Unclean (Forgotten Realms: The Haunted Lands, Book 1) (Bk. 1)

Reader Reviews
Richard Lee Byers, Unclean (Wizards of the Coast, 2007) I have to admit that with a very few exceptions, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books since the first six Dragonlance books have been a guilty pleasure at best; unless one of the best of TSR's (now WOTC's) stable of writers-- Bob Salvatore, Ed Greenwood, Weis and Hickman-- was at the helm, I knew I could expect all the trappings of genre writing without any real strong points to distinguish the book in question. Even some "name" writers, on their way up (Laurell K. Hamilton) or on their way down (Gene DeWeese, who wrote the wonderful Something Answered way back when) turned in substandard AD&D books. It got to the point where I stopped following AD&D series altogether. All of them. Then, through some agency I no longer recall, I started hearing the name Richard Lee Byers, and how he was going to be the guy who put AD&D novels back on the map. I heard it enough that when I found out he had a new Forgotten Realms trilogy starting, I decided to pick up the first one and see if there was any substance behind the smoke. Boy oh boy, is there. I grant you, this is still very much genre writing, but it's good genre writing. Byers manages to integrate game mechanics into his story without it being annoying, something a lot of writers over the years who wrote for TSR/WOTC never managed to do (and, perhaps more annoyingly, many others simply tossed the rules out the window and went their own way). But that is far from the only thing about Unclean that impresses. The story centers on Thay, the mysterious home of the Red Wizards, and the lives of a number of disparate personages therein. For those unfamiliar with the Forgotten Realms, a quick overview: Thay is ruled by the eight most powerful Red Wizards, known as Zulkirs. The book opens with one of them, Druxus Rhym, getting killed after an attacker slips into his heavily-fortified house. This, understandably, worries the other zulkirs. Szass Tam, the ageless zulkir of Necromancy and first among equals, orders an investigation into the death. Meanwhile, he's also discovered an unsanctioned raid into neighboring Mulhorand, saved the Thayan troops (who got ambushed), and concocted a story with their leaders to put a good spin on what would have otherwise gotten them executed. As if that's not bad enough, throngs of undead bent on overtaking the country are marching out of the Sunrise mountains to the west. What's an omnipotent zulkir to do? And I've only touched on the tip of the iceberg. There are also subplots about a bard coming home to marry his childhood sweetheart only to find she's sold herself into slavery, intrigue in the Flame Temple of Kossuth, a spy who may be older than Szass Tam himself, a demonic fetus (yes, you read that right), and much, much more. Byers has a lot of balls in the air here, and while it would be overstating the case by a long, long way to say that this is as good as Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, Byers certainly shows himself capable of juggling an entire fakebook full of plots and keeping them all consistent and easy to follow, in the Erikson tradition. Since I seem to have trapped myself into comparing Byers and Erikson, I'll continue on: while Erikson's characters are much deeper and better-rounded, each of his books is also at least twice the size of Unclean. Not to forgive Byers for shallowness, but Erikson's characters are rare commodities in any fiction, much less genre fiction. Compared to the last handful of AD&D novels I've read, Byers' characters could have stepped out of an Orson Welles movie. And, as seems to be written into every WOTC contract, the action is thick and fast, which generally leaves no time at all for character development; Byers handles this task better than most (certainly better than any AD&D novel I've read since Weis and Hickman's legendary Dragons trilogy back in the mid-eighties). A very promising start to the series. *** ½