Samuel Peterson’s Reviews > The Legend of Drizzt, Book IV > Status Update

And how many of those farmers are you going to accidently kill in your hallucinating rages, Wulfgar?

Now we have two fools of suitors.

Seriously? Meralda threw up at the smell of cooked eggs in front of her mother and a female gnome neighbor, and she refused to eat the eggs afterward, and none of them guessed that she could be pregnant?

First I've heard of Wulfgar siring demon children with a succubus. I wonder if that will be relevant later?

So, it is only when Wulfgar has gone through his ordeal and has not drunk any alcohol that he finally has clarity of his situation.

"Perhaps the crowds gather around eagerly merely for the excitement of the show. Perhaps there is no underlying cause or explanation other than the fun of it...for if humans on as large a scale are capable of eliminating empathy and sympathy so completely as to actually enjoy the spectacle of watching another suffer horribly, then that, I fear, is the truest definition of evil."

"One measure of any society is the way it deals with those who have walked away from the course of community and decency, and an indecent treatment of these criminals decreases the standards of morality to the level of the tortured." Essentially, what differentiates a community from criminality is how they treat those who commit crimes and those who have not committed any crimes but are punished away.

"Why would common, otherwise decent folk, descend to such a level as the spectacle of Prisoner's Carnival? Why would some of the Sea Sprite's own crew, men and women I knew to be honorable and decent, take pleasure in viewing such a macabre display of torture?" A question that I don't really have an answer for.

"...as my reputation has begun to gain me some acceptance among the human population...have I come to witness a more complex version of what I observed in Menzoberranzan, a shade of gray varying in light and darkness. So many humans, it seems, a vast majority, have within their makeup a dark side, a hunger for the macabre, and the ability to disspationately dismiss the agony of another in the pursuit of the self."

Finally, I'm in the last third of this second book. Hopefully, the final book in this volume can make up for it.