Terry Brooks had a very clear intention when, in an attempt to combat the boredom of law school, he began his now-famous Shannara series: to write a classical adventure story.  "An adventure story, something wonderfully dangerous, filled with hair-raising escapes, men and women of character and purpose, dangers that threatened from every quarter -- that was what I wanted to write and that was how I would escape the mind-numbing predictability of law life." ¹  Throughout his long career, in each of his Shannara books, his focus has been to entertain, to take the reader on a ride that they can see and hear and feel and to instill in them that heady sense of wonder and excitement that only good fantasy can provide.  While his characters always struggled internally with variations on classic heroic angst, the characters always seemed a vehicle for an exciting story, not the other way around. 

With the publication of Running with the Demon in 1997, however, Brooks's focus shifted inward.  Subtitled "A Novel of Good and Evil," Demon was the first book of the Word and the Void trilogy, essentially a pre-apocalyptic urban fantasy dealing with an ongoing and very existential struggle between the magically empowered Knights of the Word and the demons serving the Void.  Given the post-apocalyptic nature of the Shannara universe and the various hints given by Brooks that the epic fantasy series was actually set in a far future version of our own world, it wasn't too surprising when he decided to connect the two stories.  The release of Armageddon's Children (and subsequently, its sequel, The Elves of Cintra), first book in the Genesis of Shannara trilogy, canonized the struggle of the Knights of the Word as the ultimate precursor to the Shannara stories. 

The first two Genesis books set the stage for the apocalypse.  Set in a near future United States where the government and civilized life as we know it has already been wiped out, the characters, consisting of two Knights of the Word, a group of street children, and the reclusive Elves, are poised at the brink of a final, more devastating disaster.  The Gypsy Morph, Book Three of the trilogy, offers an anticlimactic conclusion to a promising story.  There is adventure to be found in the Genesis of Shannara, but it seems to be primarily located in the first two volumes.  While Armageddon's Children and The Elves of Cintra saw the motley band of good guys escaping the devastation of their homes and setting out on journeys both perilous and filled with adventure, The Gypsy Morph sees them struggling to journey's end in comparative exhaustion, with little but overwrought emotional drama to occupy them as they reach their destination.  Although we enjoyed the read and thought the book had a few great points to its name, ultimately, we were unsatisfied.