Terry Brooks: A Fantasy Legend Hangs Up His Sword (Of Shannara)

Let’s roll the clock back 34 years. It’s a cold, snowy, and blustery day in early March and the fact that Spring in Caledonia, NY is a few scant weeks off seems like a cruel joke rather than a hopeful promise. School’s been out for a few hours and my 13-year-old self is where he usually is, curled up on my living room couch, sword hilt deep in a good book. I have no memory of what tome I was steeped in that day, but Vegas odds are it probably involved wizards, goblins, elves, aliens, or spaceships. Like many I had a love of genre fiction (sci fi and fantasy were my jams) but any book would do. I was just as entertained reading a biography of Winston Churchill as I was Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers. In junkie parlance I was hooked through the bag and back.

My Mom came home from work that day just after 430 but I noticed she had a slightly bemused smile on her face and was holding a newspaper in her hand. I smiled back as she strode up to me, put the newspaper in my lap, and pointed to a blurb. I read it and my eyes went wide. I looked up and all she said was “Want to go?”

Two weeks later, on a slightly less cold, snowy, and blustery day (the potential of Spring had been downgraded from “cruel joke” to just “joke”) I stood eighth in line in front of an empty table and chair at the Village Green Bookstore in downtown Rochester, NY. It was 6:55PM and in five short minutes the man I was in line to see would grace this holy temple with his presence. For perhaps the 100^th time I looked at the book I held in my hand, the book that would soon be adorned with the signature of that aforementioned man.

The novel was The Elf Queen of Shannara and the author was Terry Brooks.

At 47 years old I no longer consider Brooks my favorite author, however he may be the most significant and formative author in my life. When I was 10, I began my lifelong love of reading with J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic work The Lord of the Rings. But if Tolkien was my gateway drug to the realm of fantasy, then Terry Brooks was my cocaine, when my Aunt Lori introduced me to Brooks and his Sword of Shannara series two years later. And I’m not talking about that weak shit cut with 80% baking soda, I’m talking that Bolivian, Ellis from Die Hard, grade A shit.

And I was hooked.

I devoured Brooks’ entire oeuvre. I bled with Shea Ohmsford as he confronted the Warlock Lord in Skull Mountain. I solemnly listened to the large, brooding, and stoic druid Allanon as he relayed the history of the Four Lands. I knelt before the Ellcrys in the Eleven capital city of Arborlon weeping at the realization that she was dying. I sung with the raven-haired beauty Brin Ohmsford as she destroyed the Ildatch – the book of black magic – at the Maelmord.

These characters were my friends. My family.

And now at the tender age of 13 I was meeting the wordsmith that created these characters.

As I nervously ventured closer, the drab metal chair and the standard foldable table that looked plucked from my church’s basement, seemed an inadequate resting place for Brooks. This mythical man deserved a throne fit for King Arthur and a table that Aslan would be proud to sit before.

I was also shocked by the look and appearance of Brooks. Middle aged, of average height, with a slim build, and gray hair that was quickly transforming to white, he cut an unimposing figure. Granted I’d seen his picture multiple times on the back cover of every one of his hardback books I owned. Yet in my secret heart I’d always hoped it was a doctored photo and that if I ever had the chance to meet him, Brooks would have the bearing and visage of Aragorn son of Arathorn. But no Numenorian was Terry. Just a former lawyer turned fantasy writer from the Pacific Northwest.

And then he smiled at me.

I’d read the word “beatific” before, but this was the first time I’d seen it made manifest. It was radiant and lit up his whole face, highlighting deep set but kind eyes. As we began our brief conversation, I realized he was actually actively listening to me, something that most adults simply don’t do with children. He asked me my name and what I liked to do for fun. I can’t even remember what I stammered but I remember carefully spelling out my first name (it’s different) as Brooks signed his latest novel. Terry Brooks wanted to get it right.

As I turned to go, I impulsively got up the courage to shake his hand and told him how much I loved his books and how much they meant to me. I’m sure he’d heard those words from the lips of fans uncounted times. Yet the sincerity and humbleness with which he replied, “You’re too kind, thank you so so much. It means a lot to me” was etched all over his face. Filmmaker and YouTuber Robert Meyer Burnett is wont to say that the currency of our current age is authenticity. Well Terry Brooks had enough authenticity to put the gold in Fort Knox to shame. I walked away from Terry Brooks so dazed and elated that I hadn’t even bothered to look at what he’d written.

Since that fateful day in March of 1992, I’ve expanded my reading appetite. I became voracious. Everything from Bronte, to Shakespeare, to Isabel Allende, to Pat Conroy – I indulged in it all. The library became my own personal Golden Corral. This included other titans of the fantasy and sci-world – Herbert, Heinlein, Asimov, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, GRRM, Jonathan Mayberry, Jay Kristoff, and on and on and on. I was insatiable.

But in the decades since, I’ve always returned to the worlds and words of Terry Brooks. I continued to purchase his novels and reveled in the ever expanding Shannara series. Infrequently I returned to his website to see what Terry had cookin’ up in the kitchen. Brooks always made it a point to write a New Year’s blog to his fans and let them know what gems were in store in the coming months.

Imagine my surprise and sadness a few days ago when I read his latest New Year’s blog and discovered that at 82 years of age, Terry Brooks was retiring from writing. Wrote Brooks:

It has been a rather long and somewhat difficult ‘24 and ‘25 for Judine and me as we navigated our early 80s and came to accept the fact that we are, finally, official elders in the writing community.  It is hard for me especially to think of myself this way. I have always considered myself spry and active through my entire life – a mindset that has allowed me to accumulate more than fifty years of active writing and the publishing of a total of just under fifty books of fantasy fiction.  But late in 2024, amid an editorial debate, I decided that enough was enough and it was time to pull up the lines and start off in a new direction.  So, I backed away from my working writer’s life, published my final book, Galaphile and stepped down from my career.  I was done writing and determined to spend my time reading.  That is what I have been doing for all of 2025, and I don’t regret making the choice.

Although Brooks went on to say that fellow author and friend Delilah Dawson would be continuing the Shannara series (her first comes out this year), I know in my soul it will never be quite the same. Yet I can’t fault Brooks for retiring. The publishing world has changed vastly in the nearly five decades since The Sword of Shannara was published. If anyone has earned a trip past the Grey Havens and to the shores of Valinor, it’s him. I can think of a lot worse ways to spend my retirement than reading for pleasure all day with the love of my life at my side.

As I picture this great fantasy master cozying up on his favorite couch with a good book in his hand, as my childhood self did daily once upon a time, I can’t help but smile. My heart is filled with nothing but gratitude and wonder. I also can’t help but think about what Terry Brooks wrote in my copy of The Elf Queen of Shannara almost three and half decades ago.

When I rejoined my Mom in another part of the bookstore, she asked me what he wrote. Realizing that in my fog of astonishment I’d forgotten to look, I opened the novel to the title page and read these words:

“To Corrye – Thanks for believing in the magic. -Terry Brooks”

And all these years later—I still believe.