Started The Ghost King

There are some things I take into account when I go into a book from R.A. Salvatore. One, that I am highly appreciative of his work getting me interested in both reading and the genre. Two, that it will not be a shining example of genre literature. I expect to find plenty of action--so much so that it may prove a detriment to the novel, Promise of the Witch-King being a prominent example. I also expect to find Dwarves with horrible names and various characters philosophizing despite their walks of life. These expectations are based on experience and they are rarely off the track. They were not this time around either.

I have a love and hate relationship with Salvatore's Dwarves. I love them because they are often hilarious and some of the more outrageous characters tend to stem from this lot. I hate them because they are often used as little more than comic relief and they turn up so often throughout all of Salvatore's work that it gets old. In The Ghost King, the use of Dwarves has been ramped up to the point of sniggering glee, which contrasts to the usual limited use--after all, who needs that much comic relief? I actually liked this about the book because it provides a contrast to the downward spiral of depression that the novel entails. Instead of brief moments of comic relief, we are instead presented with a line of comedy running along the entirety of a novel. In this it feels less tacked than it would otherwise.

Over the past year or so, I have discovered that I do not gain much enjoyment from reading about fights or battles anymore. It stems from branching out in my reading and encountering a wealth of novels that are more focused on drama than action. However, I did enjoy a few of the battles found in The Ghost King. These few, which I cannot and will not mention thanks to their spoiler nature, managed to impart a feeling of... epicness. The sort of feeling that makes you want to thrust your fist into the air and scream something unintelligible. These scenes were well written and impressive and definitely received a nod of approval from me, along with a fist pump and declaration of "Huzzah!" Make no mistake though, not all of the fights or battles in the novel were like this. There were many that left me uninterested and skimming through the barrage of thrusts, slashes, kicks, and punches.

When I read The Pirate King last year, I had quite a bit of praise for it. I enjoyed it more than most of Salvatore's other recent novels because the spotlight was finally removed from Drizzt Do'Urden and dropped on some of the minor characters we have met along the way. The Ghost King tries to take this route as well and in a way, it succeeds, but in another it fails. The Pirate King managed to focus the spotlight on a couple of characters, switching over to Drizzt every once in a while to fulfill the notion that it is a novel in the Drizzt series. This novel cannot focus. It tries, it really does, but in the end there are too many characters and too few pages to follow any single one or group of them for any significant length of time.

And that leads me into my major issue with the novel. I am not sure whether there is an enforced word limit--though I am inclined to believe there is--but it seemed to me that there was a lot of story either left untold or edited out. Everything seemed rushed, from small things like travel, to big things, like the conclusion. More time spent traveling, though an idea that strikes me as profoundly distasteful by my own inclinations, would have provided much-needed interaction among our disparate group of adventurers. On that same note, a lot of possible tension was siphoned off by skimming over scenes or leaving them to act out in the background. The resolution to the major arc of the novel was glazed over in a fashion that could only be described as lazy, but even then it only stands as the penultimate tragedy spawned by the rushing of this novel. The ultimate tragedy, the end of the one storyline that ran from the beginning of the novel until the bitter end, was done in such an abrupt manner that the only description I can coin for it is: complete and utter failure.

The Ghost King is a novel written by R.A. Salvatore. That alone is enough to pique the interest of some and to make people scrunch up their faces and turn away in search of something else to read. The prose here is simple and unadorned--and therefore inherently readable--and the likelihood of finding innovation among the book's pages is slim, but that is the norm. What can be found here is an adventure story filled with more than enough action to keep even the most distracted individuals interested and a wild mixture of characters that promises, at the very least, humor and hints at the possibility of awe and emotion. The Ghost King was a novel that had the potential to be more than good, better than decent, but the issues dragged it down to merely average. I would recommend the book, but only buy it if you are a fan, everyone else should make use of their local library.