Avalon Reviewed by Kevin R. Tipple
Avalon By Lynne den Hartog
ISBN # 1-929670-43-5
(http://www.renebooks.com)
Rating: ***1/2
Dreams and fantasy with links to the memories of the past makeup a
large part of this author's work and this novel is no exception. This
fantasy novel tells the tale of Donna and her latent psychic abilities.
Magicians have always fascinated Donna and that fascination is directly
related to her past. Donna attends a magician's show at the local fairgrounds
and has a strange experience with The Great Gwydo. The after effects
haunt her sleeping and waking hours as well as awakening painful memories
of an episode during her childhood at Avalon.
Avalon was the name for a cottage owned by her father's eccentric Aunt.
The year they spent living as a guest in her cottage after her father
lost his job was horrible. Donna was sure that the woman was a witch
and compounding her misery, were the voices that she alone heard. Voices
that no one else heard and voices that no one believed existed. The
voices haunted her and gave rise to spectral images in her sleep. The
insistent babble nearly drove her mad and she turned to the most important
figures in her life at that young age, her parents. When she told her
parents, they became very angry with her and accused her at four years
old of making up stories.
Whether she is acting out of fate or free will (another frequent theme
of her work), Donna decides to go back to Avalon to once and for all
deal with her past. Upon arriving, not only does she find the cottage
for the most part largely as she had left it, but she discovers that
the voices are more insistent than ever. Their number seems to have
increased as well as gaining in volume and she has no idea how to get
them out of her head. Their babble is mercifully quieted when The Great
Gwydo appears to her. He leads her on a journey to explore not only
her specific past, but also the past of the place called Avalon.
Donna becomes a witness to the far distant past in this fantasy novel.
The erotic becomes a secondary theme to the classic battle between good
and evil or the forces of light and dark. The author forges the links
between our personal past as well as pasts that we had no control over
in this fairly enjoyable novel. The battle rages on as Gwydo points
out at one point, "Death is a strong adversary."
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