This is excellent fun, a traditional portal fantasy of the sort I hadn’t read in years. As far as Hambly’s books go, I didn’t love it to pieces like The Ladies of Mandrigyn, it doesn’t turn tropes on their heads like Dragonsbane, and I doubt the characters will prove as memorable to me as in either of those books, but it’s an exciting adventure nonetheless.The book has a bit of a slow start, as we meet two 20-somethings – Gil, a grad student, and Rudy, a motorcycle painter – living in southern C...

Blog post with links at: https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2014/...A recent read of Those Who Hunt the Night led me to one of Hambly’s early series, The Time of the Dark. First published in 1982, it has the feel of many of the ‘crossworlds fantasy’ books so popular in that time period (Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series, Terry Brooks’ Landover, Jack L. Chalker's Dancing Gods series, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, Andre Norton’s Witch World, to nam...

I made the mistake of reading this novel (and this series) after seeing the second Aliens movie (which is my favorite of all the Alien films). When I was younger, I read a lot Stephen King, but only because everyone else at school was reading it and it irritated my mother (or so I thought). After a couple of years on a steady diet of horror, I became bored and nothing was frightening or thrilling any longer. I picked up The Time of the Dark, mostly because it was another story along the lines of...

I first started reading Hambly by reading her fantasy. Though, this book was not one of the ones I first read. As I got older, I think in many ways, her historical fiction is a bit better. Just a bit. Not that the fantasy is bad or anything.The Time of the Dark does combine both history and fantasy. Two people from our world cross the void into a fantasy world that is losing to the very, very bad things. One of those people, Gil, is getting her PhD in history and so we get the history prof's rea...

I just reread this after it has set on my shelf for a good 10 years since my last read and I was very pleased with how it has held up. The story moves along crisply with little time wasted but it doesn't move so fast that you don't build an appreciation and empathy for the main characters. The best thing though is Barbara Hambly writes with enough grit to satisfy the realist in me but she also brings in enough emotion and drama so the story elevates above the mundane drama of the daily lives of

I first read this series in (cough) 1986 at the age of 14 or so and it gripped me and scared me witless in equal measures. Rereading it as an adult, it doesn't scare me quite as much, but it's still a wonderful series with well drawn characters including one of the best gandalf-type wizards in contemporary fantasy, all the better because he is NOT infallible.I think one of the best dynamics in this particular world is the uneasy relationship between the church and the wizard community and the wa...

Originally reviewed at Bookwraiths Reviews.Once, long ago, I recall walking through the Waldenbooks bookstore at my local mall, trying to find something new to read. After having crammed everything Middle-Earth related into my brain, I needed a new fix of epic fantasy adventure. Sure, I’d loved Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, read Moorcock, and begun The Belgariad with Eddings, but I was looking for something a bit different. And that is when I saw the cover of The Time of the Dark. Obviously...

This is a book I return to, again and again.It is my comfort read: the book I pick up when I am too tired to read something new. That sounds odd given the subject matter, but within moments of picking it up, Hambly's prose is invisible to me and I am trudging down the road with the refugees, blinded by snow, freezing and wondering what's out there in the darkness....I can recommend this book on so many levels. The characters are people you come to know, like friends. Their voices become familiar...

3.5 stars. I almost gave this one four stars, but decided to stick with 3.5 as it just didn't pull me in like some of the other books I have read recently (The Warded Man by Peter Brett and Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross to name just two recent reads that I would highly recommend). That said, Barbara Hambly is an excellent writer and I will certainly read the next book in the trilogy.

Barbara Hambly's books do things for me which very few fantasy authors do. First, she puts female characters in leading roles of strength, intelligence, and power. Even other female authors tend to continue relegating women to roles as side-interests to a story rather than the main starring role. Barbara Hambly isn't afraid to do that. She also fleshes out her ladies with multiple character traits, helping me to find bits and pieces of each one that I can empathize and relate to, unlike most woo...

Unusual blend of fantasy and horror, with two (80s) contemporary characters persuaded to help in a last ditch struggle against Lovecraftian type monsters in another parallel world. This series has it all: magic, warriors, monsters, edge of the seat suspense, political struggles, romance. Flawed characters and the non obvious e.g. who ends up paired with whom. I first read it a long time ago and have re-read it a few times since, latest re-read August 2020.

Definitely enjoyed this. Slow start, but picked up in the middle. Moving on to the next instalment now. There's some mystery surrounding the creatures and the history of that world. I like Ingold - he's just like Gandalf. I keep hearing his lines in Sir Ian McKellen's voice. I like the scholarly woman becomes a sword-fighter, and the aimless bodywork painter (view spoiler)[becomes a mage (hide spoiler)]. If you watched the movie Pitch Black, these creatures seems to follow the bioraptors' descri...

The Time of the Dark has a general premise that I find intriguing. I like books whose plot features a person from modern day being transported to another world. Therefore, I snapped up this book. I was not disappointed. The Plot A graduate student named Gil (I think it's short for Gillian, so it's pronounced "Jill") dreams about a faraway place being attacked by indescribable and dark creatures.It turns out that this land actually exists in another universe and she and an inadvertent tag-along...

I enjoyed it as I read it, but I'm not sure I'll read the rest of the series.

I love this book. Obviously: I gave it five stars. It is not literature, but it is a very fine book; especially for a first time novel in the fantasy/horror genre written in the 1970's and published in the early 80's.Specific, I know. But it's a really fun book.The main crux of the story is two modern day American people in their twenties being sucked into an alternate universe on another world that is very swords-and-sorcery medieval; a world that is at the beginning of a war with these.... thi...

Similar to the Windrose Chronicles, a young educated woman from our world is thrust into a medieval world of magic and danger. She, a chance-met biker named Rudy, and the greatest magician of the realm travel together to defeat the mysterious Dark beings that are rapidly destroying life and civilization as they know it. I really liked how aware some of the characters were that their society was teetering on the brink of losing its knowledge, art and hard-won cohesion. The more insightful were ve...

This one was a free, promotional copy of the first in the Darwath Trilogy, in order to hype the "new" (at the time I got it, back in 1996) book in the same realm. A fantasy, of a type I generally enjoy, wherein our real world in some way collides or connects with some other realm of possibility. In this case, the realm of Darwath, a sort of parallel world. Darwath is rather medieval (carts and horses, nobles and peasants, castles and kings). But it has magic, and it has The Dark. It had a good p...

Years ago, for Christmas, I received a giant stack of fantasy books. They were all new (a luxury for my family at the time) and the whole Darwath trilogy was in there. I was hooked on this book from the opening scene, and I've read all of them several times since. It was one of the first stories I read that was fantasy but without the 'shiny epic' feel. It's grounded in a twentieth century reality that makes the magic and monsters more vivid. Hambly's heroes tend to be the misfits, outcasts, and...

"She had waked up. She was no longer dreaming. She was still there."The first fantasy novel by a renowned author. Published 1982, Hambley shows the right stuff from the beginning. The fantasy cast and setting owe so much to Tolkien it’s a wonder she didn't owe him royalties.“If you choose deliberately to disregard the evidence of your own senses, it’s your problem, not mine. I am what I am... ” “You are not!”Most of the characters shamelessly ripped from Tolkien, but the point of view characters...

I’d only ever read Star Trek books by this author. And a good bunch of them. Several of which I actually liked well enough. I occasionally like seeing what authors who write in other people’s universes are like in their own created universes. Oddly this never seems to work, both ways (as in, there are authors I’d read and really enjoyed books by who I then spot they’d written one or more Star Trek books, invariably, I’ll hate their Star Trek books (or other media-tie-in book); or I’ll love the m...