Net Girl & Sibyl

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Dark Night of the Soul (Buffy/Tolkien)

Reviewed by Kathryn A on 6th December 2003 (4)
Tags: Novel
(800K)

Okay, so what am I doing reading a Buffy/Tolkien crossover? I mean, a real crossover with time/dimensional travel, not just a concept crossover like "Orturmoriwen"...

Well, I felt like reading a crossover, and I thought I'd see what the Henneth-Annun archive could toss up, and this was the only one there. Unlike far far too many Tolkien crossovers, this was not a retelling of the Movieverse War of the Ring with extra characters tossed in who make no difference whatsoever to the plot. (I read one of those just before reading this, and I figure that since this was better than that one, I'd better review this one, even though this one isn't as good as "Orturmoriwen".) This was set ten years before the main events of the book, and actually references things like the Silmarilion (yay) -- though again, it doesn't seem to affect the plot of the Lord of the Rings, apart from dragging Frodo to the edges of the Shire prematurely, and then allowing him to go safely home again, none the wiser.

No, this has no or little effect on Middle Earth. It does, however, have a great deal of effect on the Buffyverse, which is why the author calls it "very alternative universe". Now, some of it I would call wish-fulfilment on the part of the author, manoeuvring certain characters here and there as the author wished, arbitrarily. If you don't believe that Buffy and Xander could ever get together... you'll go on not believing it after reading this. However, I think that's forgivable. (I'm not so happy about what happened with Giles though.)

All that aside, though, there's lots of interesting things going on. We have Elenya, the Slayer of Middle Earth; we have Giles holding out on people, and a revision of the Watcher History of the Universe; we have Buffy finding she's not the toughest thing around, and Middle Earth is a much darker realm than dear old Sunnydale; we have Xander being Xander, and we have Willow succumbing to hubris (though that bit had a number of things about it that didn't make any sense).

If you feel like a bit of an epic and something crossovery, give it a go. A downside is that the epilogue ends in a cliffhanger, and no sign of the sequel in sight.