Samuel Peterson’s Reviews > The Legend of Drizzt, Book IV > Status Update

So, it is only when Wulfgar has gone through his ordeal and has not drunk any alcohol that he finally has clarity of his situation.

"One measure of any society is the way it deals with those who have walked away from the course of community and decency, and an indecent treatment of these criminals decreases the standards of morality to the level of the tortured." Essentially, what differentiates a community from criminality is how they treat those who commit crimes and those who have not committed any crimes but are punished away.

"Why would common, otherwise decent folk, descend to such a level as the spectacle of Prisoner's Carnival? Why would some of the Sea Sprite's own crew, men and women I knew to be honorable and decent, take pleasure in viewing such a macabre display of torture?" A question that I don't really have an answer for.

"...as my reputation has begun to gain me some acceptance among the human population...have I come to witness a more complex version of what I observed in Menzoberranzan, a shade of gray varying in light and darkness. So many humans, it seems, a vast majority, have within their makeup a dark side, a hunger for the macabre, and the ability to disspationately dismiss the agony of another in the pursuit of the self."

Finally, I'm in the last third of this second book. Hopefully, the final book in this volume can make up for it.

Well, well, well, it's about time for Wulfgar to do something. We've waited long enough.

Did Salvatore look up all of these torture implements from history? Or were these things he saw on movies? Or did he come up with his imagination?

Is this the point of this torture and execution? A question of how justice is implemented by those who judge and execute the punishment, and those who catch the transgressors?

The description of being drawn and quartered...who came up with such a punishment? And how long did that last before people thought that it was too much, too gruesome?

"Legend had it that with a perfect, swift cut and a quick check guard the beheaded man might still be conscious for a split second, long enough to see his own body, his face contorted into an expression of the purest, most exquisite horror."
Just goes to show that evil is not just within the Drow, Fiends, Mind Flayers, or other monsters.