Dark Lord

In the first volume of his Falconfar Saga, Greenwood (creator of Forgotten Realms) presents Rod Evelar, a grubby, anti-social writer who cranks out the sort of dire generic fantasy novels that Diana Wynne-Jones's A Tough Guide to Fantasyland warns us about. Evelar is sincere about his hack work, even obsessed, and dreams vividly of his creations. When fantasy invades his apartment in the form of a winged woman, now dying of wounds and minus wings, he discovers that in the universe of his creation he is a Dark Lord whose blood can heal, and that he is in danger. Off he goes into the fantasy world, where the dialogue is turgid and everything partakes in a kind of substitution code. (Vultures are called ""vaugren,"" but they are still, patently, vultures.) The one original element is that our hero sold his universe to a gaming corporation and corporate hacks have interpolated more menaces and cliches, so Evelar is no longer in control. Regrettably, Greenwood ignores the ironic possibilities of his premise.