Remember when I said I was going to be checking out the offerings in my planned price range? I just bought a copy of
Mirkwood: A Novel About JRR Tolkien, Heroines, and Exodus From Middle Earth Or Pardon Me, Did You Just Come Through That Portal? by Steve Hillard.
It costs $2.99 and, fittingly, is self-published.
And I only heard about it in the first place because
the Tolkien estate is trying to sue it out of existence for misunderappropriating the literary character of J.R.R. Tolkien. Understand this isn't somebody's Middle-Earth fan fiction. (It would be a D&D book if it were), but a story that uses a fictitious representation of a long-dead man as a character, in a literary tradition that's older than literature. I ordinarily wouldn't post a link to the "buy me" page before I've actually read a book, but in this case the act of buying and publicizing the book is a political act.
Of course, Amazon has shown a distressing willingness to obliterate Kindle books at the requests of lawyers in the past, so it's possible this purchase may change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms like fairy-gifts fading away, but that's a risk I'm willing to take. If nothing else, the more people who buy this book, the bigger a headache it would be for Amazon to give in to the estate.
(
Hard copies are also available, and may prove to be harder to recall through the ether.)