does the second half of a giant book. It absolutely does nothing to help you with the first book in any way. You pretty much have to read "Spellsinger" to understand anything. It's kind of a shocking way to do a second book in a series. I haven't quite run into this phenomenon before.

The story continues the adventures of Jon-Tom, a law student that was zapped into a fantasy world with talking animals, as he and his party attempt to thwart an attack by a race of insects called the Plated Folk. The Marxist dragon Falameezar is back again, but not quite as much as the last time. And there is a new riverboat pilot character named Bribbens, a frog, who joins the party.

There is also spiders. Yes, there is a whole race of spiders called Weavers introduced in this book. Not my favorite thing to read about, but Foster did a fairly good job at making them seem beautiful in some way. My only complaint is that all of their dialog is written without any capital letters. I think he was trying to make them sound like they were whispering, but I would have rather he had typed it out normally.

The first book was actually full of a lot of humor, but this one was so serious that I barely found myself smiling at all. It was a book about war, armies, and trying to form allies. There were a lot of scary parts too. It was all well told, but I kind of missed the humor of "Spellsinger."

Once again, Allan has trouble with pacing, although they did seem like they kept moving in this one. There were not as many scenes where they were just standing around for full chapters just talking to each other. I did feel like slow progress was happening.

Where Allan did seem to have trouble was in managing a large group of main characters. At times, the main party could have up to nine or more characters, and some of those characters would not be mentioned at all for full chapters. This made me sometimes forget that they were there or think they had left the party altogether. And then suddenly they say something, and I am left shocked that they were still present. This was unfortunately a problem for the entire book.

The ending was a bare pass. It worked, but I have read better conclusions in other books. I've heard that the rest of the series is much more light-hearted than this one. It seems to be the black sheep of the whole set. That's good, I guess!

Now, I did recommend the first book, but I feel bad about not recommending the second. After all, the first book is half the bloody story. I think the completionism factor of "The Hour of the Gate" is good enough to recommend, but you should just be forewarned that it is a slow, dark, and very serious story with an ending that just barely manages to handle its wrap-up in an appropriate manner. In short, it's good enough!

This blog was written on May 9, 2024.

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