Interview: Fantasy Author David Eddings

"The Dreamers" – David and Leigh Eddings' Final Series

Sep 17, 2009

In "The Elder Gods," the best-selling team of David and Leigh Eddings launched their final, four-book epic-fantasy series, known as "The Dreamers." Here's how it began.

His first novel, High Hunt, was a straightforward coming-of-age story that had come and gone with little fanfare.

His second, a novel-in-progress about mountain climbing, threatened a similar fate. “It was a rotten book,” Eddings says. “I was bored out of my gourd.”

Remembering that J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings had begun with a simple map, Eddings took a second look at his own work. The world in his map became the setting for Pawn of Prophecy, the first book in the best-selling, five-volume Belgariad series.

Mapping Uncharted Worlds

In The Elder Gods (published by Warner Aspect, October 2003), co-written with his wife, Leigh, Eddings explores a continent cut off from the civilized world, where a race of older gods must enlist the aid of professional warriors from the outside world to save their people from the venomous attacks of the enemy, an insect-like creature from an area known as the Wasteland.

Think of it as The Magnificent Seven or The Seven Samurai, with a fantastical, godly twist.

Maps aside, with this book the Eddingses are also exploring territory that isn’t quite so well-charted: for the first time, they’re telling their story in “episodes,” rather than chapters. Each episode -- and there are seven or eight in The Elder Gods -- will be told from a different point of view, in a different character’s voice.

“It’s an experiment,” David Eddings admits. “This first book” -- there will be four in the completed series -- “took me nineteen months to write because I made a lot of wrong turns. I can usually write a book in eight months, so I hope I'm learning from my mistakes and that the process will get easier as I go along.”

Eddings must have been an apt student. The next three books, in what would come to be known as “The Dreamers” series, were published in as many years: The Treasured One (2004), Crystal Gorge (2005), and The Younger Gods (2006). All are currently available in print and Kindle editions.

Unfortunately, these would be the last novels David and Leigh Eddings would write. Leigh died in 2007, after a series of strokes left her incapacitated for the last years of her life.

“For us and his many readers, his voice is still at hand, ready to ring vibrantly once more by the simple and vital act of opening one of his books,” Jane Eddings, David Eddings’ sister-in-law, told the Nevada Appeal newspaper. “For that legacy, we are all thankful.”

Reading Up on David and Leigh Eddings

To experience Eddings’ voice once again, readers can go back to the beginning of his fantasy-writing career, with “The Belgariad” series:

These titles may be found at new and used-book stores, both online and off-. They are not currently offered in Kindle e-book editions.

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