Book Review: 'Death's Mistress'

Dyslexic artist and carpenter Terry Goodkind burst onto the fantasy scene in 1994 with his debut novel, Wizard's First Rule, and immediately set himself at the forefront of the burgeoning American fantasy scene. Since then, his yearly additions to his Sword of Truth series have solidified his right to be remembered alongside David Eddings, Robert Jordan, Tad Williams, and Terry Brooks as one of the big names in high fantasy. Goodkind proved time and again that he could run with fantasy's "big dogs," with his ambitious worldbuilding and seemingly unstoppable work ethic (George Martin could learn a thing or two) making up for his less-than-florid prose.

In 2007, the series that began with a simple farmboy from a small village finding himself thrust into a colossal struggle between good and evil, wielding a magical sword that he didn't understand and riding dragons he didn't know existed, was brought to an end. Having repeatedly defeated evil dark lords, become lord himself over a vast empire, and resurrected a dying magical community by discovering his own latent sorcerous ability, Goodkind's lead character, Richard Rahl, proclaimed his people liberated and the world. With the words "Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it," Goodkind triumphantly and brilliantly ended one of the greatest works of epic fantasy ever written to date.

Then, in 2011 — disaster. Goodkind's fans were undoubtedly overjoyed to hear that he was beginning a sequel series, set immediately after the events of Sword of Truth. I know I was, personally. Unfortunately, 2011's The Omen Machine and its four follow-up novels were not the masterful return to the world of Richard Rahl and his D'Haran Empire that we were hoping for. In fact, it seemed that Goodkind intentionally took everything that made his first series that masterwork they were (that ambitious worldbuilding I mentioned, his expert weaving of multiple strands of story and points of view, as well as his ability to make powerful magical main characters somehow relatable and imperfect in a redeeming way) and threw it out the window. The Omen Machine was a lackluster account of Richard's wife (the most powerful person alive) somehow being kidnapped AGAIN and the quest to save her. Reading it felt offensive, as if Goodkind had dumbed-down every word to pander to an audience not intelligent enough to deserve more Sword of Truth. Much like the epiphany that occurs when you realize that generic pop music is as terrible as it is because the companies that produce it think that it's enough to satisfy the general population, reading Goodkind's sequel series doesn't satisfy, it frustrates and offends. When it was brought to an end in 2015 with Warheart, more than anything else, I was relieved. At least he hadn't stretched it to twelve books like he had with the first series. At least he'd quit condescending and giving us 150,000 pandering words a year.

In January 2017, after avidly advertising his big switch from fantasy to thrillers with his novel Nest, Goodkind decided he wasn't finished with disappointing his readers after all. He released (almost completely without advertising) the first book in a NEW Sword of Truth sequel series, this time centered around original series favourite and all-around boss sorceress Nicci, Death's Mistress. The first fantasy novel in his universe not focused on the original main character Richard... Could this be the breath of fresh air we needed? As you can imagine, I was skeptical.

As it happens, I had every right to be. With every last one of its 512 pages, Death's Mistress reminds the reader that Goodkind should have set aside fantasy a long time ago. The prose is simple beyond reason, and at times one is led to wonder if Goodkind actually knows what some of the words he's writing actually mean. The plot is stagnant, featuring annoying and unsympathetic characters walking around being morally ambivalent and arrogant. And possibly worst of all, this book centered around a female main character somehow manages to make the vast majority of its female characters little more than walking vaginas (and, apparently very importantly for Mr. Goodkind, walking nipples.... We'll get to this later).

Goodkind's writing style has always been slightly more blue collar than that of his contemporaries. While his books have in the past catered to some fantasy standard protocol (juggling plotlines, most importantly), his works have never had the Tolkien-inspired faux-English literature pretension and beauty of his contemporaries, nor have they had the academic complexity of modern authors like Steven Erikson. In Death's Mistress, Goodkind has proved himself well on the way to abandoning all attempts at literary professionalism entirely, with prose that is mind-numbingly simple and slow. Even when he uses more elaborate adjectives and attempts to heighten his prose, Goodkind only seems to prove that he's incapable of doing so, as if he doesn't know what longer words mean. And when he does find a word he clearly knows the meaning of but that might be new to some of his readership, he makes sure to overuse it (see the nauseating overuse of the word fecundity).

Do you think I'm overdoing it with all this belaboring Goodkind's simplistic style? Please, don't worry. I'm not going to make claims and then not back them up. Here, for your viewing displeasure is an excerpt from Death's Mistress that illustrates my point:

"The young women were as lush as the forest itself, their breasts and hips swollen with life.... When the three figures moved forward, the undergrowth flowed along with them. Their eyes flashed an iridescent green. Victoria's acolytes throbbed with fertility, the essence of the forest and life itself. They exuded a wafting and irresistible pull of attractive scent, like an animal and heat.... The sexual shimmer pervaded the air."

So there's a bit to unpack here. First, the idea of breasts and hips being "swollen with life." I should make clear that these characters were not pregnant women. They were just women, distinctly not pregnant women who were partially made of wood and grass. Somehow these not-pregnant women have swollen hips and breasts... swollen with... life? Not to mention the fact that they "throb" with "fertility"? I can honestly say I have no idea what that would even look like. Outside of the medical field, fertility (so far as I'm aware) is not a thing one can see, and in no field is fertility a thing that should cause a person's entire body to physically throb... And these tree-women also have pheromones, the "sexual shimmer" of which is noticeable? It's almost difficult to unpack what's wrong with this because it's so hard to understand what Goodkind is even trying to say. The best I can come up with is that he's trying to say that the smell of the ovaries of the tree-women who are pregnant without being pregnant is so strong that it causes a visual phenomena in the air around them. He writes lust sequences as if he's never felt sexual attraction before, which we know can't be right because he is weirdly obsessed with nipples (I'm getting to it, don't worry).

Have you started to see why I think the more complex words used by Mr. Goodkind are just evidence that he doesn't know what said words mean? This, of course, doesn't even start to delve into the other, smaller issues in the book (like the fact that Terry doesn't know when to use "ensure" instead of "insure," and the repeated misspellings of the names of characters from the original series).

In addition, the dialogue in this book is stuffy, awkward, and unrealistic. Worse, it ruins the atmosphere of the book as a work of fantasy at times. Part of this is the inherent moral ambiguity of the main characters, which I'll touch on later, but it extends to other characters, for example the ancient dragon guarding the bones of his ancestors. One would think such a grand, dignified, and mystical character would speak with a certain degree of grandiosity, dignity, and intelligence, yes? Not so. Brom the dragon (relative of the dragons Gregory and Grimney.... think on those names for a while) speaks with all the academic grace of an overexcited golden retriever. "Now you have made me strong enough to defeat you!", "I am Brom! I am the guardian... and you are intruders!", and "You are not like other dragon slayers I have encountered. You are much punier. Easy to kill," are just a few of the gems spoken by this ancient creature of vast power, grace, and wisdom.

Have you started to see why I hate this book?

Moving on, let's discuss the plot and characters. Death's Mistress sees its main characters travel across the known world, explore the unknown world, defend a village from invading slavers, discover and fight a race of evil mer-people, fight a dragon, and save the world twice. Unfortunately, Mr. Goodkind couldn't seem to figure out how to make any of these events matter. With each turn of plot, the reader is left feeling underwhelmed. Even when main characters die or some other tragedy occurs, the only thing one can think is, "So what?" Furthermore, the plot device wherein Nicci is separated from her magic or weakened by an enemy spell but then is so determined to succeed in the fight against the enemy that she reaches down further into herself to find "strength she didn't know she had" and reaches magic again to win is overused to the point of humour.

Something that has always set Terry Goodkind aside from other fantasy authors is his ideology. While it wasn't necessarily clear in his first series, Goodkind is an avid proponent of Ayn Rand's anarcho-capitalist theory, Objectivism. Like.... really. The guy unironically believes in the drivel spewed out by the author of Atlas Shrugged. He's a Tea Party conservative who believes the Obama administration threatened the civil liberties of good American citizens.

Anyway.... like I was saying, this didn't play a large role in his first series. Increasingly through the second series — and overwhelmingly now in the third series, this ideology is coming to the forefront, and in doing so the moral ambiguities of the ideology itself become obvious via the characters that Goodkind writes it into. For example, when main character Nicci thinks back on her time as a sex slave in the first series, she unequivocally believes that she was a helpless victim and there was nothing she could do. But when she meets Bannon Farmer, a 14-year-old boy a few chapters into Death's Mistress, and sees him being beaten and robbed by four grown men, she saves him but lectures him on how it was his own fault that he was mugged. She tells him he let himself become a victim and in the future he needs to make sure he can't be robbed to ensure he won't be robbed. Do you see the irony there? A victim of rape walking around victim-blaming children? Furthermore, our main characters Nicci and Nathan spend the entire book travelling to different parts of the world and informing citizens that they are now subjects of the D'Haran Empire, and that they must subject themselves to the rule of Richard Rahl, simultaneously assuring them that Lord Rahl stands against oppressive tyrants and imperialism. This goes beyond cognitive dissonance and is instead just a blatant contradiction.

So not only is the plot stale and unexciting, the characters also all happen to be arrogant pricks who don't see the many flaws in their own morality. It's impossible to say whether Nicci and Nathan are actually the bad guys or the good guys in this story, but it seems as if Goodkind intends them to be the good guys (while I would argue he writes them — possibly unintentionally — as the exact opposite).

Finally, we reach the worst part.... the female characters. Goodkind's books have always featured a spattering of characters form all demographics, and his powerful lead characters have always been gender diverse. With Death's Mistress, he goes even further and makes the titular main character of his book a woman. Great. We are living in a society where diversity is increasingly recognized as important and many people are making efforts to be more inclusive. Goodkind is hardly alone in his efforts to be more gender-inclusive. Unfortunately, he manages to (and I can only imagine how hard he had to work to pull this off in a book with a female protagonist) write the most uncomfortably sexist book I may have ever written. Now I don't say this or slap the label on him lightly (owing mainly to my own long-developing hatred of identity politics). But his book is legitimately sexist. Of our six main female characters, five are reduced to the role of walking uterus with highly important nipples (I promise I'll get to the nipple thing!), and the sixth is a 12-year-old girl, so I'm very glad she was the exception to the uterus rule as well as the nipple rule (okay, I'm getting to it, I swear!).

As I mentioned before, Nicci has been a victim of rape in past books, and an overused plot device in this one is putting her in weakening situations in order to use her determination to save herself. See where this is going? Early in the book, Nicci is drugged by three men who attempt to rape her, leaving her weakened for an upcoming battle. But as a powerful sorceress, even drugged, Nicci is more than enough for the three men, and she dispatches all three with ease without ever getting raped. So in the end, sexual assault against the main character was used as a way to advance the plot... to make her weaker for later in the book. In addition, though she isn't raped, Nicci's dress gets ripped by one of the men, this because he has been frustratedly stewing for thirty pages, wondering what colour her nipples are. Upon ripping her dress before attempting to rape her, he spends a paragraph delighting over the colour of her nipples being revealed. Then his penis is magically ripped off, in case you wanted to know.

Victoria, a scholar-type in the second half of the book, has never been able to conceive. She is a gifted wizard and brilliant scholar who has memorized hundreds of books on magic, and was abused by her mother for her entire childhood, but the main thing we learn about her in the book is that she is barren, and has had three miscarriages. This eventually leads her to "adopt" three young women (yes, the women who become sexy trees) and train them to crave pregnancy over all else. When our main characters meet Victoria and her three sexlings in the later parts of the book, the three girls take to 14-year-old Bannon immediately, openly obsessing over him at Victoria's behest and each sleeping with him repeatedly in their turn in attempts to conceive. This obsession over Bannon makes even less sense when we remember that Victoria and her baby-crazy "daughters" live in a large village that contains many men of all ages, but Bannon is the first "man" any of them have ever slept with, let alone obsessed over. It very much seems the entire point of those four female characters was to have one broken uterus that trained three functional utersuses (uteri, uterus'?) to act as sex machines for a main character (as well as to give Goodkind a chance to discuss three new sets of nipples in detail). Then, when all seems lost and the world is almost consumed by an evil wizard, Victoria takes her sexlings out into the desert, strips them naked (at which point we get to hear even more about the eight nipples concerned) and kills them, allowing their "throbbing fecundity" to bleed out into the desert and make it viable and lush farmland again. But it doesn't end there. She then resurrects them as tree-women to guard the blossoming plant life, giving Goodkind a chance to not only remake their nipples and thus necessitate re-describing them, but also to tell us exactly what pubic hair would look like is it was half grass and vine.

So to summarize, Goodkind used his diverse cast as an excuse to spend an inordinate number of pages discussing the nipples he's obsessed with, and thus never actually gives any of the female characters (save Nicci) a personality or any traits whatsoever that don't have to do with their ovaries, their breasts, or their obsession with 14-year-old's penis (which I suppose we could consider part of their ovaries, and thus reduce to list of traits to those concerning only their ovaries and breasts).

I loved The Sword of Truth. I thought, and still think, that it's one of the greatest works of fantasy ever written. I was highly disappointed by the follow-up series, but I didn't give up on Terry Goodkind. After reading 158,000 words on why taxes are bad, victims are always to blame, and comparisons on the different colours nipples can come in, I think it's fair to say I've given up on him entirely. Don't read this book— it's a condescending letdown. Terry Goodkind should go back to building cabinets and drawing dolphins, which is ostensibly what he was doing before he decided to try his hand at writing.

Rating: 1.5/10