The Good Guys, The Bad Guys, The Grim Guys: Eric Ugland's Shared World Reviewed

Twenty-three books, one review

This is a catalog review covering Eric Ugland's shared-world series, The Good Guys, The Bad Guys, and the debut of The Grim Guys, because I consumed them as one body of work: twenty-three books' worth before I stopped, mercifully acquired during one of Audible's 97%-off fire sales. I'm glad I paid a dollar and change per book, and that sentence is the review in miniature.

Let me be fair about the craft first: Ugland isn't a bad writer. The prose is serviceable, sometimes decent, occasionally good, and the shared world itself shows real thought, distinct cultures viewed through different protagonists, with hints of interconnection everywhere. The problem is what the writing is in service of. I listened to twenty-three books in this world before stopping, eleven Good Guys, eleven Bad Guys, and the first Grim Guys, and across all of them the overarching plot barely moved. The two flagship protagonists had only just reached the same city when I quit, with no crossover in sight per the forums. These aren't novels advancing a story; they're collections of side quests wearing series numbering, and the tell is what happens to rewards: characters chase items across whole arcs that are then lost, never used, or never mentioned again. Montana receives god-tier weapons in book one and promptly loses them, forever, despite personally knowing the god who granted them. When acquisitions don't matter, pages don't matter.

Montana

The Good Guys' protagonist deserves his own section, because I've never disliked a lead quite this way. Montana is written as an idiot, and I mean that as a description of text, not an insult: he makes childish decisions, and, I need you to know this going in, has recurring hygiene problems. It is repeatedly, canonically established that he doesn't bathe unless people complain about the smell, wanders his own noble court dressed like a vagrant, and walks around crusted in gore long after the battle ends. Nobles pursue marriage alliances with this man while the text reminds us he reeks. Some readers find him relatably oafish; I found him exhausting, and the bumbling-buffoon defense fails because the books can't commit to it: whenever a scene requires it, Montana is suddenly secretly cunning, then reverts to idiocy by the next chapter. That's not a character arc. That's a dial the author turns.

The Bad Guys, and the cardinal sin

Here's the frustrating part: the early Bad Guys books are genuinely good, and I'd have told you so at the time. A clever rogue with death-magic leanings working the capital's den-of-thieves intrigue, a planner whose decisions make sense, none of Montana's issues. Through five or six books it's the clearly superior series. Then, around book seven, Ugland apparently decided his character had grown too strong and committed the cardinal sin readers of this site know I hold above almost all others: the full power reset. Corrupting abilities, mandatory fix, powers surrendered, new class, and, the aggravating masterstroke, a three-to-four book side quest away from the capital, away from the intrigue, away from every character and dynamic that made the series work, to accomplish the reset. The replacement power set isn't even interesting. By the time he trudged back to the capital, I didn't care anymore. And in the late books, both protagonists converge into the same voice, the smart one making dumb choices, the dumb one going conveniently smart, until the author's two flagship characters are distinguishable mainly by hygiene. The Grim Guys launching as a third thread, promising the same trajectory in a new font, was the nail in the coffin.

Verdict

Not worth the credit. D. Not because any single book is offensive, but because the catalog's fundamental promise, that these threads are going somewhere, has been broken across twenty-three books of side quests, lost artifacts, and one unforgivable reset. Neil Hellegers narrates gamely throughout, and the world genuinely deserved a story told in it. If a big shared-world payoff someday actually arrives, I'll hear about it from the forums and reconsider. I will not be waiting there. There are a lot of books out there, and I gave this world twenty-three of my slots already.