Series: Gord, the Rogue #6
There is much to be thankful to Gary Gygax for, he invented Dungeons and Dragons which brought such joy to so many people, for example, but his forays into fiction are surely not a thing to thank him for.
Dance of Demons is the last of his Greyhawk novels and much like his previous ones it is pretty terrible. By this time Gygax had acrimoniously separated from what was then TSR, the company which sold D&D and there was clearly a lot of bitterness in the air. In this last volume he decided to burn his remaining bridge by just destroying the world that he had created.
This could be the premise for a pretty interesting novel, but it wasn't to be. Gygax writes in an overly florid way which commits all the worst sins of fantasy writing. The two greatest of these are his penchant for long, drawn-out, battle sequences, which are really dull and the creation of an overly complex cast of pretty indistinguishable characters. There must be some 20 different demons here all with nearly unpronounceable names and paper-thin characterisations for whom you care nothing if they live or die. It feels like the novel should come with a 500 page volume of extra material fleshing out the world and characters, I kind of need to see Gygax's notes to make sense of this, or even care. By the end the universe is destroyed and our main characters live on in parallel realities, thank god I don't have to read 100 page battle scenes again.
TL;DR: 1/10 Thank fuck it's over.
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