Threshold (novel)
| Written by: | Sara Douglass |
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| Central Theme: | |
| Synopsis: | |
| Genre(s): | Fantasy |
| First published: | January 29, 1997 |
Threshold is a fantasy novel written by Sara Douglass in 1997.
The story concerns a glassworker slave named Tirzah, forced into slavery because of her father's debts. She's tasked with helping building the eponymous Threshold, a pyramid made partially with huge glass panels. She meets a Magus named Boaz, hiding behind a Magi exterior a little too well. The Magi base a religion and magic power around the One, the number of all creation. And Threshold is being built to allow them to tap into the power of Creation and become immortal.
Once Threshold is completed, though, it... doesn't go quite as planned.
Not to be confused with any of the other works named Threshold.
Tropes used in Threshold (novel) include:
- Anti-Hero: Boaz.
- Bad Powers, Bad People: All of the Magi.
- Death by Childbirth: Neuf
- Extra Ore Dinary: Being an Elemental lets you speak to glass and metal.
- Gone Horribly Right: Threshold lets the Magi tap into the Vale... only it summons a demon that starts turning everything to stone.
- Heel Face Turn: Boaz, after he finally starts to see just how evil Threshold has become.
- Infant Immortality: Brutally averted. One of the first things Tirzah sees after arriving in Gesholme is a newborn baby having its head splattered against a wall.
- Jerkass: Magus Boaz, Chad-Nezzar.
- Magical Gesture: The swirling colors required to speak to the Soulenai.
- Nightmare Fuel: A zombified child speaking taunts from the Big Bad to his dead father? More than a little creepy!
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Boaz enters Threshold entirely on his own, and we never get to see him fight Nzame.
- Precursors: Soulenai.
- Rape and Revenge: Yaqob stabs Boaz in the stomach for the things he did to Tirzah. Also Revenge Before Reason.
- Secret Art: Elementals and Cartomancers.
- You Cannot Grasp the True Form: The Vale, when Tirzah and the others look into it.