The Ring of Winter

“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.”

The Coral Kingdom

“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’?”

The Legacy

“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.”

Night Masks

“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.”

The Night Parade

“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.”

In Sylvan Shadows

“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.”

Prophet of Moonshae

“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.”

Pools of Darkness

“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.”