“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.”
“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.”
