The Passage Reads (as an ending to Ixion's Wheel: A Threnody by Michael Shea):
"It was the volte-face of eurydice except I was aristaeus, driving her on towards the serpent. 'Malachi, Maalichi...' Twice she called me by my name, twice she beckoned me with her outstretched dactyl. I stood in darkness and she in light, and yet here i was the diurnal, and she was the crepuscular, if such a neugatry distinction pertain. The aurora was breaking, the island, sea-girt, was fast stirrin. I looked at her again, her dermis pellucid in the lambent sunshine seemed as if a fish skin pulled taut. She gave me one last glancing look, and then stepped off, and plunged down into the waxing viridescence of the Ionian Waters below.
Morus Tua, Vita Mea.
The End."
Also posted in r/writing
The only ones I can find are like 1k each. Why are these books not available anywhere?
Tidying up my bookshelves during COVID lockdown has given me the chance to review several older books that were popular when published but are slowly and unfairly declining into obscurity. As noted in my previous posts, these reviews are from memory, not re-reading, and my opinion is certainly affected by a heavy dose of nostalgia. However, these are books that I liked well enough to keep them on my shelves for a long time.
Sadly and unjustly, Michael Shea seems to be a permanent fixture on the list of “Top Fantasy Authors No-one Has Heard Of”. There’s obviously an element of exaggeration to this, but for someone who won two World Fantasy Awards he is nowhere near as well-known as he should be; he seems to have fallen into that fatal gap between the “founders of the genre” and the “modern masters”.
Nifft the Lean was the book that won Shea his first WFA in 1983, a marvelously creative compilation of four linked stories about Nifft the Lean, a thief without equal. The world that Shea created for Nifft is a far cry from the currently popular medieval or renaissance-like worlds of thieves such as Locke Lamora. Shea was an accomplished writer of horror as well as fantasy, and I remember Nifft’s world as fantastic and horrific in equal measure. In writing Nifft the Lean Shea drew from the tradition of authors such as Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Robert E Howard, HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith (and doubtless other authors I don’t recognize) to create a wonderfully baroque and grotesque world inhabited by dead gods, live demons and a truly unique bestiary of creatures. The titles of the four stories in the book convey something of the flavor of the world and Shea’s writing: “Come Then, Mortal. We Will Seek Her Soul”, “The Pearls of The Vampire Queen”, “The Fishing of the Demon Sea” and “The Goddess in Glass”. (“Come then, mortal. We will seek her soul.” is a two-sentence horror story in its own right). The stories take Nifft to the worlds of the living and the dead, pitting his skills as a thief against the worst of both. Whether you need souls stolen from the underworld or pearls from man-eating oysters, Nifft’s your man thief.
This book is for you if you’re looking for one of the best thieves in the genre, for horror fantasy with a flavor of Vance’s Dying Earth, or for an introduction to the work of an outstanding author of fantasy and horror.
This book came onto my radar thanks to the Alzabo Soup podcast. One of the hosts described it as "the literary equivalent of Dark Souls" so I was immediately intrigued. Turns out, it is fairly difficult to find. There is no e-book version available that I could find and I had to settle for buying a used paperback for $20 (which seems very steep but I can only find them for $50-60+ now!)
There are four short stories with the premise that they are being told by a historian as a eulogy to his friend Nifft the Lean, a famous thief and adventurer. The first, Come Then Mortal. We Will Seek Her Soul. was probably my favorite. It details a mission Nifft and his companion take into the underworld. It's full of truly imaginative grotesque imagery. The best way I can describe it is if HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard teamed up to write a Dark Souls-style quest. My favorite part was the description of a lake teeming with human monstrosities, including men growing like kelp from the lake bed with their nerve fibers fanned out like coral, and tiny crabs with human faces scuttling along them.
Pearls of the Vampire Queen was more of a straightforward heist story with a lot of fun dark elements. The pearls in question have to be wrestled from lethal polyp creatures that will strangle men who come too close - and they are not as deadly as the other creatures lurking in the swamp.
Fishing the Demon Sea sends Nifft and his friend back down into hell on another quest. Shea's hallucinatory imagination is really running wild in this one. Some of the demons encountered include a giant scorpion with an old woman's face and a sea creature that uses bundles of nerves to control people like puppets and feed off their misery.
The last story is The Goddess in Glass. This one mixes fantasy and sci-fi in wonderful ways. I won't spoil it but bits and pieces of mystery fall into place with this story in a really satisfying way.
I really wanted to gush some more about this book but giving too detailed of a rundown of each story wouldn't do them justice. I haven't seen this book discussed here, only a small handful of mentions on the fantasy subreddit. Unfortunately I think it may be hard for most people to track down, but if you like dark fantasy and you can get your hands on it, I highly recommend it.
Hello, I would super super appreciate if someone had the Nifft the Lean trilogy to send me on either Audible US or UK. I've been looking to procure this book in either ebook or audiobook format everywhere, and saw on some blogs that Audible apparently used to sell it. So if anyone per chance still has a copy lying around, please consider sending it to me.
Thanks in advance!
...and it was excruciatingly bad. The characters lacked any real motivating animus. They were supposed to be hunting "delphs", encounter a new creature who kills a few of their colleagues and then they decide to hunt it. Unlike Moby Dick, however, none of the crew seem particularly fussed over the lost crew. A biologist spends his time trying to understand the creature and there's a love story thrown in. I don't even know if I want to continue with the rest of the short stories. Am I being too harsh or should the book go back to the charity shop whence I initially found it (maybe the previous owner had the right idea?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphemus_(book)
The late writer Michael Shea contributed several times to Vance's Dying Earth series, but what did you think of it and how does it compare to the rest of the series?
Yang might be out of the race, but the movement isn't over!
Michael O'Shea is running for congress, and he is running on a platform endorsing a form of UBI. He is a Bernie supporter, so he also has many of Bernie's central ideas/policies on his platform, but I figure anybody who is going to plug UBI in congress is worth voting for to keep the buzz going. Consider giving him your support in the primaries.
