Abercrombie is on my Mt. Rushmore of fantasy authors. But this one is a miss, and a shocking one at that.

I always thought that Abercrombie would make a great short story writer. I still think that, perhaps in a different format. He's always been a dispenser of hard lessons and punchy one-liners, saying a lot with a little, and making characters seem gigantic and plausible better than maybe any other SFF author in the game.

Which is why it's so shocking that this collection never really amounts to more than the Disney MCU and (especially) Star Wars era of cameo-as-substance storytelling. The Circle of the World has never been a dense and history-rich universe in the same way Tolkien or GRRM write-- and yet it seems just as wide and vivid because of the excellent work he's done with top-tier characterization and memorable, descriptive writing up there with anyone.

Abercrombie has built a wide, compelling cast throughout the first six First Law books, and this book is a testament to that. But none of these stories spin our perception of these characters in a new direction, and all of the enjoyment is shouldered on how much the reader enjoys seeing their favorite character show up for a bit, and rarely is it ever interesting.

I think the story with Temple is a perfect example of my gripes: We are told this happened in Red Country, and then when we get the chance to actually visit that moment in time, it sheds no new light on who Temple is or was that we didn't already know-- and similarly, it doesn't really have a self contained story that says anything about anything.

I find it interesting that a lot of reviews have a lot of people go out of their way to mention that they don't like or read short stories. I happen to love them, and read them obsessively. Maybe I'm expecting a bit more of these individual stories as self-contained works of fiction, rather than just painting pointless (harsh, but I think it's fair) vignettes.

One of the writing tips that I've picked up but don't necessarily subscribe to is sometimes writing the backstory of your characters as if they were scenes you were going to put in your finished product just to spend time with the character and get inside their head at a pivotal moment. These thought experiments don't have to work on their own or even be well-done to be useful. I feel as though Joe did this exercise, dumped them in a filing cabinet, found them later and decided to use them anyway. This is almost certainly a projection, but it is the vibe.

The female version of Fahfrd and the Grey Mauser aren't that compelling, and I can't say I ever really cared about what was going on-- but I enjoyed Abercrombie sort of tipping his hat to that style and subgenre of Fantasy. Splicing it between the other stories was probably the best way to go about it.

As always, his writing is very, very good. But for the first time in seven books of his that I've read, it feels substanceless. Abercrombie is one of my very favorites, with an insane hit streak. It pains me to say this was a waste of time.