Author: Ed Greenwood
Published: October 1996

At long last, we’ve come to the eighth and final Ed Greenwood novel published by TSR, as well as the fourteenth and final Harpers novel in TSR’s tenure. The official demise of the company is only several months away at this point.

I can’t say I was looking forward to this one. Ed Greenwood’s track record has been sketchy thus far, a mix of Cs and Ds, and I sighed in real distress when I saw that Stormlight starred Storm Silverhand, one of the author’s pet characters. In previous appearances she’s been a beautiful immortal badass with demigod-level powers, so indescribably special that everyone who meets her practically falls at her feet, and the back cover blurb suggests that she’s going to save the world. Again. I swear to god, this world needs saving so often that it’s getting boring to watch it get saved.

Still, even though Greenwood is a very hit-or-miss author, he does occasionally hit — a good quiet scene of character development here, an interesting piece of setting work there, and so on — so I suppose I should give this one a fair shake and see whether there are enough good bits to make it worth my while. Let’s find out!

Plot

This novel genuinely surprised me, breaking the usual “Ed Greenwood novel” mold in several ways. Take the plot, for instance. Instead of a Realms-spanning epic adventure, it’s a closed circle thriller where a handful of characters are trapped in a Cormyrian castle with a bloodthirsty villain and have to survive. There are mystery elements, where the villain is an enigma for most of the story— a first for Greenwood, whose plots are usually transparent and arrow-straight. The tone is much more reminiscent of Stephen King than Greenwood’s usual “Tolkien meets Fritz Leiber” shtick. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it, but the very novelty of it hooked my attention and kept me reading.

Many of the novel elements, unfortunately, aren’t used well. I spent the first two-thirds of the book thinking how wonderful it was that Greenwood was finally telling a small-scale story of murder in a remote manor instead of trying to spin tangled tales of giant battles and grand intrigue… and then he went and ruined it by making the villain be an evil mastermind who’s going to rule the world if he escapes. Just for once, can’t the stakes be something less than world domination? Please? Can’t we just have a story where a hero has to save some people we care about, without having to rope in the entire rest of the world? The bigger the stakes, the cheaper and less realistic it makes the world feel. Greenwood’s protagonists, rather than being heroes, are often superheroes with powers and plots that wouldn’t be out of place in a comic book, and he just couldn’t resist the urge to go over the top this time.

Still, I must admit that it starts very strong. The build-up is slow, with a couple of mysterious deaths attracting the Harpers’ attention and spurring Storm to investigate. Many characters are introduced and then stick around rather than being immediately killed or forgotten about, which is unusual for Greenwood. There are no overlong battle scenes; instead, the protagonists have to cautiously investigate the murders while being unable to trust each other. It’s by no means perfect, but I was shocked to find myself thinking halfway through, “You know, this is starting to feel like a B!” That’s something I’ve never once been tempted to say about an Ed Greenwood novel, and yet I found this one unexpectedly engrossing and sped through the first half rapidly.

Some of the early conflict between characters feels forced. I can see how the Cormyrian nobles would be unhappy with an interloping Harper poking her nose in their business, but the War Wizards’ distrust of Storm seems to come out of nowhere for no good reason. Why would they suspect her when she wasn’t even in the country when the first three murders occurred? Why would their first impulse be to suspect that a Chosen of Mystra is a serial killer? It feels like the author is trying hard to manufacture tension, rather than setting up conflicts that are well-rooted in the characters and situation. I’m not surprised, given that Greenwood’s usual approach for raising tension is “Suddenly, a bunch of random people attack!” and he’s not able to do that here.

All of it was at the behest of a shameless outlander Harper who hid her insolence behind the title of Chosen of Mystra! Hah! He could style himself First Prophet of Azuth if he’d happened to have so brazen an ego, and take on the same airs….

Dude, you just saw her bleeding silver fire a couple hours ago. You know she’s the real thing. Stop being such a dumbass.

The heroes’ scenes are interleaved with scenes of the unnamed villain carrying out its evil plan, carefully subverting and absorbing useful inhabitants of the castle. It’s a shapeshifter with the ability to assimilate its victims, duplicating their appearance and absorbing their memories and personality — basically The Thing, right down to a scene where it impersonates a friendly dog. At first this is done well. The monster feels dangerous without seeming invincible or overpowered, and the mystery of who it is and what it wants has a lot of potential.

But while the first half of the book was a pleasant surprise, the second half was a massive letdown. Greenwood is clearly cribbing from John Carpenter here, but doesn’t seem to understand what makes the horror genre work. Much of the drama in The Thing comes from the fact that there are a small number of characters, few enough for the viewer to learn their names and personalities, and they’re trapped in a claustrophobic base. But here the castle is a vast space with nebulous geography, where it’s never clear how large it is or where any of the rooms are in relation to everywhere else, so it’s hard for the reader to know how close the characters are to danger or how far apart they are when they’re separated. And instead of a small cast with names and distinct personalities, we have a small named cast surrounded by a seemingly infinite supply of soldiers and servants, which dilutes the effect. The body count quickly goes from “a couple of mysterious murders” to “heaps of corpses piled in every hallway,” but Greenwood doesn’t seem to realize that while one death is a tragedy, dozens are just set dressing. The more grisly deaths we see, especially when visited on nameless randos, the less they seem to matter, especially when we have no idea how many spear-carriers are waiting in the wings to die dramatically. A steadily dwindling number of survivors would be fantastic for building tension, but I found myself greeting the pronouncements of “oh no, another few guards died!” with a yawn because there’s no reason to care.

Furthermore, the Thingy’s potentially horrific abilities aren’t used effectively. Looking back, I can’t think of even a single instance where it disguises itself as a named character — it’s always guards or servants or animals. “Is this a familiar character that I’m worried about, or is it the enemy in disguise?” is a much more compelling question than “Is this some random extra I don’t give a shit about, or is it the enemy in disguise?” I had high hopes for the subplot where it mentally dominated one of the named characters and used it as a cat’s-paw, but it just turns the dominated character into a slutty murderess instead of playing the situation for intrigue, and Storm isn’t fooled by the charade for an instant. It beggars belief that two War Wizards, on two separate occasions, immediately after being told “The hot girl is being mind-controlled by the enemy and has already murdered one person,” would, when they meet her and she tries to seduce them, just shrug, say “Sure, I’d tap that,” and do their best male praying mantis impression. What part of “mind-controlled murderer” wasn’t clear to them? Jesus, guys, nobody is that hard up!

By the end, the author abandons all pretense of writing a mystery or thriller and goes back to his usual habits. All the mystery plot threads established at the beginning, including important ones like who keeps trying to kill Storm by poisoning her meals, are completely forgotten. The last third of the novel is just the same handful of action scenes repeated over and over again: the bad guy kills some extras, the crazy princess is mind-controlled into doing evil things, people are scared, Storm runs around the collapsing castle, repeat ad nauseam. It drags and drags until the final confrontation mercy-kills the comatose story. An editor could have trimmed the long running battle at the end down by two-thirds and nobody would have missed it. Still, a tiresome, over-long combat sequence that takes up one-third of a novel is a marked improvement from Greenwood novels like Shadows of Doom, which was almost nothing but.

The ending is particularly disappointing. The final confrontation between Storm and the villain is a long mental battle which collapses into a confused welter of purple prose and fanciful phrases. I found myself struggling to keep track of what was going on until I realized that I didn’t actually care all that much. Then there’s a twist during the denouement that leads to a sappy happy ending, and it fell flat for me. The sheer number of coincidences that would have to occur to make it come about are staggering, and the “suddenly, everything worked out perfectly!” resolution rings false after all the blood, sweat, and tears we’ve just slogged through. Practically no time is spent on the emotional aftermath of the catastrophic carnage on the survivors, and it ends with an honest-to-god dance party.

Characters

Whenever I read an Ed Greenwood book, I’m reminded of a witticism someone made on Usenet many, many moons ago:

Heinlein, we’ve noted, has roughly four main characters. For anyone who might have missed it, they are: The crusty old man, who is Heinlein; the competent young man, who is a young Heinlein; the matronly middle-aged but still simmeringly sexy woman, who is Heinlein with tits; and the nubile competent young woman, who is young Heinlein with tits.

That sentence is a great piece of literary criticism — simple, funny, and devastatingly true. Greenwood, too, has a very small stable of character archetypes who get re-used over and over in a way that’s sometimes made me wonder if he even knows how to depict a person who doesn’t fall into one of them. Here’s a rough list, each with a handful of examples that I could name off the top of my head:

• The crusty old man: Old but powerful men whose quiet heroism holds the world together. Comes in two varieties, either serious (Vangerdahast, Khelben Arunsun, Durnan) or goofy (Elminster, Mirt). As Greenwood would often cosplay as Elminster at conventions, it’s hard not to think of the goofy variety as Greenwood writing himself into the novel.
• The loyal beefcake: A gruff but good-hearted man, very masculine, with a world-weary sense of humour. Always some sort of man-at-arms, usually helps the protagonists in some way. (Gorstag, Delg, Helm, Thomdor, Bhereu, Ergluth, Renglar)
• The nubile badass: A confident, smoking hot, sexually liberated woman who ostensibly kicks ass and gets to look cool but who may or may not have any actual agency (Storm, Sharantyr, Alusair, Emthrara, Asper). Sometimes (Myrjala, the Simbul) overlaps with the “crusty old man” role. Frequently ends up partially or completely undressed at some point in the story. Feels like icky wish fulfillment on the author’s part, since the “hot and DTF” aspect usually gets much more emphasis than any other feature of their personalities.
• The naïf: An unwise, impetuous, inexperienced young person (Shandril, Narm, young Elminster, Dauneth). Mentored by the crusty old men and/or protected by the loyal beefcakes.
• The standard villain: A member of a cabal of evil magic-using people (Zhentarim, Cult of the Dragon, mage-lords of Athalantar, Red Wizards, Maulagrym). No backstory and no motivation besides “I’m ambitious so I do evil things.” Generally killed in the scores or hundreds in every novel.

The only counterexamples that leap to mind for characters with distinct personalities that don’t neatly slot into the Greenwoodian buckets are the Knights of Myth Drannor from Spellfire. But that’s no surprise — they’re the player characters from an old Dungeons & Dragons game Greenwood ran in an early version of the Forgotten Realms, so he’s not the one who thought them up and crafted their personalities. Otherwise, if they don’t fall into one of these buckets, they’ll almost never be relevant to the plot.

I’m willing to let an author get away with re-using the same archetypes for perhaps a couple of novels, but this is the eighth Ed Greenwood novel to date where he’s still mining the same tapped-out veins of characterization. Let’s look at the first several scenes of Stormlight:

• A naïf gets murdered
• A nubile badass has a premonitory nightmare
• Two loyal beefcakes drop some exposition, then find another corpse
• A nubile badass walks around naked in front of people
• A loyal beefcake welcomes a cabal of mages to Firefall Keep
• One of those mages has a magic telephone call with a crusty old man

It’s depressingly predictable. I’m tempted to feed Ed Greenwood’s oeuvre into a large language model and see what happens — the input data would be so regular that I expect the model could write an on-the-nose Greenwoodesque novel. And yet… the further I got into Stormlight, the more I noticed that something was missing. Where’s the standard villain? None of the cabal of mages, despite my initial assumptions, turn out to be evil traitors. In fact, there’s only one villain in the entire piece, plus a couple of henchmen, and he’s not just another evil spellcaster. That’s been my biggest complaint about all of Greenwood’s novels so far — the dull, disposable hordes of villains — so I’m excited to see him showing some signs of growth as a writer. I particularly appreciated the scenes where the villain wrestles with the personalities of the people he’s absorbing, which give him an interesting bit of vulnerability. But while it’s nice to see a villain who gets some characterization and poses an actual threat, his dialogue is absolutely fucking atrocious:

“No one shall escape me! None shall leave Firefall Keep alive! Hahahahahahaha!”

I swear that’s an actual quote and not some sort of parody or joke on my part, right down to the ridiculous evil laugh. I carefully counted the number of “ha”s so I could transcribe it correctly.

Our protagonist is a mixed bag, not nearly as terrible as I initially feared but far from what I’d hoped. Storm Silverhand is the quintessential example of the “nubile badass” described above. She’s super-hot, supremely confident, incredibly knowledgeable, an absolute monster in a fight, and is never wrong about anything during the entire course of the novel. (There are times when she doesn’t know things, but never an instance where she’s actually wrong.) To top it all off, she gets naked in front of an audience no fewer than seven times during the course of the novel, to the point where her going around naked becomes a running joke for the other characters.

Storm laughed merrily and said, “Look all you want! I’m not ashamed of this body — but it still amazes me how many men are!”

Sigh. This sure is an Ed Greenwood novel, all right.

That said, she gets some decent moments. Unlike her previous appearances, there are some characters in this novel who don’t immediately recognize that she’s special and love her. In fact, there are some characters who dislike her intensely and who don’t come around and join her fan club by the end. And it’s nice to see some genuine vulnerability from one of Greenwood’s pet characters for a change instead of the usual “waves their hand and things explode” archetype. She gets lured into effective traps, exhausts her goddess-given abilities and has to rely on purely human talents for some of the book, and nearly dies a couple of times. In short, she doesn’t feel like an author-driven steamroller flattening an army of losers, which makes a nice change from previous Greenwood protagonists like Shandril or Sharantyr. Still, the scene at the end where someone’s crush on her is critically important for defeating the villain made me laugh out loud.

Now that I think about it, apart from the hero and the villain, there aren’t that many noteworthy characters here. Ergluth, the militia captain who commands the local army detachment, is your standard “loyal beefcake” archetype, gruff and world-weary but loyal and good-hearted, and we don’t learn much about what makes him tick. His soldiers aren’t much to speak of — Cormyr’s army may be called the Purple Dragons, but their shirts look pretty red to me. They just die in piles to emphasize that the villain is a bad guy, and that’s about it. The half-dozen local nobles are potentially interesting in the first half, set up with distinct personalities and internecine conflicts, but are then mostly ignored once the killing starts in earnest. The author completely forgets that they exist around the three-quarters mark, and I don’t think any of them are even mentioned in the conclusion.

The six War Wizards who show up to investigate the murders and find themselves trapped are a bit of a mess, as I mentioned earlier. They’re obstructionist and suspicious of Storm for no good reason, are mostly useless against the villain, consider certain death a small price to pay for a chance to get laid, and for the most part, aren’t deeply characterized enough for us to care about their fates. If there had been fewer of them, giving the author more time to spread the characterization around, and if they’d been less useless, they would have made much better foils for Storm. As it is, I’m struggling to find much to say about them. I didn’t mind their leader Broglan, though, who’s present for quite a few scenes and proves to be mostly level-headed and practical-minded.

Shayla, the young noblewoman who’s magically suborned into doing the villain’s bidding, feels surprisingly bland. She’s got several point-of-view scenes and a potentially interesting perspective for a horror story — struggling against the villain’s magical mind control while being forced to spy for him, kill for him, and sleep with him. But who is she? Hell if I know. We don’t learn much about her, and she comes off as sort of an empty-headed damsel in distress. The villain’s other henchman is a lobotomized resurrected corpse, so there’s no characterization to be had there either.

Themes

All of that leads neatly into talking about horror as a genre, because the issues with the characterization are also issues for the theme. Next to The Night Parade, this is the most horror-themed novel in the Forgotten Realms series thus far. Like that book, it shamelessly copies takes obvious inspiration from John Carpenter’s 1980s horror films, but doesn’t manage to make the borrowed pieces work nearly as well as the original material did.

Horror stories of any sort depend on several critical characteristics for their impact. I don’t want to get too far into the weeds here, so I’ll limit myself to talking about two particularly relevant ones:

• The audience must get attached to the characters. When you care about the characters, you feel fear when you think something awful will happen to them. But if the characters are boring cardboard cutouts, pretty soon the audience will start cheering for the monster instead. It’s surprising how little attachment is necessary to make this work, but you have to have at least a tiny bit.
• The characters must have some agency, so that the audience is left wondering “Are they going to escape this situation/learn more about the plot/defeat the monster, or are they going to get eaten?” The tension of whether or not they’ll succeed is a crucial ingredient; if characters never accomplish anything, then watching them suffer is about as unpleasant and pointless as watching pigs at a slaughterhouse.

Stormlight’s biggest flaw is that there are too many characters and not enough for them to do. Storm is the only character who gets deep characterization here, and the rest are mostly stock archetypes or not important to the story, so it’s less interesting when they suffer. Take the Summerstar noble family, for instance. Three of them are relevant to the plot: the original murder victim, the mind-controlled young noblewoman, and a stern matriarch who gets some good characterization but does very little of interest with it. (The most interesting thing she does is get eaten by the monster, which I have to admit is one of the better scenes in the book.) And then there are four others: a young wastrel, a middle-aged jackass, and a couple of spinster aunts. You could delete every sentence involving them and it wouldn’t change the plot one bit, because none of them do anything useful. Their only narrative purpose is to be red herrings for the discarded mystery elements, and to react to Storm so we can see what kind of a person she is.

Same with the War Wizards: there are six of them, and this would be a better novel if there had been half as many. We’d have fewer names to remember, more time to get invested in them, and be hit harder when they die. Instead, one of them dies almost immediately upon arrival — we’ve barely even caught his name at that point! — and most of the rest get picked off over the course of the book to make the bad guys look scarier. With the exception of Broglan’s role in the conclusion, none of them really accomplish anything against the villain. Again: lots of characters, not much to do — and don’t even get me started on the endless hordes of redshirt extras! Imagine if Stephen King’s The Shining had been set in the Overlook Hotel with the three main characters plus a staff of a couple hundred nameless housekeepers, janitors, cooks, and groundskeepers, and you can see how how this sort of thing really harms the horror atmosphere.

Without many well-developed characters, the novel is forced to lean hard on its plot to keep the reader engaged — and once the plot goes out the window in favour of non-stop action sequences in the final third, there’s nothing left to keep the reader there. Gore is easy, and this novel has plenty of it. But horror is very hard to do right, and this is a textbook example of how to fumble it.

Writing

Another surprise: it’s not bad! It’s still not great, but it’s quite an improvement over Greenwood’s previous work. People talk in a fairly naturalistic fashion compared to Greenwood’s usual “Thy musteth slayeth the foe, forsooth” pseudo-archaic style, and the narration is less affected and intrusive. I found myself irritated much less often than I did while reading his other books.

Conclusion

Grade: C–

This is a tough one to grade because it varies so drastically in quality. The first half is an enjoyable diversion from Greenwood’s usual fare, mixing elements of thriller, mystery, and horror into a somewhat appealing package, and I’m always happy to bump up a book’s grade when its author tries something different and interesting. But the characters are weak, the mystery and horror elements are poorly implemented, and the second half is a dire slog of constant action scenes that throws away most of the good stuff set up in the first half.

In summary, well… I suppose half of a good book is better than none? On the one hand, Stormlight isn’t a success and I can’t see myself wanting to re-read it; on the other, I’m impressed that Greenwood wrote something so far outside his usual lane, and it’s far from the worst novel he’s written. I suppose a middling grade is the only way to represent that.