I finished reading The Hunter (1990) by Rose Estes, the first in a trilogy of novels that blends fantasy and science fiction.

I am familiar with Rose Estes as an author because as a child I read pretty much every gamebook (or choose-your-own adventure style story) I could get my hands on. She wrote a number of Endless Quest books. These are gamebooks that were published in the 1980s by TSR. The original series was published from 1982 to 1987, during the height of gamebook popularity, and consisted of 36 books, covering a numbering of genres including fantasy, sci-fi, and espionage. Estes wrote nine of these original Endless Quest books.

In The Hunter, the story follows the journey of a small group of companions as they seek answers in an unexplored, outside world. The companions are from a culture that is roughly equivalent to a bronze-age society. The world feels well-developed and the relationships between the characters are believable and interesting. My favorite character might be Beast, an animal called a lupebeast, somewhat of a cross between a wolf and a smilodon.

I haven’t read an old school fantasy like this in quite a while and I really had fun. It was action-packed and suspenseful at times, while providing enough details to create an interesting world and characters. I found the evolving friendships and trust between some of the characters to be one of the most appealing parts of the book.

“Well, we can give up or we can keep going.”