I was about to have a knee-jerk reaction and go "Action Figures!".
But they didn't have any action at all, so, yeah, dolls.
A few were pretty posable, especially compared with the travesties that are McFarlene toys. But for the most part, you're right.
The SR Clix line was an ambitious experiment, but sadly it just didn't work. The game itself wasn't terrible, but the scale was way too big to be practicle. I still say that the same game retooled for 3 3/4" toys (GI Joe/Star Wars Scale) would have been magnificent. Plus then you could have used GI Joe weapons and vehicles with teh figures. Could you imagine the possibilities??
(That's still a dream game of mine, to be honest)
As for the novels, I thought they were pretty solid. Hell, they're works of art compared to earlier SR Books like Shadowboxer or pretty much anything by Lisa Smedman. But, they had three things going against them...
1) A forced cast list tied to the Clix line
Not a huge detriment, IMO, and I worked on some SR Clix fiction for the WizKids website. The characters actually had a cool backstory and almost all of them had a cool web of backstory ties to the other characters. But I think that it made the novels feel a little stifled, and combine that with the general distaste people had for the Clix game itself, and it ended upa negative.
2) They were not novels aimed at long time Shadowrun players
I think this effects the books a lot more than most folks realize. Wizkids put a LOT of effort and time into the SR Clix line, and the novels were there to support it. The hope was that the Clix game would be as popular as Mage Knight and Mechwarrior had been, and that it would draw in a lot of players who previously never played Shadowrun (Which happened in a big way with Mechwarrior). So the novels were written and targetted at folks who had never played Shadowrun, never heard of Shadowrun outside of the Clix line, and who might be a younger crowd, so the Novels, especially the first one, felt more like "Young Adult" fiction.
3) Players had high expectations
This I think is the biggest one... Like the Star Wars prequals, Shadowrun fans had been clamoring for new novels for several years at taht point. Expectations were high, probably too high. I honestly think that any author would have gotten picked apart, especially when you combine points 1 & 2 with it. Zombie Nigel Findley could have written this, and I think people would be talking about how becoming a zombie made him lose his writing ability.
Bull