The Joy of Erudition > Recent Status Updates

"The Cup of Golden Death" had a high priestess character who was entirely unconvincing. Her bland personality, lack of skills, and lack of any personal goals or interests made her no different than any of the other generic maidens Niall has saved in previous stories.

"A thousand centuries ago, Yellixin dwelt here on this moor, in a castle the ruins of which have sunk into the soft ground over all the years. There is a tale told of how a man who worshiped Humalorr came to Yellixin and stole the cup. It was after the cup was stolen that Humalorr destroyed the castle Yellixin had built and all within it..."

If it was stolen first, why did they find the cup buried here in the ruins?

"She had been right behind him with that dagger before they had eaten. Of course, she had said she was merely going to cut the steak. But that might have been an excuse thought up on the spur of the moment."

YOU were the one who thought it up, Niall!

He grinned at her. "You going to cut me—or that steak I'm cooking for your meal?"
She seemed to emerge from a daze. "What? Oh. The steak, of course. What else?"

There's a character named Chilton in this book, and every time he shows up, I get the song "Alex Chilton" by the Replacements in my head.

Once again, in "The Cup of Golden Death", the demon-goddess Emelkartha is the real protagonist driving the plot, with Niall just being the "hired muscle" drifting through the story with no volition of his own. These stories should be called "Emelkartha of the Eleven Hells and her Dancing Meat-Puppet Niall".

I'm enjoying the character development and cultural details. Many other books with this many characters make it hard for me to distinguish them, but these characters are all clear and easy to distinguish.

"Still, it was always a pleasure to soak in Kindler’s prose. He’d give a lot to write with such luscious, evocative phrases. Every time he tried, though, it sounded too forced, as though he were a child jumping and waving his arms to get attention."

Knowing Howard Andrew Jones was a fan of Raymond Chandler's writing and had praised his prose, I'm sure this writer-character's esteem of "Kindler" is a sly nod.

"The Cube From Beyond" had a decent premise, but Niall's abrupt retreat, the fact that getting back out of the cube was set up to be a problem to solve but ended up not being a problem at all, and the fact that Emelkartha saves the day YET AGAIN, not to mention the anticlimactic ending, and the total lack of concern of an immortal losing her immortality all combine to make this the worst story in the collection.

Very family-oriented. I like it.

The author uses a phrase in this series that I think is supposed to give a little flavour to the setting. Instead of just "No", or maybe "Nay", characters say "Na, na." Everyone says it here: The hero, the evil wizard, the goddess who helps the hero, etc. "Na, na."

"He had no eyes for the golden censers and silver athanors, for the chests heaped high with strange and almost unobtainable magical condiments."

Magical condiments?

Lovers-2-enemies?
He looked at her as Lucifer must have looked back to Heaven.
"Go home, Basil. Go home with this female of yours. Breed your cubs, fill the house with brats, and try to think your little round of days means something. Strut about under the blue skies, growing fat and gray, bragging of what a great fellow you used to be and disapproving of the younger generation. You could have been a god—or a devil."

The characters here are so much better than in the last book I read.