Rating is more for the author's note at the end. He is funny. ( )

This is a very short story set in Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer series. I wasn’t expecting it to be so short. The Goodreads book page has it listed as 40 pages, but it’s more like 10. You can find it for free here.

This is listed as book 2.5, but it shouldn’t be read until after book 3. I have seen recommendations to read it after book 4, but it would have much more impact if read before book 4. There will be a point where you’ll think I’ve led you horribly astray, but I read it after book 4 and regretted my timing.

I feel like it’s impossible for me to give any opinions without potentially spoiling everything, so I’m going to put the rest of my comments in spoiler tags. There are major spoilers here.

The story kills off two POV characters, Kip and Liv. Then the author follows it up with a note implying it’s a scene from his not-yet-published-at-the-time fourth book. He then goes on to deliver the punch line where you realize that he’s just pulling your leg and that this isn’t actually a real scene in the series.

After one has read book 4 it’s clear that the events in this story don’t fit, so I spent the entire time up to the punchline just feeling confused, because nothing made any sense. If I’d read it before book 4, I would have been more alarmed by the story and I would have appreciated the joke better.

Although I did laugh out loud at the punch line, the story itself didn’t do much for me and it doesn’t add anything to the series (since it didn’t happen), which is what I usually read these sorts of extra stories for. I think what he did was funny, but the impact was lost on me because I read it at the wrong time. ( )

He read this to us when I was at a SF convention and the whole audience sat, enraptured, as we were led to our dooms. I wanted to strangle the author at the time.

As a practical joke, I've never been quite so had in all my life, and the fact that he pulled it off with such a straight face and with an obviously great story like this, KNOWING that all his fans were seeing such a brilliant turning point in the novels that we were there for, was sufficient for all of us to cheerfully murder Mr. Weeks by the end of the story.

Never mind that my estimation of him as both one of my favorite writers only increased after this.

Anyone who can toy with my emotions so facilely deserves every penny of my hard-earned money.

( )