Nine Goblins is the humorous but also quite dark tale of a band of nine goblin warriors who end up far behind enemy lines when a wizard accidentally transports them in the middle of a battle. It's up to their reliable but beleaguered sergeant and an elven veterinarian to get them back to Goblinhome in one piece.

Nine Goblins is part a subversion of standard fantasy tropes by putting goblins as the main characters and making fun of both humans and elves and also a criticism of war and prejudice via a fantasy lens. While this is often described as a fun romp of low fantasy, it gets surprisingly dark towards the end and has borderline horror elements to it.

Unfortunately, this really suffers from having been one of Kingfisher's early stories and it's difficult to come back to after having read her more recent works where you can see how much she's grown as a writer. It also suffers from trying to take on too many things in a novella format. The pacing is uneven and there isn't really a lot of time available to explore some of the themes that are brought up.

There are some great ideas in here and many humorous lines that I ended up highlighting just because Kingfisher's snarky observations have always worked well for me. And I do love her ideas about making goblins very sympathetic and the total underdogs of the story. But it felt like this story was more individual concepts that aren't fully explored than a cohesive narrative.

As a character-driven reader, I never felt like I got more than surface level even when I liked what I got of the characters. And on a plot level this seemed too slow to work for most plot-driven readers.
Additionally, I definitely agree with reviews that have mentioned the "magic = mental illness" and some of the prejudices didn't feel particularly well handled or explored.

Overall, Nine Goblins is easily my least favorite story that I've picked up from Kingfisher. I was expecting a fun romp and while I enjoyed parts of it, it just didn't execute on the level that I was expecting from a Kingfisher story. If you pick it up, definitely know that this is one of her earlier stories and you'll have to give it some leeway.