Pathfinder Tales: "Called to Darkness"

NO SPOILERS

Called to Darkness is one of those books that I wanted to like more than I actually did.  It has a lot of elements that, taken in isolation, are really good: exciting action scenes, a strong female protagonist, a fascinating setting we've never seen presented before in Pathfinder fiction, etc.  But unfortunately, I found that the whole was less than the sum of its parts.  The plot sometimes drifts into shaggy dog story, with a "this thing happens . . . then this thing happens" approach reminiscent of a D&D campaign that consisted solely of random encounters and then a big battle at the end.  It's not *that* simplistic, and there are definitely some redeeming features in the book.  It's just one of those where you have to take the good with the bad.

A free short story prequel to the novel is available on the Paizo website, and it'd be worth reading before the novel:

SPOILERS

This is a revenge story.  In a fantastic first chapter, we see how almost an entire kellid tribe is gruesomely murdered (Game of Thrones style!) by a frost giant named Eovath that they had adopted (or enslaved, depending on one's point of view).  The only survivor of the massacre is Eovath's "sister by adoption", a young, fearless warrior named Kagur.  After recovering from terrible wounds, Kagur sets off after Eovath on a quest for vengeance, accompanied by the almost-elderly shaman (named Holm) of a neighboring tribe.  Their pursuit of Eovath takes them on an epic journey, as the frost giant has been touched (metaphorically speaking) by Rovagug, the god of destruction, and he has some terrible, mysterious mission underground.

About a hundred pages in, I realized this was a book about the Darklands! (the Underdark, for Forgotten Realms afficionados)  I'm not really sure how a creature the size of a frost giant is able to navigate easily through the Darklands, but his trail leads the heroes deeper and deeper through the stranger and stranger layers of the underworld.  There's battles against wraiths, mysterious spores, a centipede brain mold thing (Seugathi), and more.  Alliances are also made underground, first with serpentfolk in the market city of Sekamina (which was interesting to see represented in fiction) and then a tribe of orcs in a part of the Darklands called the Vault: a vast underground cavern that has its own ocean and even type of sun!

Eovath has made an alliance with a group of xulgaths (a sort of bipedal lizard) who reside in an ancient temple in order to make war on the various orc and other tribes that live in the Vault.  So although the first two thirds of the book are a chase with several action scenes against various threats, the last third of the book is an exciting infiltration of the temple that eventually leads up to a massive battle scene between the opposing armies of xulgaths and orcs.    It's done very well, and the epilogue is surprisingly sweet.

I think my disappoint with Called to Darkness comes from a few different reasons.  I didn't fine the portrayal of the Darklands nearly as mysteriously exhilarating and uncanny as some sourcebooks made it sound.  The characters of Eovath, Kagur, and Holm are all fairly one-note, with little range or depth.  Many of the action scenes are unnecessary in terms of plot advancement and read like padding.  I know one shouldn't have too high of expectations of RPG tie-in fiction, but I've read other Pathfinder novels by authors that could have done a lot more with the source material here.

So all in all, I'm definitely of mixed feelings about the book.  I think it's still worth reading, but I wouldn't make it a priority.