I'm a fan of almost all his books except

the High Druid of Shannara trilogy which was boring

and his 2 most recent books i just got done reading

the Legends of Shannara duology.....these 2 books were simply crap...they were filler and bad filler at that

 

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I enjoyed the first two shannara series (the 7 books from Sword up through Talismans) but completely lost interest after the time frame jump following The Talismans of Shannara and never really recovered any interest in the series after that. the characters just stopped doing anything for me i think and the world just didn't seem as interesting. I also enjoyed the Word and the Void trilogy long before he decided to attach it to shannara with the Genesis of Shannara series. Genesis was interesting but overall not really something i enjoyed alot beyond the cool factor of finally seeing the story of how the Shannara world came to be.

He has 3 more books slated for release in the series starting next year but i'm not holding out alot of hope i'll enjoy them. I will be giving the first book a try though. As a sort of side note his Kingdom of Landover novels aren't bad, they aren't on the epic feeling scale of Shannara but are pleasant little reads...again though the series seemed to lose something after the first few books. I guess Brooks is sort of the opposite of Butcher...Butchers stuff starts out somewhat mediocre and then continues to build no matter how long it goes on while Brooks starts out with a bang but turns mediocre eventually. I think in Brooks case he might have just started writing for the sake of writing rather than to put out something great...if i look at the books i enjoyed the most from him it was all stuff from the first half of his writing career while everything from the second half just hasn't done anything for me.

 

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I think Brooks is awful. He writes the same bloody story over and over again. Here we are forty years in the future with the son of the last book's protagonist in the exact same position. There is nothing I loathe more than characters with magic who can not use that magic and spend the entire book talking about it.

I have been known to call Brooks the anti-christ of good writing but that was before I read Goodkind and grew to loathe Salvatore.

To be entirely fair, after the first two hundred pages book 1 isn't awful (but holy god those first two hundred pages are slow) and books 4-7 were readable. I started reading one of the prequels and hated it because it was both dull and it time jumped in a way that did not intrigue me at all. Brooks was one of my first fantasy authors and I realized I could be reading something I would probably enjoy more.

 

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