“It’s a wild, shambolic farrago which subverts my expectations for a Forgotten Realms novel, a horror story that’s grossly out of place among these heroic fantasy epics and owes more to Stephen King than Tolkien.”
“Goblins, orcs, ogres, orogs, ogrillons, giants — say what you like about the forces of evil, but at least they’ve put a lot of effort into creating a diverse workplace.”
“Well, all good things have to come to an end eventually. There was a long stretch of no books written by Douglas Niles for a while, but now he’s back with another trilogy focusing on more shenanigans in the Moonshae Isles.”
“Now, I’m not the sort of reader who believes that it’s necessary to torture your characters to make compelling drama. But characters who have only one problem are only as interesting as that problem, and ‘monsters attack’ is not interesting.”
“But even I know enough about wilderness survival to be sure that you shouldn’t treat a freely bleeding stab wound by rubbing a bunch of ferns into it, and you shouldn’t try sliding around the forest on gobbets of raw antelope.”
“With five books all focusing on one overarching story, the temptation to indulge in sloppy characterization and meandering plots requires immense discipline to avoid. “Disciplined” isn’t really an adjective that springs to mind when I think about Salvatore’s writings thus far.”
“It’s good to see elven society finally getting some attention. Despite their thousands of years of culture and history, most authors don’t go any further into characterizing elves than the usual ‘nature-loving hippies’ stereotype.”
“So what are we to make of this Lawrence of Anauroch? It may be derivative, but it’s certainly not boring.”
“Montolio feels like a much more sinister character to me now as an adult than he did when I was a teenager — the personification of the ugly questions about racism that the Drizzt books keep raising but then never addressing.”
“Just once I’d like to see Niles write a book with no divine intervention or mystical prophecies in it, where someone in the plot has some real agency… but I’m not getting my hopes up.”
