This is another bargain book on tape from BookCloseouts.com. It cost me $8.99, but the list price was $25.

This tape is two novelettes of about 90 minutes each. The first is The Little Sisters of Eluria by Stephen King and the second is The Seventh Shrine by Robert Silverberg, who is also the Legends of the Masters series editor. The title of the series is Legends by the Masters, but it makes no claim that any of these are actually good stories.

The Stephen King story is from his Dark Tower stories. There is a preface by Stephen King claiming that the story stands alone, which it does.

The Little Sisters of Aluria drops the reader down in the middle of a journey with the enigmatic gunslinger. It progresses through a series of events and concludes with the gunslinger continuing on his way without ever doing much of anything. Each event appears to be as much a surprise to the author as to the reader. King is a master at stringing together events to create a story, but I am sure that he wrote this story one day without any idea where it would end, other than the hero walking on to his next adventure. Each event is encountered without reason or foreshadowing. King strings these events into a story by force of personality. The little sisters command some kind of medical bugs, but by the end, it seems, they may be constructed of the bugs – it is not quite clear. There is a dog with a cross on his chest in the first scene, which appears in a later scene and kills a sister, but it is not clear why. There is a gold medallion that the sisters are afraid of, but the reason is not explored. The sisters drink blood, but they are not vampires, they just like it. The story is just a bunch of King-ian horror elements, stirred well and presented in the context of the Dark Tower narrative.

Robert Silverberg had a big hit with Lord Valentine’s Castle. It was a Novel where Weltschöpfung (World Creation) is an important part of the book. (I love to use those academic sounding German words.) The world that Silverberg created was called Majipoor. Lord Valentine’s Castle was the engaging story of a street juggler who is really a usurped emperor of Majipoor. He must regain his memory, and fight a war where dreams are the weapons. It was good stuff.

Less good, were the books Valentine Pontifex and The Majipoor Chronicles. I’ve read them both and they held my interest because the first book was so powerful. The Seventh Shrine is a story from one of the later books. It is full of explanations of who Valentine is, the politics of Majipoor, and the plots inherited from the previous books. This slows the story down. The Seventh Shrine is basically a murder mystery where all the red herrings come from the long exposition of old history. Even though I did not remember who the murderer was, I found my mind wondering and twice I had to rewind the tape a few minutes because I was not listening.

The production was well done. The readers were competent, if not memorable. For some reason, the book production editors think that synthesized music is just what audio book buyers want. Always hate any music that is not performed by real musicians, please!

Despite the poor quality of the stories, I will move on and try another in this series. There are two more volumes at BookCloseouts.com and I think there are a total of five in the series. Perhaps the next set of tapes will be better.