The Darkest Day

Thus, with The Darkest Day, does Dennis L McKiernan's Iron Tower trilogy conclude. This third and final volume is, I think, the best of the trilogy. I enjoyed the previous two books but that enjoyment was somewhat overshadowed and diminished by long passages that were very derivative of scenes in JRR Tolkien's famed Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Darkest Day contains very little that I could recognize as being directly derived from Tolkien. This made the final Iron Tower book the most original of the three, the most distinctly McKiernan's own. The final confrontation in The Darkest Day is particularly good, our hero meeting a fate unlike that of any other protagonist with whom I am familiar. The final battle is vigorously described and in ways is much more personal than I was expecting; it was very gripping and thrilling. There are appendices at the end of The Darkest Day, as there are at the end of Tolkien's The Return of the King, and in them McKiernan shares this tidbit: that some scholars place the location of the Evil One's dread Iron Tower in the vicinity of Leningrad, other scholars place it near Warsaw. I enjoyed this detail that the land of Mithgar is indeed our own world ages ago. My final verdict then is that The Iron Tower trilogy is engaging, entertaining, and enjoyable. It is marred by the fact that in some long sections it is too derivative of Tolkien, but the world-building and the story itself are very good examples of the heroic high-fantasy genre. Based on this trilogy, I would read more of McKiernan's books, some of which rest upon my overflowing shelves. We'll see if I eventually get around to them.