Like the Jaffe book,
Hobgoblin was published at the height of
Dungeons & Dragons' popularity and soon after the intense media coverage of the Egbert
steam tunnel incident. The Egbert case resulted in
urban myths wherein roleplaying gamers enacting live action role-playing games perish, often in the
utility tunnels below their university campuses. In a 2015 interview after the novel was reprinted by
Dover Books, Coyne flatly stated that while he had read about Egbert, the case had no influence in his writing the book. Coyne said that he had become intrigued by
Dungeons & Dragons after a nephew had become an avid player, and he became interested. "I saw in D&D, and the whole idea of such games, a way to move my story telling in a new direction. What if characters in a fantasy game became characters in real life? That idea intrigued me and to understand this whole world, I began to play the game so I could write
Hobgoblin." The
Kirkus Reviews review seems to miss the Egbert connection entirely, unlike the
Dragon Magazine review, dismissing the work as "Skin-deep horror--but better-crafted and less lurid than previous Coynage." C. J. Henderson reviewed
Hobgoblin for
Pegasus magazine and stated that "The tale is so skillfully woven that even the reader, who knows at least as much as, and, sometimes, more than, most of the characters at any given time, does not see the truth, either, until the end. This is as it should be in any good mystery tale, and it is in this that the true genius of John Coyne's
Hobgoblin lies." ==References==