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The Last Apprentice: A Coven Of Witches

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The Last Apprentice series is full of witches -- good ones, bad ones, and horrifying ones. So unsurprisingly "The Last Apprentice: A Coven of Witches" is all about various witches in this series, ranging from a vampirelike dead witch to Grimalkin herself. Joseph Delaney's stories are solid, but be forewarned: one of these stories has been released in another book.

"Meg Skelton" takes us back to when Gregory was a young man: he fell in love with a beautiful young woman that he rescued from a monster -- only to find that she was a lamia witch. Though he tried to live peacefully with Meg, her feral sister Marcia and the suspicious townspeople ultimately made it impossible. "Dirty Dora" tells us of a grotesque undead witch who returns after death to visit revenge on the men who killed her.

"Grimalkin's Tale" tells how the fiery young assassin became the Witch Assassin, and why she wants to kill the Fiend. "Alice and the Brain-Guzzler" tells of the first week of Alice Dean's apprenticeship, and how she became the target of a deadly familiar who's eyeing her as his next victim. Finally, Tom encounters the "The Banshee Witch," a mysterious woman with a terrible cry who is far more than what she appears...

I'm 99% sure that "Grimalkin's Tale" was already released in another one of Joseph Delaney's short story collections, and that the big drawback to this collection. Well, that and the fact that there's no real ending to Gregory's doomed love story -- Delaney doesn't really explain what happened to Meg and Marcia after Gregory returned.

But the rest of it is pretty good stuff -- Delaney explores some of the backstories of the supporting cast, and includes a story about Tom's apprenticeship with Arkwright. His writing also varies from story to story, from the grotesque descriptions of graveyard dirt and moldy leaves to the swampy battles with a serpentine worme. As for the "brain-guzzler," that's just horrendous.

It also provides some interesting revelations about the characters. We see the horrors that drove Grimalkin to become a witch assassin, the toxic atmosphere that Alice learned witchcraft in, and some details about Gregory's naive youth. Dirty Dora is also explored in detail, but she's such a sly malicious old hag (and a sort of vampire!) that you can't really feel sorry for her.

"The Last Apprentice: A Coven of Witches" is all about the witchy horrors and some truly terrible magic -- I just wish Delaney had told us what happened to Meg and Marcia.