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platanus's review
2.0
Ideas that could have made a nice book gone... nowhere? If you handle it more like an outline, taking out the skeleton, the key factors, and some worthy moments of the books, and then reshape it, you could actually get something good.
dark_reader's review
1.0
Scott Ciencin wrote two of my least favorite novels in the Forgotten Realms line to date: [b: Shadowdale|650584|Shadowdale (Forgotten Realms Avatar #1)|Scott Ciencin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389179074s/650584.jpg|2333719] and [b: Tantras|650579|Tantras (Forgotten Relalms Avatar #2)|Scott Ciencin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389179074s/650579.jpg|556716], in the Avatar series. As a result, I was dreading The Night Parade. Yes, I had to read it, in my ill-conceived quest of reading the Forgotten Realms novels in publication order. There was some hope that this would be a better book; I saw that he had written several other novels in the interim, and here he had freedom to write whatever he wanted, not bound to the dictates of a shared trilogy with a pre-stated outcome (i.e. the changes to Toril that the whole "Time of Troubles" god-changing events required). I was also aware that he died a few years ago, suddenly, in his early 50's, and did not want to think ill of the dead. So there I was, entering this with charitable thoughts, and.... it was not good.
The story was all over the place. Most scenes were highly random. Characterization was awfully weak. The characters were devoid of emotional resonance. The cardinal rule of half-decent writing, "Show, don't tell" was violated all over the place. And I cannot begin to count the number of times that a section or chapter ended with the suggestion that a character died, only to have them suddenly reappear a few pages later, usually first re-seen as the tip of a sword thrust through an enemy just before it slew another character. Taking just one sentence at a time, or sometimes even a whole paragraph, the prose was not bad; Ciencin had some worthy descriptive capacity, but that seems to be the extent of his wordcraft.
It was also weak as a Forgotten Realms-based adventure. "The Harpers" association was used solely as a cheap motivational tool to explain away why the dull adventurers would bother to go after these enemies, when only the main character had any personal stake. The monsters were not even D&D-canonical. Not that they have to be, but one has certain expectations with licensed pulp fantasy fiction. The "Night Parade" of demons concept is taken, I think, from Japanese folklore.
Finally, the cover art by Fred Fields; bizarrely bad depiction of Myrmeen Lhal, with a too-big unattractive head, armor that strangely conforms to her breasts, in a weird pose with her butt sticking out as she looks over her shoulder but not at the pair of monsters also on the cover. Some people think the 80's were tacky, but the early 90's really had little going for them style-wise. One of the portrayed monsters is presumably the big bad, Lord Sixx, who in the novel has eyes all over his body in sets of six (get it?), but appears without any extra eyes. Alternatively it is just a random Djinn-looking dude who does not even appear in the book.
Back on the shelf this goes, never to see the light of day again.
The story was all over the place. Most scenes were highly random. Characterization was awfully weak. The characters were devoid of emotional resonance. The cardinal rule of half-decent writing, "Show, don't tell" was violated all over the place. And I cannot begin to count the number of times that a section or chapter ended with the suggestion that a character died, only to have them suddenly reappear a few pages later, usually first re-seen as the tip of a sword thrust through an enemy just before it slew another character. Taking just one sentence at a time, or sometimes even a whole paragraph, the prose was not bad; Ciencin had some worthy descriptive capacity, but that seems to be the extent of his wordcraft.
It was also weak as a Forgotten Realms-based adventure. "The Harpers" association was used solely as a cheap motivational tool to explain away why the dull adventurers would bother to go after these enemies, when only the main character had any personal stake. The monsters were not even D&D-canonical. Not that they have to be, but one has certain expectations with licensed pulp fantasy fiction. The "Night Parade" of demons concept is taken, I think, from Japanese folklore.
Finally, the cover art by Fred Fields; bizarrely bad depiction of Myrmeen Lhal, with a too-big unattractive head, armor that strangely conforms to her breasts, in a weird pose with her butt sticking out as she looks over her shoulder but not at the pair of monsters also on the cover. Some people think the 80's were tacky, but the early 90's really had little going for them style-wise. One of the portrayed monsters is presumably the big bad, Lord Sixx, who in the novel has eyes all over his body in sets of six (get it?), but appears without any extra eyes. Alternatively it is just a random Djinn-looking dude who does not even appear in the book.
Back on the shelf this goes, never to see the light of day again.
mw2k's review
3.0
A 2.5 out of 5 effort really, but I'll mark it up as it attempts to alter the formula. It tries its hardest to be uncommonly deep for a D&D novel, and I'll admit there's a few concepts here that give it a bit of lustre over some of its peers. But when it's all weighed up, this is still popcorn. No characterisations to speak of, and the writing is only just there. It's the story and the nature of the antagonists that make this effort stand out a little from the masses around it. But not quite.
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