A Knight of the Word

John Ross, the tortured, conflicted Knight of the Word from Terry Brooks’s Running with the Demon, finally gets a good night’s sleep in the sequel. He buys this moment’s peace at the cost of his sacred oath to be a champion of the Word, renouncing that pledge after failing to prevent the slaughter of a group of schoolchildren. Duty and destiny are difficult to elude, though, and soon his former charge Nest Freemark, now a college student and Olympic hopeful, arrives to warn him of his imminent destruction, or, worse, his unwitting fall into the service of the Void.