Growing The Beard / Literature

---

• Animorphs at first did it with the third book in the series; while the first two had helped to establish the core plot and the setting, the third book took a more unique turn, centering around Tobias, the most mysterious member of the group who in the previous books had been trapped in the form of a hawk. Other points later in the series' 54-book run could also be considered growing the beard, depending who you ask. Perhaps when Marco's mother is revealed to be Visser One, when the conflict escalates to a full scale war in the later books, and more gradual as the characters grow more mature over time. There is also a very notable beard-growing for the companion books such as the Andalite Chronicles and Hork Bajir chronicles, with much more mature and engaging storylines following on characters on exotic alien worlds. On the other hand, some fans argue that the later books in the core series saw a decline in quality, where Applegate had many of the books ghostwritten (though she heavily edited them to fit), and in the climax of the series where some were upset at Rachel and Ax's deaths. It's telling that the only book in the mid-to-late range that is generally well-received by fans is a take on "The Enemy Within" which is also the only book not ghostwritten until the final two.
• The Aubrey-Maturin series picks up considerably with 3rd and 4th books HMS Surprise and The Mauritius Command, after being given command of the titular Cool Ship and heavily reducing the land-based romantic storylines of the 2nd book Post Captain.
• The first 50 or so issues of Bewildering Stories magazine were comically bad. The first 30 even deliberately so. Between issues 50 and 80 the quality of both the magazine's format and its content improved markedly. Ironically, it has since developed its own sludge-pile.
• BIONICLE comic writer Greg Farshtey brought his own beard along when he replaced Cathy A. Hapka as the writer of the short novels. Hapka's books, though not bad, were more "storybook-esque" in their writing style, and the lore often suffered due to the author's unfamiliarity with the universe, since she was essentially just hired to write them as fast as possible.
• Captive Prince: Many readers consider the sequels to be improvements over the first book, as they greatly tone down the more graphic content, Laurent and Damen are now equals so their romance comes off as far less problematic, and there's more focus on things like political intrigue and action than constant abuse of slaves, which allows for the trilogy's better qualities to shine.
• Lord Foul's Bane, the first book in Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series, isn't very good and did little to redeem its deliberately unlikable anti-hero. The series improves dramatically in the second book, titled The Illearth War, where more time is given to Covenant's internal thoughts and the complex philosophical and ethical themes really start to shine. The series remained mostly solid and stays that way with the complex themes getting increasingly deeper analysis.
• The Clique started growing the beard with These Boots Are Made for Stalking and My Little Phony. The preceding books had varying degrees of quality at best, stagnant characters suffering even further from Flanderization and flat-lining plots. In particular, the series gained a reputation for having an Audience-Alienating Premise; it was series about an Alpha Bitch and her Girl Posse, and further mired in a reputation of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring for its unlikable, backstabbing or otherwise despicable characters. Starting with these two books, characters started experience actual, meaningful character growth and actual maturity, the main protagonist (or what passes for such) started standing up for herself and in short, the series actually became what people were expecting and hoping for. Unfortunately, it was too little too late as These Boots Are Made for Stalking and My Little Phony were the third and second-to-last in a series spanning nearly two dozen.
• For The Dark Tower series, Book 2, The Drawing of the Three, not only picks up the pace and introduces some permanent companions for the main protagonist, Roland of Gilead, but takes up a linear structure which is followed for the rest of the series, compared to the episodic nature of Book 1, The Gunslinger. It also jettisons some (but not all) of that book's Early-Installment Weirdness and truly sees Roland start on the quest for the titular Dark Tower.
• The early Discworld books felt significantly different than their later counterparts. Particularly glaring within the separate section of the Discworld mythos: compare and contrast the Granny Weatherwax from Equal Rites to the one in Carpe Jugulum. Or the Lord Vetinari in The Colour of Magic (Word of God had to step in and confirm that it was the same Patrician, and not one of his thoroughly insane predecessors) to the Magnificent Bastard of the Moist von Lipwig and City Watch books. Relatedly, the first two Discworld books are "just" straight parodies of Sword and Sorcery fantasy while later books take a more Affectionate Parody/satirical take on the fantasy genre. The series began to grow its beard in first Equal Rites (a Feminist Fantasy that made Terry Pratchett finally become a household name) and then Mort (which was a surprisingly serious and philosophical mediation on death while still being hilarious), where the series began to remove the Early-Installment Weirdness and went from being a parody of weird fantasy settings to using its own unique fantasy setting as a vehicle for satirizing both real-world issues and other artworks. The beard was fully grown by Guards! Guards!, to the point where it's seen as the best book in the series for new fans to start on, and then neatly trimmed to perfection in Small Gods, where the Discworld was properly codified.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe: While Alien Bodies, Seeing I and The Scarlet Empress are all individually good books, the Eighth Doctor Adventures doesn't really hit high gear until the introduction of fan favorite companion Fitz, and the departure of sometimes-Scrappy Sam. With the addition of a second companion to shake up the Doctor-Sam dynamic, as well as the introduction of several Myth Arcs, the books became the truly phenomenal, often times groundbreaking spin-off material they're known for now. Interestingly enough, while the introduction of Fitz is generally considered to be behind the EDAs' beard growing, his first book, The Taint, is considered fairly weak and new fans are encouraged to skim it for Fitz's scenes. If anything, it's Unnatural History, which turned Sam's character arc on its head and moved the Faction Paradox arc to the foreground, that can be considered the definitive moment that the EDAs became awesome.
  • And the earlier Doctor Who New Adventures had their moment with the fourth book, Timewyrm: Revelation. After three books that were essentially on the level of the novelisations, this was an actual piece of literature which established a lot of the mythology of the series. It introduced Paul Cornell, the first of a generation of gifted fan authors, and has been widely seen as being one of the biggest influences on later Doctor Who stories in pretty much every medium.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky was a successful and widely-read author from his first novel onward, but there's a marked difference in quality between his early works and the writing he published after his political imprisonment and (possibly staged) near-execution. Almost all of the work he is famous for today, including Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, was published in the second half of his career.
• The first couple of The Dresden Files books are decent, but not amazing; it's only really during the third that it picks up, beginning the tradition of totally over the top levels of awesomeness that would later become one of the series' hallmarks and starting Harry down the road to Woobiefication and Character Development with Susan being half-turned by the Red Court. It improves even further around Dead Beat, with the introductions of Cowl and Lash, Harry joining the Wardens, and The Reveal of a traitor on the White Council. According to Jim Butcher, the first book was written to show a creative writing teacher how bad her method of writing was by doing exactly what she said in the expectation it would be badly received.
• Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book of the series. The first two were fun, wonderfully painted page-turners with magnetic characters, but didn't seem to be much more than that. Then the third book's title character, who was mentioned very briefly at the start of the first book, is unexpectedly brought into focus as a major player, and the book shows some tantalizing hints about the Wizarding War that forms the series background. The plot just gets thicker from there, making it clear that this isn't just a fluffy series of kid's books, but an incredibly intricately plotted seven-part Myth Arc.
• While it may not be extraordinary, The Host (2008) was much better received, and overall is much better than Stephenie Meyer's other works, and is perhaps an indication that she can indeed write things other than novels about sparkly vampires.
• Ian Rankin, acclaimed Scottish author of the Inspector Rebus novels, started out the series with quite straight forward serial killer and murderer hunts. The fourth novel, Strip Jack, had a change in tone in dealing instead with the sordid life of a (fictional) British politician. Afterwards, the series began to focus more on the morally gray world of big business and British politics, and the relationships between the two. The series was much better for it.
• A moment like this for The Lord of the Rings appears in The History Of The Lord of The Rings. We see several early drafts of the beginning of the book that would become The Fellowship of The Ring. They are all very similar, in construction and tone, to The Hobbit. The original villain of the piece was always intended to be the Necromancer mentioned in The Hobbit. However Tolkien's original interpretation made him a fairly light-hearted, almost mischievous villain. However, somewhere along the line (in a moment which, sadly, Christopher Tolkien could find no record of) Tolkien changed it so that the Lord of The Rings was actually Sauron, the villain from his Númenor legend. Tolkien then saw that the legend of the rings could be used as a way to explain how Sauron survived the destruction of Númenor. With the Smaug-like villain replaced by a character who was, for all intents and purposes, Satan, the book became more grounded and the story got much, much darker, growing into the legendary saga we have today. This dragged many other characters along with it - Aragorn, the wandering king-in-exile, was originally Trotter, a rather silly but experienced hobbit who dressed himself as a man and stood on stilts.
• Gardens of the Moon, the first book in Steven Erikson's gargantuan Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence, drops the reader in the middle of an ongoing war with little explanation of what is going on. The lack of scene-setting or explanations for concepts in the book have led many to give up on the novel, as acknowledged in later editions by the author. Fans suggest that the book doesn't settle down and become comprehensible until a good 150 pages in, and many suggest skipping it and starting with the more traditionally-structured second book, Deadhouse Gates (set on a different continent with different characters) instead.
• The Dragonbone Chair, the first book in Tad Williams' Doorstopper fantasy series, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, tends to drag on and doesn't introduce the main antagonist until several hundred pages in. Once the series gets going, it's very good, but you still have to get through much of the first book to get to the good stuff.
  • This seems to be the case with most of Tad Williams' doorstoppers. The protagonists only know that their lives are going to hell; they don't know why, there are webs within webs, etc. Awesome characters, storytelling, worldbuilding, and prose keep this from becoming the problem it would be in the hands of a less capable author. But it's a given that you will have no idea what's actually going on until the last five hundred pages or so.
  • Incidentally, the main hero grows a literal beard in the course of the story, symbolizing his significant maturation from a lazy kid into a worthy king. The cover art makes the difference especially striking.
• Macdonald Hall: Go Jump in a Pool is often viewed as a step up from the first book for introducing a larger supporting cast having less blatant Protagonist-Centered Morality, and slightly increasing the whacky humor.
• Misery provides an in-universe example. Paul Sheldon's flagship franchise is a series of pulpy Victorian romance novels featuring Canon Sue Misery Chastain, a character he despises but keeps writing because the money will let his kids go to college. He crashes his car, winds up in the care of Misery's biggest (and craziest) fan Annie Wilkes, she finds out he plans to have Misery Killed Off for Real in his next book so he can write gritty crime thrillers instead, and she goes nuts and threatens him with torture if he doesn't write a new book bringing Misery Back from the Dead and giving the character a satisfactory conclusion. As it turns out, shifting the genre to a Gothic horror romance where Misery has to escape being Buried Alive gives him a new appreciation for the character; he considers the finished book the best he's ever written and makes sure to save it and burn only the cover sheet and a stack of papers at the end so he can sell it on after he escapes.
• October Daye: While the first novel, Rosemary and Rue was praised by critics for its Worldbuilding and interesting cast of characters, it also received complaints of having too much Info Dump, a weirdly slow pacing and Toby being a Pinball Protagonist. The second book,'A Local Habitation', rather than building properly on the first, essentially serves as the literary equivalent of a Bottle Episode, trapping Toby and a couple characters in a single location away from most of the settings and elements introduced in book one, and also received criticism for Toby carrying the Idiot Ball repeatedly. Later novels would improve on this and give the series a faster pacing, a well-crafted Myth Arc and deeper emotional resonance that would turn it into one of the most acclaimed Urban Fantasy book series. This improvement was first felt in the third novel, An Artificial Night which truly explored Toby's psyche, began to set the seeds for some of the series' overarching plot, and had much deeper emotional stakes.
• D. J. MacHale's The Pendragon Adventure starts out a bit rocky with its first two books, but by the third book, it really starts going, with the second book ending with the main protagonist losing his mentor figure and having to stand on his own now, and the third book raising the stakes even further and giving the protagonists some extremely hard choices, and the series really expands on its potential and the creativity of the worlds they visit.
• Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain: Some fans feel that, as solid as the first book is, the series really begins to pick up with either the third book (which sees the Superkids Club formed), or the fourth book (a Darker and Edgier prequel about Spider and Goodnight), due to the new characters and world building in them.
• The first appearance of Psmith is widely considered to be the point where P. G. Wodehouse hit his stride as a writer.
  Here, for the very first time, Wodehouse is indulging freely in his gifts for pastiche and persiflage. For once, the plot is forgotten as the words begin to dance.
• A surprising leap in style occurred between books six and seven of Ranger's Apprentice, with more originality, humour, and maturity in the following stories.
• The first Rod Allbright Alien Adventures book, Aliens Ate My Homework is a fun story about a boy dealing with a spaceship full of two-inch high aliens, hiding them from his parents and teachers by pretending they're toys and so on. The second book, I Left my Sneakers in Dimension X shifts the action from a generic small town to another dimension, revealing just how inventive Bruce Coville can be with aliens and settings, and that the plot of the first book wasn't so neatly wrapped up as it seemed. The final chapter reveals that Rod's father is apparently an alien and a former member of the Galactic Patrol. This leads to major Fridge Brilliance with regards to the first book - the aliens crashing through Rod's window was no accident, and their making him a deputy them may well have been down to his father having been 'one of the best'.
• Serge Storms: Florida Roadkill and Hammerhead Ranch Motel got respectable sales and reviews. Still, the plots aren't as good as those in later books, and the over-abundance of the Anyone Can Die trope and Serge's Early-Installment Weirdness nastiness can provide a decent amount of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring sentiment. For some, Orange Crush is where the series begins finding a decent balance of plot twists, Character Development, a larger recurring cast, and whacky hijinks.
• By book five in A Series of Unfortunate Events, the formula had started to feel a bit tired. While the characters remain strong and the events remain unfortunate, the end of The Austere Academy is the first time we hear the letters "V.F.D.". From there it escalates from a deconstruction of children's adventure novels to "My Very First Dostoevsky".
• In Terry Brooks' Shannara series, the second book Elfstones of Shannara is often cited as the best starting point, due to the first book, Sword of Shannara, being very very similar, and even downright identical in places to a certain other fantasy series. The second series, The Scions of Shannara, is really where the series hits it stride with much more complex characters, unique stories, and a much more fleshed-out magical world.
• The first two Sherlock Holmes novels were huge hits in their time but many Holmesians agree that the Holmes and Watson that everybody remembers fondly didn't appear until "A Scandal in Bohemia", the first in a series of 56 short stories.
• Star Wars Legends: To some, Galaxy of Fear was much improved after Army of Terror, when the Big Bad of the first six books was defeated and the formula changed - also, in the subsequent books DV-9 had been Put on a Bus and the relationship between Hoole and the kids was much less strained.
• John Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, was a lighthearted adventure tale about the 17th-century pirate Henry Morgan. He began to grow the beard with his next few books, which focused (as most of his later work would) on the ordinary people of central California. He first achieved critical and commercial success with his fifth book, Tortilla Flat, and reached the peak of his popularity with his Great Depression novels such as Of Mice and Men (his seventh) and The Grapes of Wrath (his tenth). Most would agree that his post-Depression work once again declined in quality, though his 1952 masterpiece East of Eden is a notable exception.
• A common opinion amongst the Throne of Glass fanbase is that the third book, Heir of Fire, is a significant improvement over Throne of Glass and Crown of Midnight. A criticism of the first two books - especially the first - is that the plot and pacing can feel off, such as the main storyline's lack of development, excessive focus on romantic subplots, uneven worldbuilding and Celaena having little depth beyond being an Escapist Character with a lot of Character Shilling (a frequent joke being that for an infamous assassin, Celaena sure doesn't do much assassinating). Some readers also weren't thrilled that the only other significant female character besides Celaena gets killed off in the second book. It's widely agreed that Heir of Fire is a step-up in quality, with the main story getting more focus, interesting character development for Celaena and the other protagonists, better implementation of worldbuilding and the introduction of popular characters like Elide, Manon and the other witches. Some readers attribute this to Sarah J. Maas being a teenager when she began writing the series (Throne of Glass was also her debut novel) so it's understandable she had gotten more experienced by the third installment. Whether the series stays good is a matter of debate amongst readers, but most find Heir of Fire to be one of the strongest entries.
• The Eyre Affair, the first book of the Thursday Next series, isn't bad, per se, but features disappointingly little use of the series' central gimmick of the title character being able to enter works of fiction and a comparatively conventional "stopping the bad guy" plot. Starting with book two, Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde really went to town with the concept with nods to all kinds of different literature. Also, while some important plot threads are introduced in book one, the second really begins the series' fascinating juggling act between all its different subplots that frequently collide or call back to events several books previous in unexpected ways.
• To some, City of Shadows elevated the TimeRiders series from a flawed but interesting concept to a far tighter, more compelling work through the capitalisation on a number of twists and the introduction of some limited political ideology and more complex Alternate History predictions.
• The Uncle John's Bathroom Reader trivia book series, beginning with volume 8 (Uncle John's Ultimate Bathroom Reader). This volume was bigger than the last two volumes combined, and it started the gradual shift towards a more in-depth writing style. The evolution has continued in subsequent volumes, which now feature multi-part stories and an "extended sitting" section with even longer material. While the first few books had about 200 pages, the last few volumes have pushed 600.
• David Brin's novel Sundiver, the first set in his Uplift Saga universe, is ok, but it is often recommended that readers skip to the second, the Hugo and Nebula winning Startide Rising, instead. This is made easier by the second book being set 300 years after the first, featuring a totally different cast and having minimal references to the first book.
• Warhammer 40,000: The first book of the Gaunt's Ghosts series, First & Only is pretty good (and in fact was the first novel Dan Abnett had ever written). The second, Ghostmaker is also solid. But the third book, Necropolis, is where the series really started to gain its voice.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • The first book, The Eye of the World, cops a lot of flak for its intentional "borrowings" from The Lord of the Rings and standard fantasy conventions. The second book, The Great Hunt, takes the story in a completely different direction and is much better, and the beard is completely grown in the third book, The Dragon Reborn.
  • After Jordan's death in 2007, young author Brandon Sanderson took up the reins using Jordan's notes, and his The Gathering Storm has another slightly different direction and is awesome in a refreshing new way.

---