[Bond]

There may have been a thread like this previously but I cannot recall what it was called and even if there was it has been some time since it was active.

Some of my favorite series have first books that aren't particularly memorable but then the story ratchets up several levels and becomes more consistent in the succeeding book.

On the other hand there are series which start off very promising but then get mired in a forgettable morass.

Which series are like these?

[Janos]

The Last of the Renshai by Mickey Zucker Reichart comes to mind. That wasn't really a quality difference, if you've read it, you know how the second book changed, I'll put it in Spoilers

Reichart changed the main character in the series which put quite a different spin on the last two books in the Trilogy

[Brys]

There was quite a large improvement from 1st to 2nd books in Steven Erikson's Malazan book of the Fallen.
This is also the case with R Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series and Greg Keyes' the Briar King series.

On the other side, there's Raymond E Feist's riftwar saga - a huge drop from Magician to Silverthorn, and to a lesser extent JV Jones' Sword of Shadows series.

[Severn]

Funnily enough I'm reading Jennifer Roberson's 'Chronicles of the Cheysuli' omnibuses right now. There's eight of them - two per omnibus.

I mentioned in the 'reading in sept' thread how very much the first book resembled, from time to time, the writing style of 'The Juvenilia of Jane Austen' - written forever ago, when she was 13. Brilliantly funny. Not so funny in a modern writer who is trying to be taken seriously.

Parts of it really were dreadful - unconvincing characters, melodrama, strapping men and delicate damsels (blech) etc; very one-dimensional.

But I was hardly going to stop reading haha...so I got through number one and hoped for better. And number two was great!

First person perspective - marvellous - from a different protagonist. I love character-based writing and this was excellent. This character had played a role in the first book - again though he was very one dimensional and annoying. I wanted to slap him most of the time. So yes, more mature writing, better plot. A massive jump actually - very surprising. (The major annoyance, quite honestly - being the queen of pedantry that I am - was the amount of times the author uses the word 'prate.' I never want to hear it again).

Onto number 3 now and it's even more improved. Nice tight writing, good plot and not a 'prate' to be found.

:D K

[xghostsniperx]

I'm sure it's an obvious one, but Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Even casual fan can tell you that The Gunslinger is vastly different than the next six books, even when reading the revised edition.

[Jay_T]

Dark Tower is a excellent call.

Well, it isn't represented between the first and second books, but Ursula K. Leguin's Earthsea work definitely changes in tone, and although I liked the early ones as well, the latter couple (which were written well after admittedly) were much more enjoyable to me.

[Amaunette]

I'm sure it's an obvious one, but Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Even casual fan can tell you that The Gunslinger is vastly different than the next six books, even when reading the revised edition.


That's because there was an enormous gap of time in between when King wrote the first book and when he wrote the second.

I feel that the first and second Dune books differ markedly. Not in an overt way, but more like I felt that Paul became nearly omnipotent and godlike in the second book, where his flaws were more the focus of the first book.

[Erfael]

That's because there was an enormous gap of time in between when King wrote the first book and when he wrote the second.

Not only that but the first "book" was written as a series of short stories published in various magazines and then later assembled into the book. Also, King made a conscious effort to tell each book of the sequence in a different style of storytelling.

Vignettes, Fairy Tale, Flashback, Western, etc.