Nate

Repetitive writing over top-tier worldbuilding.

Hyboria is an amazing setting filled with incredible locations, interesting (albeit kinda racist) cultures, and badass characters. It's a shame Howard plays everything so safely. He quickly locks into a repeatable structure, and never gives it up.

His minority and female characters go from being capable, strong, and interesting in earlier stories, to being relegated to trope-y garbage by the end. He was writing for mainstream appeal and not feeding his inner-auteur and it shows.

There is so much unachieved potential here, and it's super depressing it was never fulfilled.

One of the best fictional universes ever created. Shit stories though.

Standouts include “The Hour of the Dragon” (best story), “Red Nails” (setting is too fucking cool. Definitely stealing for a DnD campaign. Could do without Conan being so rapey in this one. Also racism.), “The Tower of the Elephant” (Lovecraftian as fuck, probably the best overall, and first I'd recommend), and “The Slithering Shadow” (Drugged out city of sleeping sorcerers worshipping a timeless tentacle god? Coolest shit ever. Story? Pretty bad).

Suffers a bit from middle book syndrome but is still a really solid read.

While I love the heavy handed way Dinniman fosters consistent interest and narrative drive through big plot twists and dramatic cliff-hangers, one thing I've noticed more throughout this entry is the more gentle handed, subtle approach he uses for character development and dramatic elements. It's a really well coordinated two-pronged attack that works incredibly well. The pathos is surprisingly effective and grounded for what is ostensibly outrageous and ridiculous and for me that's the quintessential core element of what makes this series work for me as well as it does.

aaaaaand the illusion Blake Crouch had cast on me is completely shattered.

2/5 instead of a 1 because despite everything, I really like the way Blake Crouch writes. His books are so tightly edited and efficient that I just kind of look at one of his books out of the corner of my eye and suddenly I'm 150 pages in. I don't know how he does it and as much flak as he gets for it, it takes real talent to put so little obstacle between the information on the page and the brain of the reader. His style reminds me of like.. a super simple dish done to perfection, or maybe even a Barnett Newman painting. The kind of painting where at first you're like ‘ok, just a big red canvas' then you walk closer and realize how absolutely flawlessly it's done. It takes a lot more confidence and dexterity to perform this efficiently than he really gets credit for.

Everything else about this book suuuuuuuucks. Holy shit.

I am so disappointed. I thought maybe, just MAYBE, in the Crouch novel where the protagonist is a failed scientist who accidentally gets upgraded into a hyper-intelligent post-human genius we'd get a plot that isn't just resolved by meathead jingoistic pewpew gunfight bullshit. But I guess not.

It blows my mind how hard the ball got fumbled on this. Like what even does Crouch think intelligence is? Because the answer he comes to in this book is being smarter = being better at shoot gun good.

You would think, that in a novel pitting the two smartest humans who ever lived against each other in a high concept battle of wits to decide the philosophical path the human species will take in their race against a self-imposed extinction due to climate change / inequality, that maybe there would be some cat-and-mouse style twists and turns? Plans and subterfuge and subversion and tricks and backstabbing and I dunno, drama? Maybe a philosophical debate or two where we can see their opposing viewpoints? Nah, of course not. It's a Blake Crouch book. So fuck all the pretense, here's some pewpew gunfight bullshit.

Really good! There are some serious eye rolling bits, but I ate this shit up. Already preordered book 2. Closest contender yet to Dinneman's Kaiju:BS and the DCC litrpg throne.

Some really great ideas in a lot of these, but aside from a few notable exceptions, the writing quality across the board is pretty atrocious.

‘Down in the Library Basement' by Rona Vaselaar, ‘When Dusk Falls on Hadley Township' by T.W. Grim and ‘A Trick of Perspective' by Matt Dymerski are the clear standouts imo and worth the price of admission alone.

The entire last ~30% of the book is a 1/5 slog.