Author: Clayton Emery
Published: November 1996

It’s unfortunate that we’re only going to be looking at the first two books in Clayton Emery’s Netheril trilogy, since I hate leaving things unfinished. But the third novel didn’t come out until nine months after the demise of TSR, and we’re nearly ready to wrap up our tour of the Forgotten Realms. After reading the back-cover blurb, I was concerned that this book would be one of those middle novels that’s a completely disconnected side story, where the characters take a long diversion and then return to where they were more or less unchanged in time for the third book. Fortunately, Dangerous Games does a good job of developing our protagonists and wrapping up many of their storylines, so it doesn’t feel like I’m leaving crucial story threads hanging by omitting to review Mortal Consequences.

I must confess to some trepidation about reviewing this book, since it’s likely in this case that the author will end up reading what I write. I’ll do my best to call it like I see it and be honest about its faults, rather than handling the review with kid gloves to avoid giving offense. Still, according to Clayton Emery’s comments on my review of his previous book, it sounds like these late-stage TSR novels were produced under insane schedule pressure and with practically zero editorial assistance, so it’s hard to imagine any author being able to produce A-grade material under these circumstances.

Plot

I must admit that I was dead wrong about something in my review of Sword Play:

Presumably we won’t actually see Netheril collapse during the course of this trilogy — that didn’t happen until –339 DR, a few hundred years later…

Well, shows what I know. About a fifth of the way into the novel, some weird magic stuff transports our heroes through time to just before the fall of the empire of Netheril. Most of the story takes place in the future, where they have just enough time to watch everything go to shit before escaping back to their own time. I definitely did not see that coming, and that bothers me. A plot twist that significant is something you want to set up in advance, not spring out of nowhere.

I understand why they did it, though. It’s the old entertainment industry principle of “shoot the money”: the biggest, most exciting, most interesting part of Netheril’s history is its spectacular self-destruction, and you’d be a fool not to work it into a novel somehow. I just wish it hadn’t been done with this particular time-travel plot. It comes out of nowhere and the heroes don’t have any agency in the process — they mess around in the present for a little while, then stumble upon a magic dingus and get accidentally time-shifted along with it. This is the second book in a series, so there’s no chance that the protagonists will die and the only tension comes from “how will they make it back home?”.

I can think of a few ways this could have been done better. First, it would have made a great standalone story. A novel where we could have seen the fall of Netheril and its aftermath from several viewpoints would have been brilliant; we could see it from the perspective of the people involved, rather than a couple of random outsiders, and we wouldn’t have to waste any time welding the pre-existing setting and characters onto it. But if that weren’t on the table, it would have been better to have set this entire trilogy around the fall of Netheril instead of jumping around in time. That way the protagonists wouldn’t be such outsiders and it wouldn’t take any improbable shenanigans to get them involved with the plot. But since even that isn’t possible, it would have at least worked better if the characters in this time-travel plot had some agency — if the time-travelling was something they did, either deliberately or accidentally, instead of something that just randomly happens to them.

I imagine I’ll have some comparisons to make between this book and the Dragonlance Legends trilogy once I get that far, since that’s a much more successful attempt to tell a “time travel to witness an apocalypse” story. Premise aside, however, this book uses what it has to work with effectively. The adventure changes our protagonists in significant ways, so they return home scarred by the experience but having grown because of it. And I was pleased to see that some of the ongoing plot threads, like the grain blight and the phaerimms’ plot [1], get resolved in the process, so it doesn’t suffer from “pointless mid-trilogy novel syndrome.”

Once the heroes are unceremoniously dumped into the future, the plot splits along two lines. Sunbright, the barbarian tundra-dweller, meets up with a gang of poor thieves and tries to help them better their lot. Through his eyes, we see how the oppressed underclass of Netherese society is victimized by the rich and powerful. The mage Candlemas, on the other hand, ends up hobnobbing with the upper crust, including Karsus, the de facto leader of the Empire. (More on him later.) The juxtaposition is good, but the protagonists are only observers to events, not direct participants. It gives the story a slightly flaccid feeling, like you’re seeing everything at a remove instead of being involved in the conflict, because ultimately it’s not their fight and they’d rather not be there.

The pacing is generally quite good, alternating combat scenes of Sunbright kicking the hell out of city guards with social scenes of Candlemas trying to negotiate the dangerous waters of the Netherese oligarchy. The only exception is a long, tedious battle sequence at the three-quarters mark where Sunbright fights a million mutant monsters while a damsel in distress watches him be invincible. It seems to go on forever and has nothing to do with the actual plot, so I sighed with real relief when I finally got to the end of it.

The climax, where Karsus tries to become a god and destroys his empire in the process, was a little underwhelming. The protagonists slaughter dozens of hapless mooks in a repetitive fashion. All the characters always know exactly what’s going on, even things that there’s no way they could know, like how the conflict between Karsus and Mystryl plays out. The conclusion afterwards is solid, though: a bittersweet finale that does a good job of tying up the characters’ loose ends.

Characters

Sunbright, our stereotypical sword-and-sorcery barbarian sword-swinger, has two goals in this book: to complete his spiritual awakening and finally become a full-fledged shaman, and to find a way to bring back the spirit of his dead lover Greenwillow, who perished at the climax of Sword Play. He succeeds at the former, eventually becoming one with nature in a long subplot that feels like a diversion from the rest of the story, but completely forgets about the latter. He’s dead-set on it at the beginning of the book, but then completely transfers his affection to the Netherese thief Knucklebones and never mentions trying to bring back Greenwillow again, with no explanation for why he’s given up. But apart from this mystifying omission, he works fairly well as a character. His kind heart and firm sense of morality contrast with the brutal surroundings in which he’s stranded, and the culture shock between his simple barbarian upbringing and Netherese culture is done well. We see plenty of concrete examples of his confusion, rather than just being told that he feels lost. He spends a lot of time getting grievously injured — even tortured — and then healed, though, to the point where I found myself no longer caring about his physical suffering because it never seemed to have any consequences.

Candlemas was probably my favourite character from Sword Play, and he continues to hold my attention here. He’s got the most dramatic arc of any of the characters, initially amoral and self-interested but remorseful and repentant by the end. He has his own culture shock to deal with as he struggles to adapt to three hundred years of magical and social advancement, and we see a variety of little incidents throughout the novel that gradually change his morality and sense of personal responsibility. I particularly appreciated the scene where he’s suffering post-traumatic flashbacks after being in his first battle – something that D&D novels, with their casual attitude towards violence, rarely consider. His doomed romance with a Netherese noblewoman is the most affecting part of the book: set up early, reinforced throughout the story, and then taken to a tragic but inevitable conclusion. The personal tragedy of losing one person makes more impact on the reader than the collapse of an empire and the deaths of unseen millions.

Karsus, the archmage whose hubris causes the fall of Netheril, is the source of most of my disappointment with this novel. He’s the character upon whom this whole story hinges, an arrogant fool straight out of a Greek tragedy whose overweening pride destroys everything he cares about. There’s tons of potential there, and it’s crucial to get him right. But here he’s more Willy Wonka than Croesus of Lydia, a quirky, zany nutcase who can barely communicate intelligibly. It’s the worst possible approach to take with Karsus. A tragedy doesn’t work unless the audience feels some degree of sympathy for the tragic character, and right from his very first scene I knew I wasn’t going to care what happened to this giggling, immature psycho. Everything about him is completely unsubtle and over the top: his bizarre appearance, his weapons-grade ADHD, his complete disconnection from reality, his inability to make even a single good decision. He’s too crazy to take seriously and stands out like a cartoon character in an otherwise realistic setting.

Furthermore, his dialogue feels incredibly false. He’s supposed to be a mad genius, but I’ve known madmen and I’ve known geniuses, and this guy doesn’t talk like either. Rather, he talks like a hammy actor who’s trying too hard to pretend to be mad. Ultimately, his genius is all “tell, don’t show,” and nearly every one of his scenes includes a cringeworthy sentence like this:

“Only I, a genius, could think of [super obvious thing]!”

Not to mention that he’s so insane that he nearly gets himself killed and has to be saved by his underlings. How does such an unstable idiot survive for three hundred and fifty years, let alone rise to become the ruler of a city-state? This should be a tragedy where a proud, arrogant man believes he can save his empire by doing something drastic, but instead we get “Bozo the Clown presses the self-destruct button.” It kicks the whole theme of this novel right in the nuts, and I could feel my enthusiasm for this book drain away every time he showed up in a scene.

Knucklebones, an impoverished thief who leads a food-stealing gang from a sewer lair beneath the city, is a fairly good character. Her romance with Sunbright feels somewhat clunky, sort of a “ice queen automatically defrosts for the first person who treats her like a human being” thing, but her fatalistic outlook really sells the hopelessness of Netherese society and she’s extraordinarily competent within her specialized environment. My only complaint is that there’s a long sequence where she and Sunbright get off Karsus’ floating city and hang around on the ground, and she spends most of it as a useless damsel in distress whom he has to drag around and protect.

Aquesita, the pampered noblewoman whom Candlemas falls in love with, is an interesting idea for a character: a good person who’s part of this inherently fucked-up system, but blind to its faults because she never has to see the world outside of her manor. It’s ultimately her tragic flaw, where she decides to stay behind and dies because she still believes that the Empire is salvageable and worth saving even when all the other characters can’t wait to get out of that hellhole. She’s not particularly idealized; she’s kind-hearted and thoughtful, but capable of petulance and industrial-grade obliviousness to the reality of her situation. I wish the relationship between her and Candlemas had gotten more screen time, because it’s a good emotional core to the story that reinforces the theme.

Themes

Same as the first novel:

“They lark and game like blind children. But the nobles skate on thin ice that’s bein’ licked away from underneath by a changing tide. They can prop the empire with brutality, with magic, with money — but it can’t hold up forever.”

The most interesting thing about Netheril is how it fell, and the author puts it even more front and centre in this novel than he did in Sword Play. We see first-hand the complete disconnect between the rich one-percenters and the starving, ragged commoners, and how far Netheril’s decadence, violence, and self-delusion has advanced in the 350-year transition. The ending was inevitable, but I appreciate that we get to see the social problems that led up to the collapse instead of just “Everything was fine until this crazy guy blew us up!” The author sells the theme a little too hard sometimes, like the scene where the narrator explicitly stresses “This lady is the personification of the current state of the Empire.” Come on, man, give the reader some credit! But it’s a serviceable theme that mostly plays out well.

Dangerous Games is much darker and bloodier than its predecessor. We see police brutality, public lynchings, lethal experiments performed on prisoners, and so on, and the body count racks up quickly. Ordinarily this sort of thing would annoy me, but here it doesn’t feel gratuitous because we need to see the rot at the core of Netheril’s society and how far they’ve degenerated. It’s neither cartoonish nor leering, but just the inevitable result of people not seeing other people as human. The protagonists do a lot of killing too, but they generally only slay in self-defense or in defense of others and are willing to give their enemies a chance to escape. It’s a good way to contrast their morals against the complete lack of empathy displayed by the Netherese.

A less practical critic might stretch to find other themes, like “Heavy magic is a clear analogue to radiation, therefore this book can be read as an anti-nuclear tract” or “Sunbright dies and comes back as a magic badass, so it’s a Christian allegory” or such, but I’ve got better things to do.

Writing

Mostly good. There are some annoyances, like how the close third person narration will occasionally switch to omniscient for a sentence or two:

Something had alerted him, but he didn’t know what. A sense of being watched or, oddly, spoken of. (Though he couldn’t know it, he sensed the Phaerimm plotting far below the earth.)

As a reader, I find that sort of perspective-switching disorienting. And as the previous example demonstrates, the narration abounds with awkward parentheticals:

No one could explain [heavy magic] with satisfaction, and Candlemas suspected that no one but Karsus understood it, and perhaps even he didn’t really. (Scary thought.)

Also, “with satisfaction”? But by and large the writing is well-done, with good descriptions, dialogue that sounds natural coming out of the characters’ mouths, and narration which mostly stays unobtrusive and close to the characters’ viewpoints. I have some nitpicks, but nothing more substantial.

Conclusion

Grade: B–

There’s a lot to like about this novel, but it’s marred by a fair number of problems, especially Karsus. When the tragic figure of your realistic drama is a wacky cartoon character, you’ve done something terribly wrong. Still, it’s a clear improvement over its predecessor. I enjoyed how the protagonists changed and grew over the course of the novel, and the ending felt like a good way to tie off their stories.

Only two novels left in the Forgotten Realms series! We’re in the final stretch.

Footnotes

[1] Is it just me, or are the phaerimm in the running for “dumbest looking monsters in all of D&D history“? Seriously, I felt bad for the author whenever he had to try to describe them on the page.