Melody Murray's Books

I read the Darkover books before I was old enough to have the slightest bit of literary discernment. They offered me a world very far from the unhappy one I lived in. Some of them I can stand to re-read, but some of them are unrelievedly awful, and for the most part I prefer my memories of them to the actual books. When Bradley died in 1999, her world lived on and various others began publishing "Darkover" books based on alleged conversations with MZB or outlines left behind. I think one of the more memorable of the original Darkover series is The Heritage of Hastur. Hastur Lord is a sequel, and one MZB talked about in print before her death. There's no way I could ignore it, once I knew it actually existed.I must address the egregious mistakes. There's nothing like a glaring error to bring me out of the flow of a story, and there are plenty of them here. "Flout" for "flaunt" was relatively mild compared to this nonsensical combination of words:"Regis raked his hair back from his face, pulled on the dressing robe that lay across the foot of the bed, and stumbled about in a semblance of his morning ablutions." Say what? Or this about going in to dinner: "Our brother has superceded (sic) you and is anxious for us all to be together..."That aside, the writing just isn't very good. The plot is clunky, the dialog wooden, and the prose alternately turgid and purple. It's preachy, it's pedantic, and it fits into the canon the way a hand-carved wooden spoon fits into the ancestral silverware.