One New York Life

You may have heard of Buster Olney as a frequent “contributor” to Fire Joe Morgan. Olney is a writer deeply entrenched in classical baseball stuff — Wins are important, OBP is dumb, VORP is something evil dreamed up by people who hate the sport. In fact, the only reason I read this book is because my buddy Hulse told me it was very good. The Last Night Of The Yankee Dynasty tells the story of Game 7 of the World Series… only if it was dramatized with Lost style flashbacks giving you history on all the Yankee players. Olney takes the game, describes it inning by inning, and describes the players in building the dynasty and, ultimately, how it ended.

If anything, I was pleasantlly surprised at how engaging it was. I’m not a huge fan of Olney and I’m not a huge fan of the Yankees, but Olney describes the game in a way that anyone who is a baseball fan can get into. Unlike most Met guys, I’m not an active Yankee hater — though frequent-commenter Doug tells me that I IMed him after this game to goof on him which I don’t recall, but I’ll take his word for it. I remember this game primarily because it was the first championship game of any sport that I watched in a bar. Previously, all World Series games were watched in a college dorm room. This was the only World Series that happened when I was at RPI and the school isn’t really known for its jocks. In fact, only one guy I knew there was a baseball fan of any kind. My friend Matt and I watched this game at Peabody’s, a bar known for (at the time) being the only actual sports bar in Saratoga Springs, having the best wings in town, and being the place where we went on an unprecedented 4-hour run at a pool table. The book describes the game in such a dramatized fashion that two things happen 1) You start thinking this might have been the greatest baseball game of all time and 2) I really, really wish I could watch it again. Oddly, I can’t find it in the Yankees Classics rotation on YES.

As someone who lived in New York outside the Yankee thing, it’s also a pretty good revisiting of just how good those Yankee teams were. Like, as he was describing the 1998 team, I had pretty much forgotten how absurdly awesome that team was. I had forgotten it had taken them until late May to lose their 10th game and that they’d run away with the division by mid-July. I’d also forgotten how agonizingly hard Mike Piazza crushed the ball that led to the last out of the 2000 World Series*.

I’d also kind of argue with Olney’s contention that this particular World Series was the end of the dynasty. The Yankees would go on to win the division every year until 2007. I think you could successfully make the argument that the dynasty ended with Josh Beckett and the Marlins in 2003 or, even worse, with The Comeback in 2004. For artistic reasons, I understand why he chose this game — neither of those elimination games were particularly dramatic. In 2003, Beckett just made them look bad in game 6. In 2004, the doors were blown off game 7 by the 3rd inning. Only in 2001 did you have the added drama of most of the dynasty guys (Scott Brosius, Paul O’Neill, David Cone, etc) still on the team and playing in their last game, a gem of a game from both Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling, a team full of guys who were not expected to do much against this juggernaut, and, most damning, the best closer of our era giving up a crap hit to sneak in the winning run.

Recommended if you’re not a Yankee fan.

—-

* – cheated

Apparently, I lied. I forgot I had one more in the hopper before moving on to a couple non-fiction. I’ll bury this posting on the weekend because I’m relatively sure people care less about these book reviews then Ms. L cares about the Mets.

The Silent Blade is the first book considered outside the “Legend of Drizzt” cycle and is, instead, the first book in the “Paths of Darkness” cycle. This seems to be the point at which Salvatore and and Wizards of the Coast realized they had about twelve marketable characters stacked up inside one ten book set and it was time to split them up. This book serves to do that and also serves as the fantasy world’s study of PTSD and how different characters deal with it.

On one side, you have Wulfgar whose spent the last six years being tortured by the demons. Not symbolic demons… actual demons. After being sprung from hell he’s mentally ruined. We find out some of the tortures visited on him — including being given illusions of freedom to the point where he believed he’d escaped only to watch his friends massacred by demons. He’s watched succubusses (hm… what is the plural form up succubus? Succuben? ZING!) assume the form of Catti-Brie and then turn back at the moment of passion. He’s watched the same succubuses give birth to his twisted half-demon spawn only to be murdered by Errtu. In all… he’s had a rough go of it. He’s not dealing with freedom particularly well — continually flashing back to his problems and putting his friends in danger.

On the other side, you have Artemis Entreri. Entreri was brought to Menzoberranzan to live with the drow where he discovered that, even though he’s spent his entire life tuning his senses and becoming the most finely honed warrior on the surface, he’s barely as talented as the lowest of drow commoners. Visiting Menzoberranzan allows him to look at himself in a huge mirror and he doesn’t really like what he sees. He returns to the surface realizing that Drizzt may have been right and the life he always led was kind of pointless.

By the end of the book, relationships have been reshuffled as the agonizingly long dance between Drizzt and Catti-brie and their maybe/maybe-not relationship continues… almost to the point of ridiculousness. At this point, the two have been “friends” for something like twelve years, including having spent six years together as pirate hunters on the Sea Sprite. All this time, the reader’s to understand that Drizzt longs for her. Six years on a boat and spending all their time together and nothing happened? Their relationship never progressed? Really?

This is a good book for what it is, as long as one goes in to it with very little hope of a resolution of anything. If anything, this book sets in to motion a lot of obvious stuff that the reader can infer from the last set of books. Drizzt and Artemis will fight again. Jarlaxle’s quest after the Crystal Shard. Wulfgar’s need of some alone time to deal with his figurative and literal demons. And the Friends’ return to Icewind Dale. It’s a table-setter for Spine of the World, The Sellswords Trilogy, and Sea of Swords. It’s pretty much designed to divide our main characters in to three different books and set them on their own paths. High time, too, as any more fights between Drizzt and Entreri are just overkill. We get it… you want to kill each other for metaphysical, philosphical reason.

As for the divergent paths… I’m curious to see if Salvatore has the ability to make his non-drow characters interesting — because to this point they’ve all been a supporting cast. Whether or not Wulfgar can carry a whole book on his own remains to be seen.

And now we’ll wrap up the little bit of storyline that wasn’t wrapped up in the last book. Unsurprisingly, this is the last book that’s considered part of the “Legend Of Drizzt” series. If the series had ended here, it would have been acceptable. The later books using these characters (Sellswords, Thousand Orcs) will hearken back to stuff that happened in this series, but these three-thousandish pages gives you one whole story.

At the beginning of the last book, Lolth convinced Errtu that if he protected Menzoberranzan from outside influences while she was otherwised deposed (by deposed I mean “not a god anymore) she would give him a prisoner to torment and whom he could use to end his banishment. When a monster is defeated on the Prime Material Plane, he can not re-enter the prime material plane for 100 years. The only way around this is to have the creature that banished him summon him. It is presumed this prisoner is someone Errtu could use to convince Drizzt to end the banishment. Then, Errtu would be able to re-enter the prime material plane and find the Crystal Shard… the evil artifact that keeps popping up throughout the series.

It’s been six years since the Battle of Mithril Hall. Bruenor and Regis have gone back to Icewind Dale because Bruenor thought he should give control of Mithril Hall back to his great-8x-grandfather. Drizzt and Catti’Brie have decided to help the world by joining back up with Captain Deudermont and the Sea Sprite (introduced WAY back in the Icewind Dale trilogy… one of the first humans to accept Drizzt) to hunt pirates on the Sea of Swords (The Forgotten Realms version of the Atlantic Ocean).

After six relatively peaceful years hunting pirates, Drizzt’s past finally catches up to him as he receives a message that his former nemesis Errtu is holding a captive. To retrieve this prisoner, Drizzt must end Errtu’s banishment. The quest to release Errtu is the first half of the book. The quest to put him back is the second half.

Both halves are pretty good.

I did find it amusing the lengths to which Errtu went to get Drizzt to unbanish him. It’s good to know that demons from the Abyss suffer from bad-guy overplanning as well. Errtu was holding a hostage and wanted Drizzt to unbanish him. Instead of just sending him a message to that effect, he sent a doppleganger to trick his boat into sailing to a deserted island that was full of zombies. On the island was a witch who delivered the team a riddle. The riddle sent them to somewhere else. Now, Drizzt’s the only mortal who can unbanish Errtu. Errtu really wanted to be unbanished. You’d think that he’d, I don’t know, not try to get Drizzt killed before the unbanishing happens. Bad guys, no matter what species, are kinda dumb. Also, in a level of transparency that approached daytime television, we spend 300 pages being told that the hostage is Drizzt’s father Zaknafein while anyone with half a brain in their skull are likely to realize it’s Wulfgar as he was dragged into the Abyss and all.

Long story short, Drizzt and company do manage to summon and unbanish Errtu who immediately retrieves the crystal shard that was buried under an avalanche in book four.

In all, it’s really a satisfying ending for a ten book arc. Very few plot-threads are left dangling other than Wulfgar’s lingering PTSD from six years of torture in hell and whether or not the friends will finally manage to destroy the Crystal Shard. In all, well done.

Complaints with the whole series, if I had any, were mostly with Salvatore’s writing style. He had a terrible tendency to have the friends only be saved by amazing luck and his inability to kill core characters. He also is not particularly good at describing battle scenes. It’s not easy to describe a sword-fight between two characters who are supposedly the best swordsmen in the world and it falls a little short. He also has a tendency to have events happen via a string of coincidences (Matron Baerne just happens to have the soul of an ancestor of one of the people Drizzt happens to meet on the surface). It’s OK to fall on this occasionally… other times it makes the reader roll their eyes. He also ignores his own mythology when it suits him. In the Dark Elf Trilogy, he specifically says that the third son of a drow house is sacrificed to Lolth. In later books, the Baerne clan has three sons (Berg’inyon, Gromph, and Dantrag) and no mention is made of the three son rule. Later still, we find out that there was another third son (who is certainly older than Berg’inyon as he is Drizzt’s age) who was, in fact, sacrificed. There’s also the inexplicable attitude shift of Drizzt’s sister Vierna Do’Urden (and Drizzt’s equally inexplicable reaction) simply to create a bad-guy even though it made no sense and stands out as one of the more stupid moments of the entire series.

There is one more book that’s not really a part of this series but acts as a springboard to split the series in two. One branch follows the good guys. The other branch follows Artemis Entreri who, until this point, was the bad guy. Before that… I need a break.

Moving along in my quest to burn myself out of R.A. Salvatore books, I moved on to the ninth book of the Legacy of Drizzt series. This is nine of ten before I can take a break and move on to a couple other books. That’s probably a good thing.

Siege of Darkess is pretty much the culmination of the previous eight books. I guess Salvatore had decided that eight books of build were enough. Pretty much every character we’ve seen through the entire series plays a role in this book to get everyone together in one giant Drow vs. Everyone battle at Mithril Hall. Mithril Hall, if you were keeping track, was the underground kingdom conquered by evil forces and liberated by the Companions. The dwarves invited the barbarians to be their trading partners on the surface and everyone was happy. All of the random political and racial stuff is put aside in this book to bring us to the battle.

Finally, we find out why Matron Baenre has taken such an interest in following Drizzt through the Realms. It turns out not to be his rogue status but instead because he travels with Bruenor Battlehammer. Matron Baerne, you see, was previously involved in a surface raid against Mithril Hall and trapped the soul of Bruenor’s 8x great-grandfather. The location of the hall was eventually lost to the drow, but Matron Baerne bid her time and waited until a rogue drow randomly found her trapped soul’s great-[...]-grandson so the two of them could decide to find the hall. Thank god that happened or the plan would not worked out at all. The drow believe they can use Mithril Hall as access to the surface for supplies via trade or theft.

This is probably the best book of the nine so far winding up everything that’s been left dangling in one neat little package. Save for the extremely contrived set-up of the raid I was glad to see there was something of a payoff to the constant attention Drizzt received from Matron Baerne. Even if it was somewhat unbelievable that no one died in the onslaught (save for bad guys) it was a satisfying conclusion to a bit too much build up. The victory of the surface dwellers borders on disappointing, too. Before the battle started, you knew they were going to attack at night. It was glaringly obvious that the sunrise was going to eventually drive them back.

If I have one single complaint about the book it’s that it treats the Time of Troubles as almost an afterthought. For those uninitiated to the Forgotten Realms, there was a period during which the gods were banned from their home planes and were forced to walk the earth as avatars. There was a whole trilogy about this (one of the better ones) called, conveniently, The Avatar Trilogy. This was a time of chaos. Magic went wild and gods died and other gods ascended and various different amounts of good stuff. This book treats it as almost a nothing occurrence… which considering the fact that Menzoberranzan’s entire social structure, government, life, and everything else is based on the will of their goddess is pretty silly. It’s used to introduce one Menzoberranzan house that makes use of psionics only to see the house utterly obliterated after the Time of Troubles Ends. It was pretty disappointed, overall. The chaos in that city should be a book of its own — not an afterthought conflict in a book where they completely reorganize their city in time to assault the surface.

All told, I really liked this one and felt like the ending of the story arcs were mostly satisfying. Except for one, which will be addressed in the next book.

As it’s been getting kind of serious around here for the last couple of weeks I figure it’s about time to lighten up for a bit and blow through the six-ish drafts of books and TV and movie stuff in my draft queue before getting back to depressing myself with our sham political system. Let’s even take a break from the fantasy novels that I’m relatively certain no one but me cares about.

I don’t remember exactly where I first read about Bill Jenkinson’s The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball’s Greatest Slugger. It must have been listed as a source to one of my previous baseball books. When I read the blurb about it on the NYPL’s website, I pegged it as a statistical study of Babe Ruth’s career numbers and, in particular, his 1921 season (not a typo… it pays more attention to his under-appreciated World Series-losing 1921 season in lieu of his World Series-winning 1927 season). When I read the “104 home run” title, I presumed it would be something about ballpark dimensions and such and be a distinctive study of tape-measure home runs and retro-fitting current stadiums (like… the Oakland Coliseum vs. Shibe Park, The Cell vs. Shibe Park, The Metrodome vs. Griffth Stadium, Fenway vs. er… Fenway) to see where Ruth would have wound up for the season if he played in those stadiums. Sounds interesting, right?

I thought so, too. Turns out, this book wasn’t that all. I don’t think. Really, I read the whole book over three weeks and still really don’t know what the author was trying to prove other than “Ruth Was The Greatest Baseball Player Ever.” The 104 home runs may have been referring to the ones Ruth was robbed of when he hit 500-foot outs or he may have been including the home runs he hit in mid-season exhibition games. Honestly, the argument wasn’t presented concisely enough for me to even figure out what the author was trying to say.

By the first chapter, I was pretty sure I was in for a long, long read. In the first 20 pages Jenkinson professes his love for Babe Ruth and his disdain for modern-day sluggers. He also tells us he spent something like ten years exhaustively researching every home run Ruth ever hit. Instead of going through box scores, he tried to find as many primary sources as possible and piece together an actual distance for all of those home runs. He looked for people who were at various exhibition and barnstorming games to get their stories and, in some cases, have those people show him exactly where home plate was in the game and where the ball landed. He then listed all these accomplishments.

Exhaustively.

A standard paragraph in the first few chapters was something like: Ruth then traveled to Philadelphia where he belted four homers against the Athletics. One of those is rumored to have gone 550 feet but my research puts it around 495. The Yankees were only up by three games on the Senators at that point and Ruth felt ill. But the Babe felt guilty leaving the team in such hard times. On the way to St. Louis they stopped off in French Lick, Indiana and played an exhibition game against the Church of the Assumption All-Stars. Babe put on a show that day! Can you imagine modern players not only playing in exhibition games but having 30 scheduled in as part of the regular season? Sometimes even on the same day as real games? When Ruth finally made it to St. Louis he was exhausted but he couldn’t leave the people without a show. He ate a dozen hot dogs and struck out three times but hit a triple off the wall 450 away.

And that goes on. And on. And on for something like 2,487 pages.

What I DID get out of the book were a couple of well-constructed arguments to defend the more dishonest claims made by Ruth’s detractors. For example, the oft-heard point that he’s over-rated because he didn’t face the best competition because the league wasn’t integrated. While the latter part of that statement is true, the former isn’t. Ruth was one of the few major league players who actually DID face Negro League pitching… playing in a fairly large number of games against Negro League teams. The book mentions the confirmed number of home runs he hit off Negro League pitchers (I can’t remember it). It’s not like when Ruth played Negro League teams he suddenly turned in to .094 hitter who slugged .188. Another well-constructed point is this: professional athletes really didn’t have the options then that they do today. If you were a professional-caliber athlete and wanted to make money in the 1910s or 1920s then you either played baseball or boxed. He draws this comparison to the current crop of Latin baseball players. If you’re an excellent athlete in the Dominican Republic, you play baseball. If you’re an excellent athlete in the US, you play whatever you feel like — and baseball’s probably a distant third option. A third point mentions that some of Ruth’s career numbers are hindered by the time. He spent something like 100 games over the course of his career suspended for doing crazy things like “barnstorming” and “not hating black people.” He was also frequently sidelined with things like chest-colds and the like and would miss five or six games at a clip with things such as “chest colds.”

To say I was disappointed in this book would be a gross understatement. I thought it was going to be a statistical analysis or something like that. It turned out it was just a baseball book designed to canonize Ruth and give a laundry list of his accomplishments. If anything, I spent three weeks to get a couple good arguments if I’m ever in an argument in which I have to defend Ruth.

Best sub-plot in the book was the description of Ty Cobb’s disdain and hatred for Ruth because of the popularity he gained by hitting home runs. Cobb insisted that anyone could do what Ruth did and, to make the point, hit three home runs in one game before going back to playing “real baseball.” Another fun story: Ruth was covering third when Cobb decided it was time to come in spikes up. Ruth tagged him with the ball. In the face. And knocked him out cold. Apparently Cobb never came in spikes up on Ruth again.

Not a particularly fun book to read, though. Recommendation to avoid.

My ongoing quest to get through all the Drizzt books continues. Next up is Starless Night, the eighth Drizzt book and the second of the Legacy of the Drow cycle. I remembered liking this more than The Legacy but that isn’t saying much.

The set-up to this book is simple. Drizzt feels guilty for the death of Wulfgar and believes he has to stop the drow pursuit of him. To do that he has to travel back to Menzoberranzan to do….. something. I don’t really know, exactly, what Drizzt’s plan to stop, you know, a whole city from attacking him was but, regardless, he gives Guenhwyvar to Regis with explicit instructions to tell no one where he’s going. This only lasts a day or two until Catti-brie, stricken with grief over her fallen fiance, yells the truth out of Regis and takes off in pursuit.

Reading this book, I’m realizing what my problem is with reading these books again ten years later. I have many, many more level of geek experience now and these books are written as much for people who’ve never played the game as people who have. As such, I know most of the rules of the D&D world and keep applying them to the stories. For instance, Catti-Brie tracks Drizzt to Silverymoon — basically the Forgotten Realms version of Chicago — and finds the woman who Drizzt’s been sharing a relationship with. As it turns out, Drizzt has in fact been there. Now, Lady Alustriel (one of the most powerful spellcasters on the planet — the daughter of a GOD mind you — tells Catti-brie that she has no way to get a hold of Drizzt. And that’s entirely not true. There are NUMEROUS ways to send a message to Drizzt.

Second problem. Drow use sleep poison. Drizzt knows drow use sleep poison. Everyone on the surface knows that, when drow elves attack, they have poison-tipped darts on crossbow bolts that are designed to knock you out. But Drizzt somehow decides to assault Menzoberranzan without the use of any anti-poison measures at all? He’s really that stupid? This is a frustrating thing with Salvatore’s writing. He loves to use the drow sleep poison to capture characters so he makes them seem woefully unprepared for encounters. You know the annoying guy you watch a movie with who tells you they’re not properly portraying how a particular model of gun recoils? Yeah, that’s me with geeky D&D references in these books.

On a more positive note, this is really the first book since the Dark Elf Trilogy that really gets into the inner workings and the intrigue of the drow city of Menzoberranzan. We learn that, in fact, the Matron mother has no interest in kidnapping Drizzt. Instead, she is using Drizzt to rally the houses for an assault on Mithral Hall. They plan to take the dwarven city to be an outpost to the surface. Drizzt, it turns out, is just a rallying cry.

The other good thing about this book is it really starts to get in to Jarlaxle of Bregan D’aerthe. The drow city is a matriarchy. It’s organized into to a strict hierarchical structure where females are in charge and males are subservient. It’s nearly impossible to be a drow without a house. Except for Jarlaxle. Jarlaxle created a mercenary organization built from commoners and houseless nobles (such as Drizzt’s brother Dinin. After House Do’Urden was destroyed, Dinin was offered a spot in Bregan D’aerthe as opposed to getting killed by the attacking house. He accepted). Bregan D’aerthe holds no loyalty to any house and is available to the highest bidder. In fact, in the introduction to the organization, we see his mercenary band involved in an attack on one of the drow houses only to turn on the attackers and join the defenders when the matron mother of the defending house offers him more money. I love Jarlaxle and hope that future books really start to delve in to him even more.

I’m neutral on this book. I wouldn’t recommend it but I wouldn’t tell you to not bother.

Continuing through my Legend of Drizzt chronological quest, I finally got through the first two trilogies and into the individual books. Before Wizards of the Coast got hold of the rights and repackaged the same work into the Legacy of the Drow and the Legend of Drizzt sets, The Legacy was the first stand alone Drizzt Do’Urden book. The original release was in 1992 under TSR. I had to hunt this book down a little. It’s mine, but I’d lent it out so many times that I had no idea who had it. I tend to be far less crazy about getting books back than I do DVDs or CDs. My favorite part of this book is the original cover pictured to the left. They spent six books already teaching us about dark elves. They live beneath the ground and have ebony skin black as night. On the cover: white guy. God bless TSR.

The little bit I remembered about this book was that I didn’t like it. Even when I first read it back in high school, I remember seeing that it was a “best-seller” and assumed it would be a tremendously awesome book. I remember reading (after having read the two trilogies already reviewed on here) and being tremendously disappointed in it. I wanted to see if I remembered correctly or not so I tried to go into it with an open mind.

Turns out that it held up as one of my least favorite books of all time and I still don’t understand why it was received so well and why some people think it’s one of Salvatore’s best works. I question now whether or not any of the people who reviewed it or received it well even read the preceding six books before picking up this one.

I have the very same complaints with the book in the present day that I did fifteen years ago. Salvatore took one of the most important and interesting characters in the entire Dark Elf Trilogy, Drizzt’s sister Vierna, and completely flushed away everything interesting about her. The first child of Zaknafein (and thus Drizzt’s only full sibling), Vierna’s not-quite-evil attitude was given as one of the primary reasons that Drizzt winds up with strong moral character and the ability to think for himself. She didn’t treat him as awful as her other sisters did and didn’t indoctrinate him properly. Drizzt references this in his “writings” that open the book’s parts. He questions “how would I have turned out if wicked Briza had raised me. Would I have turned out just as evil as she?” At the beginning of The Legacy all of those very interesting questions are flushed away.

We pick up in Menzoberranzan some 30 years after Drizzt has left. We’re given no information on what has happened to Vierna in the interim, but she’s returned to us as just another bat-shit crazy priestess of Lloth. In thirty years she’s gone from kinda-not evil to “I’m going to turn one brother into a drider and hunt down and kill the other one for the glory of Lloth” evil. It made no sense to me how a character who never really exhibited many evil tendencies is suddenly as gloriously evil as her sister Briza.

Every bit of this plot, from the absurd set-up (Vierna is told if she kills Drizzt she will be given control of the first ruling house, House Baenre, even though she’s in no way related to the family) to the execution (Vierna turns her brother Dinin into a drider for questioning her mission… something Trilogy Vierna never would have considered) to the resolution (Drizzt unapologetically running his sword through her heart) is weak and senseless. Salvatore was probably going for something along the line of “constant religious fanaticism of an evil deity can drive anyone insane” but it fell totally flat. It was also completely out of Drizzt’s character to coldly kill her because she was reaching for a weapon that he absolutely could have disarmed. The Drizzt everyone has been introduced to through this book would have disarmed Vierna, knocked her out, showed her the non-Lloth world of the surface, and tried to save her. Instead he runs through the only member of his family he ever really cared about. I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now. I have always thought a better story would have been Drizzt trying to save Vierna’s and convert her to Shar or Eilistraee. Instead, she’s used as a weak catalyst (when any high priestess from any house could have been used more believably) to kill off major characters and get Drizzt to attack Menzoberranzan.

On top of that, I really hated Salvatore’s use of “a quick death is just too good for you” moment with Artemis Entreri. Entreri catches up with Drizzt, loses again, and thrown into a cavern by Drizzt. Regis goes out to find him — the same Regis that Entreri has just spent the entirety of three books either chasing, torturing, capturing, or killing — finds him completely helpless, and says “A quick death is just too good for you, I’m going to leave you for the vultures.” Really? When he was just a member of an entire force that attacked your home? No one’s going to come find him? Really? I understand that Salvatore was not finished with character, and that’s fine, just don’t use a stupid and cliche way to keep him alive.

The only good thing about this book was the exploration of Wulfgar trying to learn to deal with a strong-willed woman. In the entirety of the Icewind Dale Trilogy, barbarian women are never seen and it’s suggested they live as slaves to the men. At the end of the trilogy, it’s suggested that Catti-brie and Wulfgar are going to get together and by the beginning of this book there’s a wedding planned. Showing Wulfgar dealing with a wife who won’t kowtow to his wishes is a good character exploration. Unfortunately, most of it is thrown away by simple jealousy. With the use of the ruby pendant, Wulfgar is convinced Drizzt is trying to steal Catti-brie from him and it follows the predictable course from there. This was another crazy character turn that made no sense at all. For most of the preceding trilogy, we’re told that Bruenor raised Wulfgar as his son and imparted his values on him. By this book, Wulfgar is less complex and mostly an angry barbarian. Another pretty silly destruction of a character’s background in the need to give him a tragic flaw.

Just like then, I hated this book because Salvatore spent 1800 pages in the Dark Elf and Icewind Dale Trilogies establishing characters one way and completely derailed them in this book. I found myself just wishing this book was over by halfway through because I wanted to move on because I knew the ending was going to be just as unsatisfying as it was the first time.

Solid recommendation to avoid.

Chronologically written (and actually read by me) before The Dark Elf Trilogy, the The Icewind Dale Trilogy by R.A. Salvatore is the 2nd of the Drizzt trilogies or books 4, 5, and 6 of the Legend of Drizzt series. This trilogy was the series that introduced Drizzt and his compatriots Regis, Catti-brie, Wulfgar, and Bruenor to world.

Reading through this series now it’s not hard to figure out why Drizzt turned out to be the breakout character of this series. Everyone else is honestly kind of one-dimensional and boring. The idea that no one expected this character to be hugely and absurdly popular — and create a generation of fanboys who demanded to play dual-scimitar wielding rangers in their weekly game — is probably one of the reasons TSR is now a sub-subdivision of Hasbro. Take a look at the major characters who are introduced in this series:

Bruenor Battlehammer: The king of this dwarf tribe. He’s a surly, angry, drinking dwarf with a soft side who took in a human girl (Catti-brie) after a goblin raid killed her parents. He also takes in another human boy (Wulfgar) after the barbarian tribes failed attack on Ten Towns in The Crystal Shard (book one). Bruenor, other than his penchant for taking in humans, never does anything to break out of the surly dwarf archetype that exists everywhere from Lord of the Rings on down. In fact, when I mention Bruenor, picture Gimli.

Catti-Brie: The aforementioned human girl whose parents were killed in a goblin raid. How exactly she came to be in Bruenor’s care is never really addressed, just know that she’s 18 and Bruenor is the only father she knows. We’re first introduced to her at the end of the Dark Elf Trilogy and she’s only 13. She is the first human who doesn’t treat Drizzt with mistrust. Her trust and Drizzt’s subsequent rescue of her earns him Bruenor’s trust. Five years later she’s beautiful young woman and a potential love interest for Drizzt. She’s also one of my least favorite characters in any book ever. For whatever reason this character has always seemed a bit lame to me. She always seems like she’s floating around the exterior of the story and inserting herself into everything. Somewhere in the course of this trilogy she goes from “girl who barely carried a shortsword around and was terrorized by an assassin” to “girl who finds a magic longbow and all of the sudden morphs into the worlds most dangerous markswoman.” I’ve never really bought her.

Wulfgar: The first parts of book one involve the barbarian tribes attack on Ten Towns. Bruenor captures one of the younger boys instead of killing him and indentures him to five years of servitude. He raised Wulfgar as a son. Advance five years in The Crystal Shard and Wulfgar is a 6’10″, 300-lbs of muscle fighting machine. Jeez, are he and Catti-brie going to fall in love someday?

Regis: The halfling thief. He’s the hook for both book three, The Halfling’s Gem, and the conduit through which Drizzt will be introduced to his Moriarty. I’d like to think that Regis has points in these books other than to be a troublemaker that leads the friends’ adventures… but he really doesn’t. After this series, he’s rarely around at all. Regis’s most important role in any of these books to force Drizzt to meet his nemesis.

Artemis Entreri: Entreri is supposed to represent Drizzt’s dark half. A man who grew up on the tough streets of Calimshan, Entreri is every bit the fighter that Drizzt is. This is important because we’re supposed to understand that Drizzt is the most impressive fighter to wield two weapons that anyone has ever seen. Entreri is every bit as skilled as Drizzt, but sees himself as superior because he is not hindered by personal relationships. His judgment is never clouded by care for someone else. This character would be better if Salvatore didn’t spend pages and pages of text beating you about the head about how you’re supposed to understand that this guy is Drizzt without the soul and, later, what Drizzt would have become had he not been raised with values by Vierna and Zaknafein.

Most of these characters, other than Drizzt, are kind of boring. In fact, the only reason I don’t doubt that Drizzt wasn’t supposed to be the central character in these books is the complete lack of mention of why the hell there was a drow on the surface. Once we get in to books after this, the roles of Regis, Bruenor, and Catti-brie are far diminished in lieu of the far more interesting conflicts among the drow.

The 2nd half of The Crystal Shard deals with an artifact of the same name and a wizard who gets his hand on said artifact and wants to use it to conquer Ten Towns. The artifact is a tremendously evil item of power that had drawn the balor Errtu to the surface. Unfortunately, a bumbling human wizard had found it first. The artifact uses the human as a vessel and Drizzt and crew vanquish everything.

The 2nd book, Streams of Silver deal with the friend’s adventure across the surface and the rampant racism that Drizzt has to deal with once he leaves his comfort zone in Icewind Dale. This is also the first real mention of Entreri as we find out that he has been tasked with capturing Regis. Regis has a fancy ruby pendant with hypnotic powers that he stole from the master of the Calimshan Thieves’ Guild. This book pretty much contains the entire sequence of events that makes me dislike Cattie-brie. She spends a good portion of this book as one with no skill with a weapon who is terrified of Entreri. By the end of the book, she’s found a bow and is shooting arrows through everything that comes near her. There’s no progression. She just goes from Princess Zelda to Bullseye. It seems like Salvatore had a character map for her, then decided he didn’t need a damsel in distress and just went in another direction without actually retconning what he’d already wrote. It never quite worked out… even though Catti-brie remains as the crazy archer of doom, it never quite rings true. You always have that image of her terrified of Entreri.

The 3rd book, The Halfling’s Gem, deals with what happens after Entreri catches up with the friends. He catches Regis and begins the long trek back to Calimshan. Wulfgar and Drizzt chase after them culminating with Drizzt meeting his dark half in battle.

If the theme of the last trilogy was theology’s effect on society, the theme of this trilogy is the effect of racism on the individual. Most of the good parts of the trilogy are written from Drizzt’s point of view and the fact that, no matter what he does, people will always judge him first on the reputation of his people. One of the biggest internal struggles he faces is when he is given a mask which allows him to appear as a surface elf. Not nearly enough time is spent on this. Drizzt is given the opportunity to literally change his skin but chooses to continue allow the ignorant to judge him how they will. The assumption being if they will judge me on my skin and not my actions that they are not people he would care to associate with.

It’s coming across that I don’t like this series… that isn’t true, although Salvatore’s writing style can also get grating after a while. I do like it but I also know I like the stuff that comes after it better.

If you want to read any of Salvatore’s future Dark Elf works, this trilogy is necessary to get the history and backstory of a lot of the relationships (the rest are addressed in the Dark Elf Trilogy). Other than that, they’re fun one-off fantasy books and nothing more.

I considered writing a review for each of these books individually but later decided it was pointless. The TSR trilogies are meant to be taken as one whole. Each book CAN be taken individually but it makes more sense to think about them as a whole rather than three parts. The Dark Elf Trilogy is the prequel to the Icewind Dale trilogy. I read it first as I wanted to do the chronological thing. The Dark Elf Trilogy deals with Drizzt’s birth in Menzoberranzan and how he manages to become a “good guy” while surrounded by nothing but evil.

In the Icewind Dale Trilogy, Drizzt was a supporting character… but it turned out that he a more interesting character than any of the book’s other characters. You can’t just drop a neutral good drow elf on people and expect them not to ask questions. As it happens, the character was popular enough to warrant an entire prequel trilogy. I’d give credit to TSR for realizing that except TSR was apparently one of the crappiest run companies ever.

As it turned out, it went pretty well and Salvatore knocked out three of my favorite books ever. Reading them through, they’ve not only held up but have actually become more relevant in the 20 years since it’s been written.

How? Well, drow society is a strict theocracy. The city’s ruling council is made up of the high priestesses of the top eight houses in the city. Each priestess is very careful to exactly follow the tenets of their goddess Lloth or risk losing her favor. The loss of her favor means the eradication of the house. As such, the followers of Lloth find themselves justified in anything they do. Any mercy is frowned upon. The drow believe that Lloth saved them after the surface elves drove them underground and gave them the gifts needed to survive in underground caves. We even get a taste of the propaganda delivered to young students in school that ensures the hatred of the surface world continues through generations. To Salvatore’s credit, it probably took some work to take creatures that are just handy bad guys and flesh out WHY they’re bad.

What he also gives you is a fictionalization of a theocracy based on hatred of all others who don’t believe like they do. It has everything: the scapegoating of the surface elves, the belief that they are right and everyone else is wrong, a ruler who is believed to be the very voice of their god, “surface raids” that are pretty much terrorist attacks, and the fanatical following of everything deemed proper by their goddess lest they fall out of favor and be sacrificed. 17 years later and this is more relevant now than it was then. Not necessarily because of terrorism abroad, but as a strong cautionary exaggeration of what happens when ANY society is raised with an “us vs. them” mentality.

The best part of this book is that it actually presents a believable chain of events that led to the rearing of a good guy in a world of bad guys. Two characters, his father Zaknafein Do’Urden and his sister Vierna are the two people who have the strongest hand in raising Drizzt. Vierna is described as the least evil of Drizzt’s three sisters and the only other child of Zaknafein and Malice Do’Urden. In drow society, there is no concept of marriage. The matron mother has a normal consort, but she can use whoever she desires in her house when the mood strikes her. The child is raised as she sees fit. Male children are frowned upon and the third living male is sacrificed at birth. Had Drizzt’s eldest brother not been killed by his 2nd eldest brother on the night of his birth, Drizzt would have been killed to appease Lloth. Vierna raises Drizzt for his first ten years and is not as cruel as his other sisters would be given the same job. In fact, she’s often described as the only female in the household who doesn’t exactly accept all of Lloth’s teachings. After the first ten years, Zaknafein takes over to teach Drizzt how to fight. Zaknafein is described as the best fighter in Menzoberranzan and of high moral character in a world where morals are seen as a weakness. Zaknafein instills this strong moral character in Drizzt before he goes into the drow schools. Drizzt, armed with morals from his first twenty years, does not fall for the propaganda machines and quickly learns he can’t live amongst these people. After finding himself unable to kill a surface elf child in a drow raid (and this ultimately brings down his entire family) he runs from Menzoberranzan and tries to find his own way.

Leaving the city he finds other people who help guide him on his path. He meets up with a svirfneblin (the gnome version of the drow) who he spared years before who gives him aid. When he gets to the surface he finds a blind ranger who teaches him the ways of the forest.

Altogether, this story is one of the more uplifting stories I’ve ever read. Drizzt rises above the evil teachings of his homeland to strike out on his own. Outside of Menzoberranzan, he faces nothing but racism because of the terrible reputation of his people but rises above it based on his morals and his actions. It leaves you with a tremendous feeling of hope.

If these books were about people instead of elves, they’d probably be considered a classic study in theology and racism in the modern world. As they are, they’re just tremendous reads.

Strong recommendation.

I am a an admitted Stephen King fan-boy going back to high school. I read IT back in seventh grade and, in retrospect, I’m kinda shocked my high school library had it. Not that I’m real up to what goes on in high school these days but it seems that a book with some of the coarsest language I’ve read in any King book along with the fact that the last few chapters contain a somewhat graphic description of a 12-year-old girl getting gangbanged by six 11- to 13-year-old guys does not seem like something good Godfearin’ folks would want in their middle or high school library.

Regardless, I read it and it remains one of my top 3 books of all time… so much so that I re-undertake the 1,100 pages every three or four years or so. When I saw a few years back that King was semi-unretiring after his self-imposed, post-Dark Tower retirement, I was excited. After reading Cell (which got an unfair rep for having a shitty ending… get an imagination people), I was more excited. It seemed like he was ready to ride in to the twilight writing the type of books that got him there in the first place.

Of course, the Lisey’s Story came out… which was a totally different direction than Cell. And now Duma Key kind of continues Lisey’s Story’s direction.

The Good

• Getting a story completely out of New England was a nice change of pace. The New England stories are getting almost TOO self-referential. I mean, at some point, wouldn’t the rest of the world kinda notice all the f*cked up, supernatural stuff going on in that part of the country? There are entire shows dedicated to finding out if supernatural stuff exists. Someone’s eventually going to notice the occassional armageddon that happens in Maine, right?
• This seems to be one of the occassional personal books that King writes. I’m not sure if I can explain it to someone who’s not a King reader, but every few years he puts out a book where the central character is very obviously an exaggeration of himself. Bag of Bones was one of these… I think IT was, too in some ways. This is one of these. I always like these books a little more than the random cast-off horror stories.
• Strangely, I didn’t hate this book by any means but I’m having a terrible time coming up with bullets for this section.

The Bad

• Since Cell, this is the 2nd book in King’s post-accident/Dark Tower career. It is now the second in a row where his themes have become very depressing. Maybe it’s just a natural progression for a guy who’s crested into the 2nd half of his life and who probably has death on his mind more often; but death has become a very prevalent theme in his books… People used to die in his books, but the death usually served a purpose of some sort – and very rarely were the deaths as depressing as they were now. Lisey’s Story is an entire book written about a widowed wife left behind by a husband who died too soon. This book has characters die with the main character having left issues with them unresolved. I know that’s how real death works sometimes, but it doesn’t make it any less depressing to read about.
• As King gets richer and richer and becomes farther removed from being an everyday dude, his characters become harder and harder to relate to. The main character in this book is a multi-millionaire who built a successful company and just has enough money such that he never has anything left to worry about and can just cruise down to Florida and rent a house on the Gulf for a year. He also has started to drop his political beliefs into his books more and more often. Yes, I get it. You went from young, idealistic liberal, skipped the step where you had to struggle and work for a soulless company and pay taxes to people who are too lazy to work, went right to uber-rich and now you think we should all pay as much in tax as you and everyone who thinks otherwise is a soulless ass. You hate Bush. We get it. (Aside: Can we stop with the Bush thing? It’s been almost eight years now. There’s nothing left to say that hasn’t already been said by everyone a billion times. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have both made careers on it. Enough already). Much like in music, I respect the guy’s opinion but I really don’t need it in my horror fiction, thanks. Reading and sports are distinctly my escape from the politics nonsense.
• I wasn’t sure if this was good or bad… but I went with bad. This might be the first book I’ve ever read where I found myself completely indifferent to the main character in every possible way. The book was written from the first person with his time on Duma Key being four years removed from when he was writing the memoir. I just found Edgar Freemantle completely uninteresting in any way. I felt bad for him as a guy whose life fell apart because he was unfortunate enough to be the victim of a horrible accident… but it also makes me wonder about his decisions in the first place. I mean, he married a woman who leaves him when he’s recovering from this horrible accident that scrambles his brain for a year. Almost every instance where this woman appears defines her as a complete shrew who was obviously cheating on him while he was laid up in the accident. In the divorce, he just gives her 60% of the contracting company that he built from scratch. I understand the desire to just put stuff behind you, but he just seems like a pushover to the point he’s almost pathetic.

The Rest

King’s books are taking on a consistent feel since his Post Dark Tower books. If I’m being honest, the theme probably started in the final three Dark Tower books. They are heavilly laden with death, sadness, loss, and how people deal with them with a bit of random sci-fi filtered in. While I’m sure critics love this, it leaves me feeling like I’m not reading a King book. I don’t know that I need to read 600 page epics to tell me that getting old sucks. I’m pretty sure I already knew that.

I would probably be looking forward to the Dark Tower comics if I actually read comics anymore. I can’t even get myself to go get the Season 8 Buffy comics.

Mild recommendation.