Finally caught up on the Fantasy Forest series, so it will stop messing with my lovingly curated chronological order, and here we are in 1984 with its fourth volume. There will be more Fantasy Forest books, all of them coming out later in the year, so we’ll cover them then.

Michael Carr is back to the series, this time with a cover by Keith Parkinson and interior illustrations by Michael Fishel, who I quite like even if his illustrations are pretty weird. They feel a bit reminiscent of medieval woodblock prints which work with the fairy tale elements on here. 

In terms of story we again get a girl protagonist, Amy, who goes out of her way to help returning character Sir Gregor in his fight against the skeleton “lich” (the word is never used, but we all know that’s what he is) Nightshade. We help Sir Gregor out with the use of our family heirloom invisibility ring, but I’m sure Nightshade will come back again. It’s quite novel that these books seem to have a common universe between them with characters moving from book to book, which is very much not the case with the other TSR gamebooks.