“I’d love to see more Forgotten Realms authors run with this depiction of godhood, which gives the gods a delightfully alien feel. Alas, I suspect that everyone else is going to keep writing them as powerful, slightly dim humans and I’ll continue to be annoyed.”
“The reason this review is up later than I expected is because I kept putting the book down out of sheer boredom every time I came to another six-page stretch of ‘And then they killed a bunch of goblins.'”
“Imagine that someone read The Lord of the Rings, then said to themself, ‘That was cool, but you know what this story really needed? An entire book devoted to the Scouring of the Shire!’ Because that’s pretty much exactly what we have here.”
“Five out of Niles’ nine books have featured wicked, venal, self-righteous priests of Helm as major villains. What’s the deal here? Did the author have a bad run-in with a mall security guard in his youth and now seeks revenge on the anthropomorphized concept of guards and watchmen?”
“The nice thing about a mixed bag like this is that even when you suffer through a badly-written story, you know it’s going to be short and you’ll probably get to a better one soon. Beats slogging through a bad 300-page novel, that’s for sure.”
“Is it even possible to write a story of lost cities, dark jungles, and cannibal natives in our modern era without being anachronistic and offensive? Apparently so.”
“Does he just not realize that other plots exist? That you can have a story that doesn’t start and end with an evil god doing bad things just for evil’s sake? Maybe even a plot where people are in conflict with other people, possibly for reasons other than ‘Group A is good and Group B is evil’?”
“Let’s be honest: Drizzt wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he didn’t have things to kill on a regular basis. I don’t buy this self-pitying pacifist bollocks for one minute.”
“Writing tip: when your other characters start lampshading how incredibly annoying it is that your protagonist magically knows everything, maybe, just maybe it’s time to dial the omniscience back a bit.”
“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.”
