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 Running with the Demon by Terry Brooks
reviewed by Edward Michael Lee
Original appearance: Albedo one issue 16, Spring 1998
Terry Brooks has taken a step away from his Shannara and Landover Kingdom series' and tries his hand at a modern day fantasyish tale and trips somewhere along the line.
In a town called Hopewell in Illinois two men appear, one a demon with a terrible plan, the other a Knight of the Word, John Ross, plagued by twisted dreams of what the future will be if he fails to stop the demon.
Caught in the middle is a young girl, Nest Freemark, who fights against invisible spectres called Feeders. Only Nest and her forest companion, Pick, can see these Feeders, and so they notice that the Feeders are becoming braver and more dangerous, no longer content with hiding in the shadows, no longer afraid of Nest's ability to destroy them with her magic, magic which her mother also had before she mysteriously died.
Nest knows that her grandmother knows something about Nest's mother, but too often she is lost in her alcohol, unwilling to talk, even to her own husband, Nest's grandfather.
But events are coming to a head. Nest meets John Ross, the Knight, who Nest believes to be her father, who is a half-cripple with only a walking stick to aid him which just happens to be a magic staff with which he hopes to destroy the demon of the Void.
Oh God, this is Terry Brooks, this has got to be good. God, no it isn't. The story is filled with secrets and half-explored and unexplained plots. It starts off well, walking a thin line between an adult fairy tale and a child's. But then all the plot lines unravel, the line snaps, and the whole story crashes into a disappointing finale, which isn't really an ending at all, not with the two sequels that are on the way.
When I first read this book I wasn't aware of any sequels. When I had finished it God knows I knew. In an interview (not the one in Albedo One issue 15) Terry Brooks said that Running with the Demon could stand on its own. I hate to disagree but I'm going to. For instance, he gently brushes over the history of John Ross and how he became a Knight the Word, but not why he was chosen. Anything he tells us leaves us with more questions. And when it comes to the demon, short of telling us it was once human, it is left to us or the next book. And to top it off an Indian called Two Bears comes into the picture to say a few things, so a few visions. But who is he? Sorry, buy the sequel.
Nest Freemark's family could have done with some more limelight. There's even an old tree which is a prison for a monster, probably because the monster was needed for the storyline.
In the end you really don't care about the characters, the story, the sequels. You're just glad to be finished it.
According to Terry Brooks he had intended this to be the first book of a trilogy. So why doesn't it say something akin to this on the cover. All there is, apart from author and title, is 'A novel of good and evil', the Word and the Void respectively, and these are barely brought under the spotlight.
Basically Running with the Demon is a fantasy story which should have been set in a fantasy world, and with an extra hundred pages would have been an excellent stand alone novel from the author of the Shannara series.
Sadly, it is not.
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