Kerrick
First Post
I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates his writing. Gods above... I read Beyond the High Road - that is one of the worst FR books ever. He totally doesn't explain what the monsters (whose names I forget) were - I didn't even know what they were until I happened to see them in Dragon Magazine! He never fully explains what they were doing there, and he takes the high-magic of the Realms to a new, blatant, high - at one point, he was detailing how all the mages were decking themselves out with rings, wands, staves, and other magical miscellany (this was 2E, mind you) so they glowed like, well, Christmas trees. Ugh.
That is not, however, the worst FR novel ever, however. No, that (dubious) honor belongs to The Glass Prison, by Monte Cook (yes, Monte Cook!). Here's a brief synopsis, from Candlekeep.com:
I grabbed the book thinking, "Hey, this looks kinda interesting..." (I didn't really know who Monte Cook was back in '95). I got 10 pages into it and returned it for a full refund. I can count on one hand the number of times I've read books that were so bad that I wanted my money back, rather than just toss them in the pile destined for the used bookstore, but this was one of those times. God, that book sucked.
On the subject of bad books... RAS's later stuff has gone downhill. Of particular note is The Spine of the World. As some of you might recall, this one's mostly centered around Wulfgar - Drizzt makes a cameo appearance. I actually cheered when that idiot threw himself off the cliff (not Wulfgar, the other idiot). That's definitely a low point for the Drizzt books.
And one final note for the bad side... The Threat from the Sea trilogy. Those books started off with such promise - the first one was really good; the second kept it going fairly well; but the third... wow. First, they put the identity of the bad guy on the cover, then the main character turns into a total whiny pansy wuss, and THEN he ends with a totally anticlimactic ending (he stabs the shark in the eye?? WTF?). A real disappointment.
On the other end of the spectrum... I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Harper series. While there were a few here that were less than stellar, the series as a whole is some of the best FR writing, IMO. The Night Parade is, perhaps, the best of them - it was also one of the first FR novels I read, and the first of the Harpers books. Scott Ciencin is a great writer - I wish he'd done more. The Elf books were good, as was Masquerades; Crown of Fire was decent (though Greenwood tends to go a bit over the top on magic - you can see this in his Lost Kingdoms trilogy too). Crypt of the Shadowking was good (Paul Kemp is another good writer).
