Tomes of Spellcasting--The Witch Doctor

Tomes of Spellcasting

Welcome to the land of mystery, where the impossible is possible, and the improbable the reality. Join me as I investigate worlds filled with magic and meet the souls that wield this wondrous powers.

W A R N I N G !

This review does not represent the opinions of the general public. It reflects my personal thoughts and opinions on the book.

That said, on to the review!

Title: The Witch Doctor
Author: Christopher Stasheff
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine Books
Format: Paperback
Copyright Date: 1994

Saul "Paul" Bremener doesn't have so many friends that he'll just sit idly by when one disappears. When it happens to be Matt Mantrell, his best friend, however, he's more than a little concerned...especially since his friend seemed to have disappeared in the middle of a busy diner with no one knowing where he went! What Saul isn't prepared for, however, is his search for his AWOL friend to land him in a whole other dimension/universe, one where Remus won the fight with Romulus, magic is real, and all power flows either from Heaven or Hell. Now he's caught up in not one, not two, not three, not even four, but five different battles: freeing Allustria from the reign of evil Queen Suettay, saving the soul and life of Angelique the Ghost, always walking the neutral path between the extremes of Good and Evil, determining if he's still sane or if he's gone crazy or dead from the spider bite that sent him there, and--which was his first objective all along--rescuing Matt from this strange dimension...always assuming Matthew Mantrell, Lord Wizard of Merovence, will want to leave!

The Witch Doctor does a terrific job of detailing--however briefly--what's been happening since Matt Mantrell disappeared out of the "real" world. It's a little hard to reconcile overall because of the time differential (two or three days in the "real" world to three or four years in the other), which means that only Saul's had time to miss Matt. It wasn't as hard as it might have been, since I grew up reading The Chronicles of Narnia and acclimated myself to the time differentials there (no time in the real world, mere seconds to centuries in Narnia).

Unlike the previous two books, The Witch Doctor comes from Saul's 1st person perspective, giving it an immediacy that is somewhat lacking in Her Majesty's Wizard and The Oathbound Wizard. This perspective allows us to listen to Saul's inner thoughts and the problems he's wrestling with, like his falling in love with Angelique or trying to argue for or against his having gone insane. On a cautionary note, however, there is one specific part that runs dangerously close to text in its predecessor: the part where Saul summons up Grendel is almost an exact copy of Matt's summoning of Grendel. I'd accuse the author of plagarism, except that he wrote both books so it wouldn't really be plagarizing except of himself, which isn't plagarism, is it?

The Witch Doctor is the third installment of the Wizard in Rhyme series. As before, Christopher Stasheff pits the forces of Good against that of Evil...only this time with an agnostic being the focus of it all. Can you imagine how interesting it must be, a story of a world-displaced wizard refusing to accept the existence of Heaven and Hell in a world where those two poles are real?

Rating: Thumbs up! Can there be a middle ground in a universe where everything is either Good or Evil?

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