Harry Turtledove's novels of world war in a world of magic--Through the Darkness is the third of the sequence--are a corrective to any view of fantasy as fluffy or emotionally soft. These tales of mass slaughter to fuel magical explosions, of dragons and behemoths and great sea creatures as instruments of death that scream and bleed as they die, tell us that, when it comes to human inhumanity, magic is just another way of conducting business as usual. Sometimes, as with the persecution and slaughter of the blond blue-eyed Kaunians or the bloodthirsty paranoid King Swemmell, the parallels with the history of the 20th century are a little too pat. More often, Turtledove finds something interesting to say about the slow drift of compromises that becomes a treasonable collaboration, or the subtle sleights of hand by which people survive in the middle of deadly enemies, or the ways in which hatred makes the inadequate feel better about themselves. As with his alternate-world military-history series--Worldwar, Colonization and The Great War, Turtledove manages a vast cast of characters with considerable efficiency. We rarely need the character list at the front of the book to keep track of all these people and their awful destinies. --Roz Kaveney