By the Rivers of Babylon

Granny is sick and tired of it, and she is going to put a stop to the hijinks of Trumpkin and his bear friend once and for all. No more "Error establishing a database connection" from them going forward.

LOL! I had these books as a kid, and I remember not liking them much. The LotR pitch was certainly off-base. I had forgotten how quaint-ugly the covers were!

>2 paradoxosalpha: They have a certain charm to them, to be sure. On other hand I get sort of a "trying too hard" vibe from them.

Why is the bear manacled? He looks a lot less threatening than the others in the picture. Okay, maybe the otter-like mammal hiding in the plants there isn't so menacing.

Clearly it is the little guy that is the hard-core baddie. Look at how he is dressed, after all - very threatening.

This is the strangest bounty hunter story ever.

Gramma-type crone captures various creatures, manacles them and they just follow her around without being dragged? Gramma must be a witch who has entranced them into docility, or the citizens of this country are cowed into obedience in the face of authority....

>6 Hammy_JLK: It's the cookies.

Or maybe the witch/old lady/whatever is leading them _out_ of captivity and is taking them to a locksmith.

>8 bam2001:

What? Granny-witch doesn't own bolt cutters, an angle grinder *or* a cheap metal file? What kind of granny-witch are we talking about here?

I had to open this anew in a different browser because I have a browser extension called Make Trump Kittens Again (MAKA) and the first line set it off. So I only saw a cute kitten in the spot where the cover would be.

I may be sorry I bothered.

Anyway, the little guy is clearly evil, Granny is more evil, the bear is likely innocent, and the otter is hiding from all of them, as a smart critter should. Look at the fear in his eyes.

If the content is as try-hard as the cover, I'm glad I never encountered these. But what do you expect from a guy who can't spell his own name?

Yawning with boredom, Lumpyhammer the dwarf wondered what on Earth had inspired him to try reading through the "Circle of Light" series.

https://images.pangobooks.com/images/7aa9382a-d16d-4dfb-93dd-639a533ae753?width=...

Apparently, the author wrote _thirteen_ of these books, three tetralogies and a stand alone, and they're not in order chronologically: the first four books are the _end_ of the story, the next four the beginning, and the rest happen somewhere in between. And apparently there's Stealth Buddhism. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/fantasy/the-completely-bonkers-world-of-niel...

>12 bam2001: Well, that review did sell me a little. Who knows, if they fall into my lap I might read them anew. I'm sure I didn't get past the second volume, and crypto-Buddhism is just fine with me.

These books are EVERYWHERE in used bookstores near semiconductor manufacturing / engineering facilities and DARPA / MIC plants in the West. I have never seen them east of New Mexico except in Austin, but they are endemic in Silicon Valley / Silicon Desert and related locations where large monolithic buildings feature 50-foot antennae arrays. But I have never run across them anywhere back East.

>12 bam2001: Ooh, I remember that cover with the otter in the bed and we were all so WTF we couldn't even agree what sort of mammal it was. The search over t' th' old place isn't working so I can't link. (Admin showed up this week to promise he was doing something about the page.)

That link made me even less interested in reading these in any order. I'll take my Buddhism straight, TYVM, and without terrible covers and lazy character names.

@EndofDiskOne: And yet I have lived Silicon Valley adjacent for decades and both myself and Mr. xn worked in tech. Yet I don't recall seeing these even at cons, new or used. Did they all appear as used books to start with?

>15 GSSex-noob: Ha - It sure seems like it!

The cover in question:

https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/e/e7/FRGNFY1977.jpg