Excuse the typos all. My daughter was talking to me as I typed and I have a tough time listening and typing at the same time.
Plus it seems like ALL of his books had something like that original quote. Webb is gone.
We will see what the MSM does with this.
When you write a book (and, yes, I write; I'm working on my second), you have to write for your audience and your genre. My genre is fantasy, and when I consider my audience I think very carefully of how old I was when I started reading fantasy. I was a teenager when I got bitten by the fanstasy bug, and so I'm very careful to validate what I write to make sure it's acceptable for someone like me. Killing monsters is ok, but I keep it from getting too graphic. It's fantasy, after all, and in that sense I consider the heroism, character development, and especially the epic plot elements to hold much greater significance.
What really disturbs me is not only the motifs in the text (and how much he must like using them since he uses them so much), but what he obviously thought to be acceptable for his audience. It's possible, I suppose, that he was deliberately attempting to shock his audience, but then I would expect the acts he describes to be tied exclusively to villians, as the only effective villian is one the reader has grown to truly despise. That doesn't seem to be the case here, which makes me wonder what goes on in his mind. I surely hope his protagonists aren't doing these things...could they all be conflicted, anti-heroes? Even if that was so, it seems to me that there are limits to how dark an anti-hero can get before one thinks of him as villian rather than hero. Something just isn't right here, my instincts tell me, and I don't think I'm alone here.
Webbs wife and children and MOTHER have to be SO very proud of him (uploading barf bags to the crew)