Night's Master by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Parables of Sex, Cruelty, Beauty, Humor, and Fantasy Tanith Lee’s Night’s Master (1978) reads like The Thousand and One Nights crossed with an occult Bible (or any demonic play on the Christian myth) filtered through Tanith Lee’s distinctive fantasy vision: compact, meaningful, unpredictable, controlled, imaginative, and erotic. Its three “Books” (Light Underground, Tricksters, and The Lure of the World) are each comprised of two “Parts” made of three short story chapters each. It all coheres as a composite novel oriented around an enigmatic satanic anti-hero, the demon king Azhrarn, “Lord of Darkness, Master of Night, Bringer of Anguish, Eagle-Winged, the Beautiful, the Unspeakable,” and his relationship to humankind and the world. The wicked, playful, and vengeful Azhrarn is irresistibly (devilishly?) beautiful and charismatic, and to see him is to love him, often to one’s cost. He manifests as male (usually) or female (occasionally) and is catholic in his amours. The parable-like interconnected stories relate the often-unintended results of Azhrarn’s or his minions’ interference with mortals, including his adoption of a beautiful boy, his challenge to a blind poet, his makeover of a mutilated sorceress-queen, and his three attempts to seduce a virginal bride. The Master of Night likes to present himself as icily detached, but there are moments like this: “If Azhrarn heard that last cry, who knows. Perhaps he was watching in some magic glass for the end of the youth, and saw him drown; perhaps for a moment some of that awful pain hurt his own throat, and in his mouth, which spoke so wondrously and with such charm, perhaps there came, for the moment of a moment, a taste of green salt water.” For this first book of her Flat Earth Series, Lee envisions three realms: the Underearth of the demons, the Flat Earth of human beings, and the Upperearth of the detached gods who made the earth and people and have long since regretted and tried to forget the mistake, leaving humanity to the whims of the demons. (Of course, Lee makes it clear that people don’t need interference from demons to do awful things to each other: “The snake had learned the speech of man centuries before, for hatred and jealousy must find a tongue; only the creatures which never feel these things have no need to talk. Therefore, the snake spoke.”) Some stories feature lesser demons, like a great one where an ambitious bottom feeder worker demon called Viya crafts an exquisite necklace with tears for jewels, which Azhrarn sends to the Flat Earth, where it plays on human weakness to tally a high body count: “A collar constructed in ambition and pride and jeweled with sorrow could only stir up greed and smiling fury, and bring weeping after.” In addition to that necklace of tears, Lee conceives other fine fantastic things, like love-sick demonic groans that turn into bats, a Chair of Uncertainty, cursed diamonds, a bitter sorceress-queen, a wizardly cold war, a cloud of Hate, a woman made from a flower, a tree with flowers of ash… She does interesting things with gender, too, as in depicting people’s souls as half female and half male, or as in making the gods of Upperearth genderless, or as in having a raped princess get a fitting revenge. The book is, as the original (best!) DAW cover says, “an adult fantasy.” Lee writes lots of varied sex: male-male; male-female; demon-human; demon-spider; snake-snake; comical-horrible; etc. The stories are funny and terrible, exquisite. Lee’s prose is terse, lush, controlled, poetic, and savory, reminiscent of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth and prefiguring Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but all her own. I love the tone of her narrator, an unblinking but winking serpent’s eye, with an ironic delivery of beautiful images and a no-nonsense approach to cruelty. She thinks nothing of killing her heroes, innocent or villainous, but she allows (occasionally) for redemption or resurrection. Here is one of my favorite passages embodying the appeal of this book: “In those days a curse or a blessing was like a bird. It had wings and could fly. And the stronger the blessing or the curse, the stronger the wings and the farther the bird could go. The curse of Bisuneh was very strong, for everything in her, who had once been named Honey-Sweet, had turned as bitter as gall. And the bird of the curse, which was of a color never seen by mortals save with an inner eye--the vivid color of pain and the dark color of brooding--flew unerringly towards the earth's center... and perched upon Azhrarn’s shoulder, he both saw and felt it. Azhrarn smiled. Perhaps winter smiles when it bites dead the leaves on the trees. ‘Some mortal has cursed me,’ said Azhrarn…” View all my reviews
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