Twenty-Four Books in Eric Ugland's Shared World, and the Needle Never Moved

I acquired most of Eric Ugland's shared world during one of Audible's ninety-seven-percent-off fire sales, and I heard twenty-four books of it before I stopped: fourteen Good Guys, nine Bad Guys, and the first Grim Guys. I am glad I paid a dollar and change per book, and that sentence is the argument in miniature.

Each series has its own review and its own tier, because they are not equally bad and grading them as one thing was a mistake I made the first time I wrote this up. What follows is the thing none of those three reviews can say on its own, because you only see it after all of them.

The craft is not the problem

It would be easier if Ugland were a bad writer. He is not.

The prose is serviceable, sometimes decent, occasionally good. The world has real thought behind it: distinct cultures seen through different protagonists, kingdoms with their own logic, and hints of interconnection scattered everywhere with enough consistency that you can tell they are deliberate. Neil Hellegers narrates gamely throughout. Ugland is also enormously prolific, which is a skill in itself and one plenty of better-reviewed authors lack.

The problem is what all of that is in service of.

What happens to the loot, and to everyone else

Here is the tell, and it is the most concrete evidence I can offer.

In book one of The Good Guys, Montana is granted god-tier weapons. He loses them. Permanently. He personally knows the god who granted them, and nobody ever pulls that thread. That is not an isolated beat. Across the catalog, characters chase items through entire arcs, and those items are then lost, never used, or never mentioned again.

Think about what that means structurally. An arc exists to change the situation. If the acquisition at the end of the arc is discarded before the next one, the arc did not change anything, and the pages you spent on it bought you nothing. When acquisitions do not matter, pages do not matter.

It is not only objects. The Bad Guys builds the best institution in the shared world, a legal market in which desperate skilled people sell themselves into lifetime service for a lump sum they can leave to their families. The individuals Clyde ends up owning arrive with real backstories and a moral problem he cannot escape. They are then killed off one by one protecting him, and the manner of it is the tell: Mornax the Destroyer, a minotaur, dies by falling asleep in an enchanted chair that absorbs him before anyone can pull him free, and is never mentioned again after that dungeon. A good idea and a set of characters worth caring about, spent as protection detail. Across these books a fair amount of page time goes to introducing someone and then killing them shortly after.

Do that consistently across twenty-four books and you have not written a long story. You have written a long sequence of self-contained adventures wearing series numbering, and the numbering is doing work the plot is not.

The promise that keeps not arriving

The connective tissue is always present and never load-bearing.

Three series, one world, recurring hints that the threads are converging. That is a real promise and it is the reason people stay.

Clyde finally makes it back to Glaton at the very end of book nine, which put the two flagship protagonists in the same city for the first time. I heard that. It is the moment three books of errand had been building toward. Then book ten arrived, the first full volume with him actually home, and I did not buy it.

Here is the part that settles the argument for me. Since I stopped, two more Good Guys and two more Bad Guys have been published. Going by reader discussion, the two protagonists still have not crossed paths. That is sixteen books of one series and eleven of the other, twenty-seven volumes in a shared world, with the two leads in the same city and no scene between them.

And crossing paths would not be a conclusion. It would be the start of one. Whatever this story is building toward sits somewhere past a meeting that twenty-seven books have not managed to stage.

Meanwhile a different convergence did happen, and it is the one nobody wanted. The leads started sounding alike. The smart one began making dumb choices; the dumb one went conveniently smart whenever a scene needed it, until the most reliable way to tell Ugland's two flagship characters apart was personal hygiene. That is what it looks like when an author has one voice and three series to fill.

Then The Grim Guys launched as a third thread, promising the same trajectory in a new font. That was the nail in the coffin for me, and its review explains why the one genuinely good idea in it made the situation worse rather than better.

The pattern has a name

I have seen this shape elsewhere, and naming it is useful because it predicts what you are buying.

An author writes serial content at speed. Page count gets filled with self-contained adventures. A larger story is gestured at continuously and advanced rarely, because advancing it would constrain the next book. Land of the Undying Lord is in the same family. So, in its late run, is The Ten Realms.

The plainest word for the result is soap opera, and I do not mean that as a cheap insult. A soap opera is a legitimate form with a real skill behind it, and its defining feature is that it is built never to end. Threads open faster than they close, because closing them would eventually finish the show. That is a fine thing to buy if it is what you want. It is a very bad thing to buy while believing you are partway through a story with a destination, and the series numbering on these covers implies a destination.

The clearest instance is in The Good Guys: Montana is told outright that every god's champion is coming for the prize in his city, and across fourteen books not one arrives. The question the series opened with, who takes the throne, is still open at book sixteen.

The reason it is worth identifying rather than just disliking is that it changes what a good review can tell you. If a series is badly written, you skip it. If a series is competently written and structurally going nowhere, the honest advice is different: buy the good stretch, stop at the point it stops paying, and do not wait for the convergence. That is exactly the advice I give for The Bad Guys, and it is why that series has the highest tier of the three by a distance.

Where I landed

The world genuinely deserved a story told in it. That is the part I keep coming back to, and it is why this reads as frustration rather than contempt.

If a big shared-world payoff someday actually arrives, I will hear about it from the forums and I will reconsider in public. I will not be waiting there. There are a lot of books out there and I have already given this world twenty-four of my slots.

The per-series verdicts, with tiers and the specific case for each, are here:

• The Good Guys (D) — serviceable prose, a world worth caring about, and a protagonist written as an idiot except when the plot needs otherwise.
• The Bad Guys (C-high) — six genuinely good books of capital intrigue, then a full power reset and a four-book errand out of the city that made it work.
• The Grim Guys (F) — a third series launched into a world already slowing down, with leads I could not tell apart and its one good idea spent on a side quest.