Book Review: Hobgoblin

Book Review: 'Hobgoblin' by John Coyne

0 / 5 Stars

'Hobgoblin' was issued in 1981 in hardcover, with this Berkley Books paperback (342 pp.) published in July, 1982, with stepback cover art by Mark and Stephanie Gerber.

Author Coyne (b. 1937) published a number of horror novels in the late 1970s, and throughout the 1980s. He has a fondness for using gerunds as titles.

'Hobgoblin' refers to the fictional tabletop role-playing game (RPG) that the lead character, a tormented teen named Scott Gardiner, is obsessed with. As Grady Hendrix points out in his 2017 book 'Paperbacks from Hell,' Hobgoblin sought to capitalize on the notoriety of 'Dungeons and Dragons' in the early 1980s. 

 

Strange as it may seem to modern-day audiences, back then D&D was all over the pop culture, depicted as a pastime that suborned naive kids into practicing black magic and the dark arts. The premise of a fantasy RPG driving wholesome teens into committing acts of mayhem and depravity has a certain allure. Does 'Hobgoblin' do anything effective with this premise ? Well.......no.

'Hobgoblin' is set in the Fall of 1981. As the novel opens, Scott Gardiner and his widowed mother Barbara have taken up residence in the grand estate of Ballycastle, on the Hudson River in New York state. Ballycastle is an impressive monument to egomania. Originally a castle in Ireland, in the 1920s it was dismantled stone by stone, shipped across the Atlantic, and re-erected on the grounds of property owned by an eccentric Irish-born magnate named Fergus O'Cuileannain. A foundation operates Ballycastle as a tourist attraction, and has hired Barbara to be the archivist for the estate.

Scott is a prick, and a fuckup. He's self-centered, arrogant, a mamma's boy, prone to self-pity, has attempted suicide several times, and is preoccupied with Hobgoblin to the point where he interprets the world through the lens of the game; people are judged based on their resemblances to characters from Hobgoblin. In his own mind, Scott sees himself as the ancient Irish hero Brian Boru, his avatar in the game, and Gardiner's real-world struggles are echoes of those Boru has faced in sessions of Hobgoblin.

Nothing of consequence takes place in the first 300 pages of 'Hobgoblin'. Author Coyne is determined to stuff as much padding into the narrative as he possibly can. We get lengthy passages describing the emotional conflicts between Scott and Barbara; Scott's (improbable) romance with his high school classmate, Valerie Dunn; Scott's bullying at the hands of some troglodyte football players; and Barbara's burgeoning romance with the foundation's director, Derek Brennan. There is considerable exposition on the gameplay mechanics of Hobgoblin and RPGs in general (Coyne at one point alludes to TSR founders Gary Gygax and Dave Arenson). 

There are all sorts of Ambiguously Spooky Phenomena, associated with what may have been devil-worshipping conducted on the grounds of Ballycastle by O'Cuileannain, popping up now and then to impart a feeble momentum to the narrative.

'Hobgoblin' could have redeemed itself by providing a worthy climax, but the final 40 pages read like a really bad script for a Slasher film: it seems that Scott has persuaded his teachers to allow the high school kids to have a Hobgoblin cosplay party at the castle ! Contrivances are so plentiful that they completely negate the author's efforts to impart a sense of horror and dread to the proceedings.

The verdict ? 'Hobgoblin' is one of greatest duds of the Paperbacks from Hell era, and deserving of a Zero Stars score.

Book Review: Slaying the Dragon

Book Review: 'Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons' by Ben Riggs

5 / 5 Stars

'Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons' (293 pp.) was published by St. Martin's Press in 2022. Author Ben Riggs is active in chronicling the contemporary RPG landscape in podcasts and articles for a variety of online portals. His blog hasn't posted content since 2022, but contains articles relevant to 'Slaying the Dragon'.

I was a wargamer in the 1970s, and I have only vague memories of 'Dungeons and Dragons' (D&D). I played the games from the major publishers such as SPI and Avalon Hill. As far as I was concerned, D&D was just another one of a number of indie games that floated around the periphery of the tabletop gaming world, buying small ads in The Wargamer's Digest:

D&D advertisement in The Wargamer's Digest, 1974

Little did I know that D&D would morph from a modest, home-made game into a franchise that would come to define Planet Geek like no other properties before or since.

'Slaying the Dragon' tells the story of TSR and D&D from its start in the 1970s to 2022. It all began with Gary Gygax, a man in his mid-thirties who worked as a shoe repairman in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and who, in his spare time, wrote about, designed, and sold, board games. 

In 1973 Gygax formed 'Tactical Studies Rules' to promote and market his properties, and in January 1974, he began selling an RPG called 'Dungeons and Dragons'. The game was assembled in the basement of Gygax's house in Lake Geneva, and immediately became popular with gaming geeks.

As author Riggs relates in 'Slaying', within a few years, D&D had become a pop culture phenomenon, and Gygax moved his enterprise into the Hotel Clair, a rather dilapidated building in downtown Lake Geneva. TSR's expansion only accelerated in the late 1970s and early 1980s when lurid stories of impressionable youth, led astray by D&D, proliferated in the national media.

William Dear's account of the life and death of D&D fan James Dallas Egbert III

But although outwardly TSR was a thriving enterprise, Riggs shows that in reality, the company based its business strategy on what proved to be an inherently risky arrangement with publisher Random House. And its management had a habit of alienating some of its most imaginative, and commercially successful, creative personnel. By the mid-1990s, TSR was experiencing increasing financial difficulties, and only the intervention of an RPG rival would enable the world of D&D to survive into the 21st century.

'Slaying the Dragon' is a very readable book. Author Riggs avoids getting too bogged down in the minutiae of tabletop RPG gaming, keeps his chapters short, and uses a large body of on-the-record statements from many former and current staff to provide 'insider' perspectives on the history of TSR and D&D.

This allows the book to appeal both to geeks, and to businesspeople. This is a rather unusual conjunction of interested parties, but Riggs does a commendable job of interlacing the actions taken by TSR's creative staffers with the actions of the managerial tiers, emphasizing that the willful separation of these two facets of the D&D enterprise was ultimately to the detriment of the company. 

Riggs does not shy from arguing that many of TSR's business problems originated with Lorraine Williams, who ousted Gary Gygax from the company in October, 1985 and installed herself as CEO. Riggs acknowledges that he was unable to persuade Williams to be interviewed for the book, and thus her side of the story is absent, but he relies on anecdotes and observations from other TSR staff, as well as company documents, to buttress this argument.

The 'hero' in the TSR narrative is Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison, who purchased TSR in April 1997. Riggs portrays Adkison as the sort of boss who inherently understood what RPG gaming was all about, and realized the need to treat employees with consideration and respect. 

[ Its publication date of 2022 means that 'Slaying the Dragon' can't remark upon the current, fractious state of affairs between a reincarnated TSR, helmed by Gary's son Ernie Gygax, and Wizards of the Coast. ]

The verdict ? Whether you are an RPG and fantasy fan, or someone interested in the rise and fall of corporations, 'Slaying the Dragon' is worth reading. 

'The Gamesmen of Earth Prime' 

Epic Illustrated Fall 1980

  

The  Fall 1980 issue of Epic Illustrated has an illuminating look at the state of Geek Culture at the time, with an article about the Dungeons and Dragon and wargaming  scene titled 'The Gamesmen of Earth Prime'.

In the magazine's 'Overview' section, which provides capsule comments by editor Archie Goodwin about the contents of each issue of Epic, he describes how a fateful encounter with a Klingon planted an idea in his head ....

This in turn led to the commissioning of a lengthy article on the D&D and wargaming world, which I've posted below. (Although I doubt anyone under 40 will find this stuff all that intriguing).

Remember, this is the Fall of 1980, and there are no such things as 'personal computers' as we now know them, although some of my friends are taking classes in their electrical engineering curricula on 'microcomputers'. 

Video games exist, but they are the large coin-operated consoles, like 'Space Invaders', that are found in bars and arcades along with foosball tables.  

The idea that a D&D game, or an SPI wargame, could be played on a computer seems promising, but still a ways off ....