Dark Lord of Derkholm, by Diana Wynn Jones

A friend and I recently attended Bilbo Baggins’ 111th birthday party. That’s right. The Party of Special

Magnificence itself! We didn’t travel to the Shire though; it was a production put on by a LARP company called Fell and Fair (here’s their website; they’re pretty awesome: https://www.fellandfair.com/). If you don’t know, LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing—basically you create a character, dress up as that character, and then go out with other LARPers and act out a story together.

Maybe that sounds weird to you, but that’s not the point. What I’m working around to is the book that I brought to the event for downtime. (LARPers are also the kinds of people who suggest that you bring books to events in case there’s downtime…obviously my sort of people.) It’s called The Dark Lord of Derkholm, by Diana Wynne Jones.

So the set up for the story is this: the magical worlds are being overrun by tourists from non-magical worlds. A mean-minded businessman has come into possession of a demon and is using his powers to force all the magical lands to host hordes of tourists on adventure tours. Basically they’re LARPers except instead of playacting that they’re in a magical land, they go to the magical land and playact that they belong there.

Every year one of the lords in the magical land is chosen as the Dark Lord. He is given maps of where to hold all the battles, must manage all the Dark Forces, provide suitable adventures for the tourists and use his own castle as a Dark Tower where the tourists will end their tours by “defeating” him before returning to their own country via magical portal. The tours are wrecking the economy, and naturally the Dark Lord has it the worst. The nobility and priesthood and heads of guilds get together to figure out how to stop them, and their solution is to ask the oracles what to do. The oracles direct them to place Derk, Lord of Derkholm as the Dark Lord, and his son, Blade, as one of the Wizard Guides for the tours.

A mild mannered, slightly buffoonish, perpetually worried man, Derk has never been considered much of a magician. Instead of what the magicians consider proper magics, Derk has invested himself into magical combinations of animals and plants—coffee plants that grow pre-roasted, friendly cows, some sarcastic and hyper-intelligent geese, a flying horse, and his most prized creation, his griffins. He and his wife contributed DNA to their making, so the griffins are fully intelligent and more like sons and daughters than beasts. When the council of lords and guild leaders make Derk the Dark Lord, they assume he will fail so catastrophically that the tours can’t continue. But Derk and his family might have more capacity and cleverness than the council assumes.

I have read a lot of Jones’ books, but I hadn’t run across this one before and it was just as delightfully individualistic as the rest of her magical worlds! She manages to use all the normal furniture of fantasy and still makes stories and worlds and systems of magic that are completely unique and different. And even if LARP type people were a disaster in her magical world, they still do throw a pretty awesome hobbit birthday party in mine!