The Redemption of Althalus

Have you ever wanted to see what it’s like for someone to go insane from listening to an audiobook? I invite you to stick around and find out.

First and foremost: fuck this book. It is astounding in its awfulness. I consider it a crash course on how not to write a fantasy epic. Secondly, I’d like to suggest an alternate title: "The Gary Stus, the Cardboard Villain, and the Story of How the Former Repeatedly and Unerringly Curbstomped the Later at Every Turn – Hence Ruining Any Sense of Narrative

Have you ever wanted to see what it’s like for someone to go insane from listening to an audiobook? I invite you to stick around and find out.

First and foremost: fuck this book. It is astounding in its awfulness. I consider it a crash course on how not to write a fantasy epic. Secondly, I’d like to suggest an alternate title: "The Gary Stus, the Cardboard Villain, and the Story of How the Former Repeatedly and Unerringly Curbstomped the Later at Every Turn – Hence Ruining Any Sense of Narrative Heft or Conflict in the Story." It's a little bulky and I’m Looking to trim it down some, but honestly I think the current working version is already good enough to send to the Eddings estate for whenever they reach into the depths of hell for a new print run.

I wanted to put this book behind me. I wanted to pretend that it never happened; to repress the memory of it and move on with my life, but even half a year later, I can't. The overwhelming awfulness of this 'novel' weighs on my mind, and I don't think I can move past it without doing the GLOBAL public service of leaving a review for this monstrosity.
What follows is an editorialized collection of the rants and messages I typed out for a friend whilst I was reading this... thing. Hence, it might lack coherence at some points, flitting from criticism to criticism without any overarching thread, but I assure you that it will still provide much the same horrific entertainment as watching a train crash in slow motion. If you give a flying fuck about spoilers, you are welcome to stop right here, and expose yourself to this infohazardous piece of shit without any further warning from me - and if this is so, then you are welcome to the brain cancer that awaits within its pages.

I loved David Eddings' Belgariad as a younger reader. You wouldn't think that would be at all relevant, but I also loved The Redemption of Althalus too. I mean, why wouldn't I have? It was a single-tome fantasy epic! It was like the Belgariad condensed into a single, sprawling novel! The issue, of course, was that it wasn't like the Belgariad, it basically was the Belgariad. The same character archetypes that I remember, following the same story arc I remember.
As an adult reader, I hate this book so much that I refuse to read the Belgariad again, for fear that I will find that I hate it just as much. I really can’t stress enough just how much I despise The Redemption of Althalus. Let’s just get started with the rant-view

At first, I was resistant to recognizing the shittiness of this book due to the sheer power of my nostalgia goggles, but even at the outset I had bones to pick. Just watch as my critique starts soft, and slowly degrades into full-blown rage-induced insanity.
It's got over-explain-and-repeat-so-younger-readers-don't-get-lost syndrome so bad that one would be forgiven for thinking it was an English translation of a manga novelization or something (I activate my pot of greed card!). And it broadcasts the character relationships so hard I'm worried a lighthouse might dive out of my earbuds and skewer my brain.
The characters are very trope reliant. Not two dimensional, but definitely less than three dimensional – except for one character, who is definitely 2D. All his dialogue in the story consists of either [say something priestly] or [say "that's impossible" when the character who is LITERALLY A GODDESS offhandedly mentions something that conflicts with his faith that he's pretty much turned away from anyway].
Oh, and the narrator kinda bugs me. He voices one female character who I always imagined to have a kinda sultry voice with a... crone-ish voice instead. Every other woman in the story is voiced like a caricature of an overdramatic housewife
Well, the weird thing is that I'm still enjoying it, for the bare most-part, but I wonder if I would hate it if I wasn't wearing nostalgia goggles.

For the next few chapters, that was the extent of my dislike for the novel, but oh, just watch how it changed. Watch how mere words managed to reduce a man to a subhuman beast.
bTW the nostalgia vision has worn off for Redemption of Althalus - or should I say: "The Unchanging Characterization of Gary Stu" - and I fucking hate it now. I'm like 3/4 through, and I'll be able to power through to the end with my shift tomorrow. I Consider it the audiobook equivalent of hate fucking. It's horrible and it'll end up leaving your day exponentially worse, but you're gonna do it anyway.
Every plot point in this book (EVERY FUCKING ONE) can be condensed to either "A thing happened, and then it turned out not to be a big deal" or "A thing happened, and then it kinda just resolved itself."

"Oh no! We burnt all of the cropfields to gimp the arm we were fighting, but now that we've totally curbstomped them for the second time - without the absence of crops playing into it at all - out subjects are all going to starve when winter comes in a few weeks! We'll have to bankrupt ourselves importing grain!"
-three chapters later-
"Well, it turns out that the southerners had the best harvest they've had in years, so the grain is going very cheap! I also buy in unconnected bulk purchases so that nobody realizes how dire things are and skin me for it. (This part's a literal quote up next:) I've moved forty tonnes of grain, but I've only paid for 30!" What’s even more ridiculous is that the time of year and price of gold means literally nothing anyway, because one character constantly manipulates time and can organize time travel freely, while another has an effectively limitless supply of gold for no real reason. Hence, there was no reason to contrive grain being senselessly cheap at all, except to assure the reader that "LOOK EVERYTHING IS FINE AND ALWAYS WILL BE" Oh, and nevermind how fucking illogical it is that the harvest was somehow perfect that year, when the inciting incident for the plot involves growing glaciers locking up the world's water and causing global droughts.

"Oh no, the illusion million-strong army outside we were pretending to surrender to in an elaborate ruse to draw the enemy leaders close to us has suddenly been replaced by a REAL million-strong army because FANTASY MAGIC. Looks like things are actually not going to go perfectly our way for once and this is actually a real surrender. Oh, wait. One of the bad guys just got stabbed and died, which made the entire army disappear and instantly turned it into another hero-wins curbstomp. YAY.” Seriously, fuck this book.

By the end, I hated every fucking character and wanted to physically wrench them from the book and Make them understand just how much pain they were causing me. I'm honest to Christ not kidding. Every piece of dialogue involved over-explaining something and repeating it at least once, if not twice, for no fucking reason at all – normally capped off by a round of multiple "are you sure this is a good idea?"
Laytha was the worst for this. Throughout the entire book, she existed to basically support ANY IDEA that was uttered. Almost every time, with a simple "it's an interesting idea" or "sounds like it's worth a try". That was all she ever contributed to anything at all, unless the scene was focusing on her
And then there’s Gher. Motherfucking Gher. That little fuck. I hate him the most. I despise him as Satan despises God. Every fibre of my being is dedicated to loathing him. Part of it was helped by the FUCKING AIGOUABEGAIBGAEG BECAUSE THERE IS NO WORD TO DESCRIBE IT voice the narrator gave him, but the rest of it is just because of how he exists in the story. He shits out literally every idea for the middle two quarters of the story, bar one. Over explains it, of course, and then everyone spends ten lines musing over it the exact same way every fucking time and then congratulating him on how clever he is.
There is so much more wrong with Gher but I literally lack the capacity to articulate it. It's like a giant mush of hatred balled up in my head, with individual details bubbling to the surface and then diving back to the core before I can render the concept as words. I hate Gher so fucking much that I’m actually going to just stop talking about him because it pains me to think of him.

But on the note of characters praising one-another: half the dialogue in the story is everyone congratulating each other on how fucking clever they are. The other 50% is divided roughly as so:
10% Althalus retelling the same stories multiple times throughout the story with sometimes no changes.
10% Althalus convincing everyone ever to do everything he says within seconds
10% Dweia revealing something offhandedly about the details of their seemingly limitless magical capabilities, and either Bheid or Gher immediately telling her with absolute certainty what the "truth" is even though she is LITERALLY AN OMNISCIENT GOD AND YOU HAVE AN EXCHANGE LIKE THIS EVERY FUCKING CHAPTER.
10% inexplicably repeated jokes and lines that are either really shitty callbacks or really shitty attempts at running jokes. (You wouldn't think this is worth mentioning, but part of what broke me while reading this book was how, with this point combined with all the other things I've written, it felt like I was reading the same general thing OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER)
And finally, 10% conveniently or magically overheard enemy planning, always discussed in breadth, and detail by two people who both already know the full details, and hence would never, EVER have reason to talk about the entirety of their immediate plans in excruciating detail to each other – especially as if they are both explaining it to each other for the first time

And it’s about here that I petered out. Even half a year later, I can't bring myself to elaborate any further. Hopefully, I’ve managed to impress on you how fundamentally bad this book is. If I develop cancer in my life time, I don’t care if it’s because I just went swimming in a pool of nuclear waste; I will attribute it singularly to having read this book.

David and Leigh Eddings: what the fuck happened?