%A Duncan, Dave %T The Living God %I DelRey %C New York %D April 1994 %G ISBN 0-345-37899-7 %P 385 pp. %O hardcover, US$20.00 I thoroughly enjoyed this, the fourth and concluding volume in Dave Duncan's "A Handful Of Men" series, which is itself a sequel to Duncan's "A Man of His Word" series starring the stableboy-turned-sorcerer Rap, King of Krasnegar. Dave Duncan's character as an author reminds me of the character of Bink in Piers Anthony's A SPELL FOR CHAMELEON--an ordinary person whose abilities, average in most respects, are transformed and transfigured by a single, mysterious, extraordinary talent. (Incidentally, for those who have not read CHAMELEON, I mean this as a compliment; it is an excellent book.) Duncan's fantasy world, which is populated by imps, elves, dwarves, goblins, jotunn, and dragons, is not an especially original conception. Nor is the plot of "A Handful of Men", which involves a magical threat to the foundations of the Impire of Pandemia. Without Duncan's transfiguring talent, this would be routine genre stuff. The talent that makes Dave Duncan special and makes his Rap novels jewels of the fantasy genre is a simple one: he is a wonderful storyteller. Because of this talent, his fantasy world, based on a handful of clever premises, is skillfully elaborated. His plot is crisply executed and builds to a conclusion which I found both satisfying and surprising. His characters are utterly engaging and his style lucid and literate. In short, his work is a prose poem to the art of writing entertaining fiction. So to continue the Xanth analogy, what are the future prospects for Duncan's work? Is there any sign that he is beginning to repeat himself and churn out formula product? Thankfully not; this, the eighth novel in the Rap series, is as fresh as the first. There is no obvious sequel to this book, so it's difficult to guess where he will go from here; but my hopes are high. --Frederick Zimmerman Previous IBIC Reviews, as well as links to many other Internet information resources related to books, are available via the Internet Book Information Center WWW serverspace (provided courtesy of SunSITE, a joint project of the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Sun Microsystems). The URL is http://sunsite.unc.edu/ibic/IBIC-homepage.html. Selected text resources are available by anonymous ftp to sunsite.unc.edu; directory is /pub/electronic-publications/ibic. The IBIC Gopher server is unavailable. E-mail comments encouraged to ibic@sunsite.unc.edu.