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"Creatures of Light and Darkness" Discuss Everything *Spoilers*
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Dan
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Apr 30, 2019 09:36PM
This topic is created so we can dig deep as we deconstruct this text! Just kidding. Once you've read the book, it's okay to put spoilers here in this topic in order to adequately discuss this speculative fiction (is it really Weird?) classic. So, who's ready to pay homage to an Egyptian god or six?
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In another group, we're discussing robots. Going in, I thought I knew what a robot was. I don't. The more we discussed them, the less I knew, so I found this passage particularly interesting.“That may be the beginning of wisdom, then. You could as easily be a machine which I chose to incarnate as a man for a time and have now returned to a metal casing, as you could be a man whom I have chosen to incarnate as a machine.”
“Then what difference does it make?”
“None. None whatsoever. But you cannot make the distinction. You cannot remember. Tell me, are you alive?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I think. I hear your voice. I have memories. I can speak.”
“Which of these qualities is life? Remember that you do not breathe, your nervous system is a mass of metallic strands and I have burnt your heart. Remember, too, that I have machines that can outreason you, outremember you, outtalk you. What does that leave you with as an excuse for saying you are alive? You say that you hear my voice, and ‘hearing’ is a subjective phenomenon? Very well. I shall disconnect your hearing also. Watch closely to see whether you cease to exist”
… One snowflake drifting down a well, a well without waters, without walls, without bottom, without top. Now take away the snowflake and consider the drifting….
After a timeless time, Anubis’ voice comes once again: “Do you know the difference between life and death?”
“ ‘I’ am life,” says Wakim. “Whatever you give or take away, if ‘I’ remain it is life.”
Last year I took a course in Biology. The authors of my text found defining life challenging as well. For them it was the border cases, fungi, virii, and maybe other forms I'm not remembering. In your quote the question is more philosophical than physical. TV series like Battlestar Galactica and Caprica wrestled with with not only the question of what it is to be life, but went further by examining the ethical implications of various possible answers.
Should intelligent life be afforded the privileges and protections of humans, for example?
Is anyone else reading this? The second chapter about the Witch of the Loggia is very short & weird. A loggia is a gallery or room with one or more open sides, so that opens possibilities. She deals with Time as a proper entity & enemy. Tarquin was the seventh and last Etruscan king of Rome who was expelled for his cruelty, so it's a great description, although dealing with a different land than the first chapter. Anubis & Osiris were both mentioned there & they were Egyptian. Also, the last line of this chapter mentions that ...Janus is again doing things by halves….. Janus was the Roman god of doors & time. He has 2 faces.The mad poet Vramin is mentioned. He'll show up quite a bit throughout the story, next chapter, in fact.
The third chapter, "DEATH, LIFE, THE MAGICIAN AND ROSES" contains one of the more famous bits of this novel, the Agnostic's Prayer, perfect for every occasion.
Even back when this was written, Zelazny was thinking about tailored children. Since a gene pattern can be constructed to satisfy the parents’ specific wishes and substituted surgically for the nucleus of a fertilized cell, she is liable to see anything born and often does.
I ordered my book during early morning hours of May first when I knew this book was to be the group read. I hope others did too. That said, since both books that won the polls this month had to be ordered, I'm expecting a little down time as people's copies arrive through the mail. I very much look forward to beginning this book. One nice thing about having a short story collection and a novel win this month is that they're easy to read simultaneously. One can start the novel, and then when slightly tired of reading it can refresh with a short story, and then resume the novel. That will be my approach anyway.
Just noticed Zelazny's He Who Shapes won a 1965 Nebula. Amazing!I'm looking forward to starting this book as soon as my copy arrives. Does anyone else other than Jim have theirs yet?
Zelazny's dry sense of humor permeates this book. “You are a deviant from the social norm!” she announces, striking him again.
“Is that an insult or a diagnosis?” he asks.
I sometimes wonder just how deep the joke goes. This was written in the late 60s, so many things were changing. For instance, homosexuality was still considered a psychiatric disease. I think the last time it was voted so was in 1974.
I find it helpful to look up various names. For instance, The Prince Who Was A Thousand visits his wife, Nephytha. There's an Egyptian goddess Nephthys who fits this role admirably. The link makes for some interesting reading given what we've just read about the Red Witch.I've seen complaints that Zelazny didn't stay true to the various mythologies in his novels. I don't know why anyone thinks he should. They're used as a basis & lend themselves to allusions, but they're not a straitjacket. Besides, most mythologies mix things up a lot anyway.
I haven't read many complaints about the myths in this book, but it's mind bending enough that I guess no one expects it. More often it's how he treated the Hindu pantheon in Lord of Light. I'm not sure why anyone would expect accuracy from the crew of a colonization ship that used religion to rule the descendants of passengers. It's obviously a political tool.
The meeting between Typhon & Anubis tells us a lot about what is going on & the various balances of power. Typhon is an interesting character, a shadow shaped like a horse that seems to be incredibly destructive. The name is actually that of a Greek deity. His parentage is uncertain, his powers tremendous, & his offspring are the worst of monsters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhon
I'm trying to read This Immortal by zelazny, so I haven't gotten to this. But you made me break my rule about not buying physical books (often used books are moldy, which sets my allergies off). Fortunately, I got an OK copy and will start after finishing This Immortal and Ancillary MercySo next week, maybe.
Kateblue wrote: "I'm trying to read This Immortal by zelazny..."That's one of my all time favorite books. I reread it every few years. Is it SF or fantasy? Just who is Conrad? I love all the allusions & dry humor scattered through it. Excellent characters & descriptions of them too like the way Lorel emerges through his pipe.
Unfortunately, it has a terrible publishing history. It was another award winner as a short story that was serialized in the mid 60s. He turned it into a novel for Ace, but they butchered it. They left out a very important paragraph early on about Radpol. Later reprints were apparently copied by drunken monkeys considering all the typos. While I love my paperback copies of the book, I consider the original short story "Call Me Conrad" the best rendition.
THE COMING OF THE STEEL GENERALWhat a character! ...he has placed himself beyond the law by always obeying its spirit rather than its letter. He can be defeated, but never vanquished. Vramin's introduction is worthy of P.T. Barnum, too.
The Steel General has been mentioned before & now he's fleshed out, but the chapter is short & then another starts to heighten the tension. It lends to the madcap pace of the novel. Just as I start to piece things together, there's a new distraction.
Horus goes to the world of D’donori. A search for "Donori" brings up a small village in southern Sardinia, Italy. It has about 2000 inhabitants & made me think of Corleone - the village that The Godfather hailed from. It's a good foundation for the picture that Zelazny paints of the planet.
As gloomy as it is, the entire chapter had me chuckling the entire way through. The "Many sheets of that monthly journal the Ligla Times" are used to great effect.
...but of all scriers, I know scatologists to be the queerest sort. Take Freydag, now. He’s quite nearsighted, he says, and this means—“
“They are my innards! I will not have them misread by a poseur!”
What did Megra do to Isis? I shall give you a gift that is all unhuman wisdom and human shame. doesn't sound very good.
After 12 days' travel my copy finally arrived to my mailbox! I read the first chapter, about 12% of the book, and am hooked already. I like it when authors let us know up front who the protagonist is and what he will be trying to accomplish. Here we have just two main characters, some interactions so we get a sense of the type of people (or gods) they are, and the mission: (view spoiler). What a premise!
Both of these characters are very interesting too. Can't wait to see how it plays out.
I'm glad it's grabbing you, Dan. I think you'll like it.THE THING THAT CRIES IN THE NIGHT
is the chapter that spells out the great war & what is happening. While we've had to figure most of it out already, this puts a bow on it & explains some odd bits that have been floating around. Typical of Zelazny, it's halfway through the story, though.
MARACHEKI wonder if this is supposed to be an allusion to Marrakesh which is sometimes spelled Marrakech, so it's just reversing the 'kech', kind of. If so, it is a future, abandoned version. This is reinforced by 'the Citadel of Marachek-Karnak', Karnak being the abandoned complex of temples near Luxor, Egypt. It's quite a vivid description of enduring desolation that brings to mind Ozymandias - both poems.
Madrak makes a great straight man for the extravagant Vramin in their byplay.
“Oh, cynical monger of indulgences! ‘Twould take a man of the cloth to work a scheme like that!”
“Speak not to me of ethics, thou inhuman humanist!—Caterer to whatever life-lie man chooses! Th'art an holy ambulance-chaser!”
“Do not forget, Madrak, that I am the poet, and kindly reserve such conjectures to those better able to say them with a straight face.
SEXCOMP is an interesting, if odd interlude. Who would have thought that Saint Jakes the Mechanophile would be considered a heretic?
CHIEF OF MISSIONS is wonderful! They players meet. I won't say more until some others have caught up.
I'm now one third of the way into the book and am really enjoying it. Reviewers who say there is no plot are mistaken. They need to put the book down and return to it later once they reach a point in their reading lives when they can set aside the conventional demands we all like to make upon an author and open ourselves to the experience of just reading. That should be followed by contemplation of what we have gained or learned from the experience of what we just read.After the set-up I wrote about earlier, we now have the confrontations between the characters. The characters are not introduced to us. No narrator tells us what the scene is, who the participants are, or what the stakes are for each. Zelazny simply thrusts us in, telling us what is happening and giving us the dialog we need in order to understand. Most of that understanding comes AFTER the reading, not before, as more conventional authors do.
I've never read anything written in a style that's quite this extreme, but I have read someone recently whose style approaches this: C. J. Cherryh. I'm not sure I'd like a steady diet of this any more than I read a lot of Cherryh, but I'm up for the challenge every now and then.
One really neat thing about Zelazny's novel already is the complexity of the characters. When I reread this novel, and this novel is deep, densely written, and rich enough to demand rereading, I will keep a character chart and really try to deep dive into who the characters are, how they relate to one another, and what their motivations are. Zelazny writes enough so that we the readers can figure this out, but we have to do 80% of the work to do it rather than the author doing it for us.
I'm glad you're enjoying it, Dan. I hadn't read any of the reviews that say there is a lack of plot, but I read this long before GR. I wonder if they actually read the book since it's about the only obvious thing, IMO. It's also laid out in the chapter/poem "THE THING THAT CRIES IN THE NIGHT". That's kind of jarring since this is mostly a novel. That's half the charm as it's filled with a variety of styles. Entire chapters are mere vignettes that make no sense until much later. The reader has to hold a lot of disparate pieces in mind until they start to gel.A lot of Zelazny's books are sparse on information. It's part of what makes them rereadable since so much is left to the reader's imagination, but it also requires careful reading & attention to detail. Some demand a reread after some mulling over & this is one. There are generally several ways to interpret the story, too.
I guess I am not getting to Creatures of Light and Darkness this time. I thought I had a paperback copy around here somewhere, but I cannot find it . . . I did read it years ago, but the only thing I remember is there was like a half person half robot slot machine prostitute or something similar.
Kateblue wrote: " . . . I did read it years ago, but the only thing I remember is there was like a half person half robot slot machine prostitute or something similar."Ah, the "electrical-mechanical-biological votary of the god Logic". Definitely memorable. Sorry you won't be joining this group read.
I happen to be on the chapter "NIGHT BECOMES HORUS" in which he meets the "electrical-mechanical-biological votary of the god Logic". We aren't told who she is, but can certainly guess given what has gone before. The Red Witch is inscrutable & devious in her ways. She meet Vramin in the next chapter in the House of the Dead.Set battles "The Thing That Cries In The Night" in the following chapter, "UPON THIS BANK AND SHOAL". I notice that a lot of the descriptions of this most horrific of monsters make it sound like a nuclear explosion. I'm not sure if it will read that way to everyone, but Zelazny has used some of the same words in his other books, especially 'an old man with a long beard, miles high'. I believe he used that in "Lord of Light" & "Damnation Alley".
Is this monster nuclear bombs? I think so. At the time Zelazny wrote this, the Cold War was going strong. I don't think we were doing air raid drills in school any more then, but the paranoia was strong & tensions were high between the US & USSR. It also explains the devastation & why it is so hard for Set to kill it.
The "INTERMEZZO" quickly catches up on how things are going in other places we've visited. We also find out that Puff the Magic Dragon resides on the planet with the memory of the Prince's wife. Makes sense.
I'm going to stop here. I'm almost finished & the last bit is hard to put down.
Jim wrote: "At the time Zelazny wrote this, the Cold War was going strong. I don't think we were doing air raid drills in school any more then, but the paranoia was strong & tensions were high between the US & USSR."In Tennessee, where I attended third through ninth grades, no year passed without a nuclear bomb drill. I remember single filing out of my classroom when that distinct siren went off. We faced the hallway wall, got down on our knees, and extended our arms up to protect that most precious commodity our school officials so seldom used--our heads. This would have been 1972-78.
Since Tennessee is a very conservative state, things that would have been discontinued in other states might have gone on there another decade or two.
I've forgotten who it was that first suggested this for a group read, but whoever you are, I want to shake you buy the hand and buy you a beer, because it's my new favourite novel.I finished reading it late last night and immediately wanted to go back to the beginning and read it all again. For a slim book it's absolutely teeming with images, characters and ideas that speed by so fast you barely grasp them before they're gone.
In lots of obvious ways it's an inappropriate comparison, but it actually reminded me of Moorcock's Cornelius novels (this is a good thing because Jerry Cornelius is a) a real person and b) the love of my life). I adore the psychedelic mash-up of mythology, cosmology, scifi, magick, sly humour, different writing styles jostled together, big ideas wrapped up in a fast-paced romping plot. (All of which I try to do with my own writing too.)
The only thing I didn't love about this book was its treatment of the female characters. In all those vast worlds there are only two significant female characters, and their function in the plot is basically to be consorts and/or incubators. That wasn't ok in 1969 and it's not ok now. It's also a missed opportunity, because both characters have huge potential to do and be more interesting and exciting things. Shame.
This was my first encounter with Zelazny. I'm intrigued by Jim's reference to Lord of Light (the Hindu thing is another Cornelius resonance) and will have to check it out. Dan's renewed my curiosity about C. J. Cherryh too, as she's been on my "must get around to" list for a very long time. But before I read either of those, I might need to read Creatures of Light and Darkness again, just for kicks.
I'll admit to being the one to recommend this book. Glad you liked it so much. I've tried a couple of times to get into the Cornelius Chronicles & never got far. I think I still have an omnibus around & will try it again. I liked Elric, Corum, & Hawkmoon. I also adore this book, so you've given me another reason to try. Thanks.
Treatment of female characters... Sigh. It comes up so often with books of this age, as you say. The last couple of times groups have read Stranger in a Strange Land, a book once praised for its support of feminism, younger readers thought it was awful on that score. "We've come a long way, baby!" Too far, too fast for most to remember.
I was also sorry the Red Witch didn't get more time in the story. She was obviously very powerful & damaged. She says she fears the conflict, but it's really Set that she fears. He's shown to be a real nasty piece of work. Great as an ally in a crisis, but hell to live with.
The end of the book really pulls things together & also made me want to go back & start over to put all into a better order. Thankfully I've read it enough times that there is no need this time."Die Luft ist kuhl und es dunkelt, und ruhig fliesst der Rhein" that comes into Vramin's head translates to:
"The air is cool and it darkens, and the Rhine flows calmly"
It is a line from "The Lorelei" by Heinrich Heine, an early 19th century German poet. There's a quick bio & translation of the poem to make more sense of it here:
https://www.thoughtco.com/heinrich-he...
(Zelazny frequently makes me run to Google!)
Some said Zelazny shouldn't have ended the book the way he did, but I thought it worked very well. Definitely a strange journey.
Jim wrote: "I've tried a couple of times to get into the Cornelius Chronicles & never got far. ... I was also sorry the Red Witch didn't get more time in the story."Yeah, the Red Witch (view spoiler) WTF? I mean, really?
Now I'm going to feel responsible if you try Cornelius again and still don't like it. The storylines and characters are not at all like those in Creatures of Light and Darkness. It's more the underlying attitude and the scale of ambition that are similar.
No harm or foul if I don't like Jerry again. I wouldn't have kept the book around if I didn't mean to try it. Yeah, she's definitely a puzzler, especially the way she keeps retreating from the world. Considering her husbands though... She sure can pick them. And then what she did to Megra & her son? Very weird. Did she know what children she would bear with her husbands? How much does she see & feel? To do what she did with Megra & Horus... So much vision - too much? Is that why she keeps retreating?
The more I think about her, the more intriguing she is. All of the men are so powerful, but even Thoth is fairly easy to understand. She is an enigma, though. She's also extremely powerful in her own way behind the scenes, so subtle & powerful when she wants to be. Yet she seems scared & vulnerable.
Jim wrote: "Yeah, she's definitely a puzzler..."An uncharitable explanation would be that she's just not very well written, because she's more of a plot device to move the male characters' stories along than a thought-through character in her own right. But I actually really liked the fact that she was so full of contradictions – as we all are in real life, after all.
I found the copy I thought I had. I knew it had to be here somewhere. I will be starting it, but I am not sure I will be done by the end of the month. I have enjoyed the discussion here, though.
Is Thoth female in this book? He was originally a male god, right? (And also an interesting street violin performer in SF and NY.)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._K._T...
No, Thoth is male, just supposed to be inscrutable, but she has him beat.Zelazny isn't great at female characters, I guess. None of the princesses of Amber were much. Oh, he had several queens, but he didn't seem to have much for them to do.
I finally managed to finish this book; doing so was work. I didn't appreciate it as much as others did. My review, such as it is, is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...That said, I am not upset I read it. There was a lot to think about even in what little I understood of the book. I am thrilled so many others enjoyed this book and got so much more out of it. I do think it was a good and "an unique" choice for Group Read. I love and am proud that we claimed this title for Weird, and agree it belongs here.
I guess it takes a woman to point it out, but I never noticed how small the role of women was in the book until Merl mentioned it. I kept expecting Isis to feature, and was disappointed she only got a cameo. The Red Witch passages were even more confusing to me than most of the others.I just went through the list of Amber characters, and while there are many women, you are right about them being the minor characters Jim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
Kateblue wrote: "... there was like a half person half robot slot machine prostitute or something similar ..."The book Les Enfants de Mord from 1979 also contains a prostitute slot machine. I thought only the French would publish something so weird.
I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it much, Dan. You're right that he was unclear about a lot & that's not unusual in his books. Keep in mind this was supposed to be a private exercise, too. That's not an excuse, IMO. He seemed to be more interested in getting stuff published than polished in several cases that come to mind, a notable one his lack of rereading Nine Princes in Amber before writing The Guns of Avalon. Some time passed between the two & he didn't keep notes, so he screwed up Eric's lineage.He does expect the reader to keep far too much in their mind for a first read. This book didn't really tickle me until the third read, I believe. Since then, I've found it better each time. The first time through many of his books, I'm so busy trying to figure out what is going on that I miss many of the subtleties. The second time through, I know what's going on & can concentrate more on the text. It's usually quite good, but there are often other layers revealed on a third read. IOW, for anyone who wants to read a book once, Zelazny is probably not going to be their favorite author. At least they're short, but they're never quick.
Zelazny wanted to be a poet, but decided there wasn't any money in it. He detested being locked into a genre & seemed to love to slip back & forth across the line. Lord of Light is definitely SF, but the setting & ending is so fantasy-like that many think of it as a fantasy. This Immortal is SF on the face, but again there's a lot of fantasy (mythology) in the setting & it can easily be read that way depending on how you interpret the many allusions. (Who is Conrad? Is he really the Great God Pan?)
And then there is A Night in the Lonesome October which is a fun, facile story that seems straight forward until one peeks under all the allusions. I've read it maybe a half dozen times with groups here on GR & now have over 20 pages of notes on it. There's a LOT of subtext, but most of his books do contain a lot.
There's also his love of strange formats. This book was full of changes in form, but relatively straight forward. Lord of Light starts in the 'now', jumps back in time & slowly works forward until the next to the last chapter has caught up with chapter 1. Then the last chapter continues on & is the climax. A lot of people miss that first time jump & are hopelessly lost from the outset. Zelazny requires careful reading, not skimming.
Today We Choose Faces starts in the past, jumps to the future, but the main character has tried to improve himself by blocking his memory, so the following chapters are both a journey into the past as the story continues forward.
Doorways in the Sand is an SF mystery. Every chapter starts in the middle of the action, looks back to the beginning & then concludes on a cliff hanger. We then start the next chapter without the cliff hanger being resolved - it must be, but we don't know how. We get caught up in the new situation, only to be brought back to resolving the original situation & then work ourselves back into the next cliff hanger & start it all over again.
One of the oddest & yet most satisfying is Roadmarks which follows several characters through time which is a road. People & other things drive on it. Exits slowly change, sometimes new ones appearing while others disappear as events are changed. Chapter 1s are all written about one character in sequential order. Chapter 2s are about the rest of the characters, also written in sequential order, but then he pulled them out, threw them in the air, & put them back in between the Chapter 1s pretty much randomly.
I've babbled on enough & The Boss says dinner is ready. Anyway, he is a pretty weird author in a lot of ways & I can certainly understand not everyone appreciating having to read a book 3 times to really get it.
Thanks Jim for that really interesting overview. I am definitely going to be reading more Zelazny from now on.
You're welcome, Merl. He writes fantastic short stories, part of his wanting to be a poet. Packs a lot into a little. I don't care much for any poetry, even his, though. He wrote some real stinkers, too. The Millenium trilogy written with Sheckley (The didn't work together well.) & the one he did with PKD are both unreadable, IMO. I never cared for The Dream Master, one of his early achievements, either. YMMV, of course.
I liked everything he did with Lindskold, who lived with him the last few years of his life. Coils, which he wrote with Fred Saberhagen, is a favorite. I could go on, but if you think we have similar tastes, you might check out my reviews of his books here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
I think I've read & own all of them, save for To Spin is Miracle Cat, a poorly edited collection of his poetry that is grossly over-priced.
You can also find out more about him & his books in the Zelazny group. It's nicely laid out, but pretty dead. The moderators don't keep conversation stirred up. Still, Chris Kovacks checks it & he's the primary editor of Zelazny's Collected Works, a real expert. You can find the group here:
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
I immensely enjoyed every one of Zelazny's Amber books (five stars I thank I gave each) when I was in my early twenties. I found them highly accessible and did not have to struggle in the slightest to understand them.I take your point on the need to be able to focus on 'Creatures' with 100% of my waking attention. I wasn't able to properly do that this time. Another thing I often do that I didn't on this read is keep a character chart in which I write what of importance is revealed of each character as the character is introduced and/or reintroduced. For most books one line per character is enough. For this one when I reread it I'll leave space for four or five lines. Rather than sell the book, my usual m.o., I'm keeping this one in my library in order to reread it one day. When I do, I'll reread it in three days, devoting 2-3 hours of my full attention each day to the reading. I imagine I'll be able to upgrade my rating then.
Thank you for taking the time to share your insights into all of Zelazny's body of work. It has helped me reconsider my previous writing off of Zelazny.
I agree, Dan, that Amber is much more accessible than Creatures. I remember almost not taking Nine Princes in Amber out of the public library years ago because I had read Creatures and probably also This Immortal and Lord of Light, and I just wasn't sure Zelazny was for me. But then Amber became one of my faves, so it just goes to show you can never tell.
Zelazny had a lot of range. You might try Damnation Alley if you just want a straight forward, post apocalyptic, hell-drive across the US with a nasty anti-hero. Hell Tanner is the last of the Hell's Angels & they force him to make what is probably a suicide run for CA to MA. It's a lot of fun, IMO. Quick read, too. Great imagery & action; not much thought. Don't judge it by the terrible movie that was made from it starring George Peppard & Jan Michael-Vincent in the 70s.My Name is Legion is 3 SF-mystery stories about a fixer who takes on tough jobs. He's hacked the world wide data net, so he can be whoever he wants to be. They've held up well even though he developed the idea before the Internet.
There were some overriding themes in this book that I tend to wonder about long after reading. I really liked the ideas of the 'tides of life' & how they were controlled through the stations. We're never told how that works or what any of the other stations were besides the House of Fire which Typhon used to rule, although how he actually touches any controls is rather difficult to understand. We're there were other Houses that controlled things & kept life/death flowing more evenly. Vramin & Madrak both controlled one, I think. Maybe Madrak was just a helper. Neither of them seem to fit into the mythos in any way that I can figure out. The Red Witch (Isis) & the Steel General never seemed to have Houses & were just among the 300 immortals. That leaves a lot unaccounted for which leaves the story wide open. Of course, all the odd aliens & how we're told nothing about the development of the system does that, too.
Especially at the end, the characters go from individuals to forces of nature. That fits well within the mythology, but is often difficult to reconcile with the story. Just how is Thoth ever going to get back to the business of running the cosmos if he's so busy sowing monsters for Set? Will he be able to reembody his wife?
I found Vramin one of the most interesting characters. His passion for writing obscure verse & casting it about in a seemingly random fashion makes for some great lines & scenes throughout the book. He seems to embody the randomness of life, its passions, & fleetingness.
Definitely a lot of loose threads fluttering about. It makes no sense & yet overall seems to make some.
Weird Fiction
Books mentioned in this topic
My Name is Legion (other topics)Damnation Alley (other topics)
Lord of Light (other topics)
This Immortal (other topics)
Nine Princes in Amber (other topics)
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