Lord Foul's Bane

Lord Foul's Bane is a fantasy novel by the American writer Stephen R. Donaldson, published in 1977. It is the first book of the first trilogy of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and it is followed by The Illearth War.

Thomas Covenant is a young author whose world is turned upside down when he is diagnosed with leprosy, and after six months of treatment he returns home to find himself divorced by his wife Joan and outcast from his community. On a rare trip into town he is accosted by a beggar, and disturbed by the encounter he stumbles into the path of an oncoming police car and is knocked unconscious. He wakes in the Land, a world of the kind that fantasy fiction had already established, where he meets the Cavewight Drool Rockworm and Lord Foul the Despiser. Foul prophesies that Covenant will destroy the Land within forty-nine years, and adds that if Drool is not stopped the doom will arrive much sooner; he instructs Covenant to carry the warning to the Lords, who study ancient lore and have sworn an oath to protect the Land.

The series takes its name from its protagonist's refusal to accept that the world he has been placed in is real. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant was one of the long fantasy sequences that appeared in the years after The Lord of the Rings, and its leading character is a man who dares not believe in the strange alternate world he suddenly finds himself in, even while he is tempted to fight for it.