Individual Stories

• Creatures of Light and Darkness

  Immortals loosely based on the Egyptian pantheon battle for the control of a many dimensioned multiverse. Unusual powers, mythic, epic tone. In this work, you can see many of Zelazney's ideas for the Amber books and Lord of Light being worked out.

• Lord of Light

  Transfer of intelligence into cloned bodies allows virtual immortality on a strange world in the far future. A soceity strongly reminiscent of India is enforced by an oligarchy posing as deities. But the world is in for some change. Also written in Zelazney's epic style, a book both of sweeping magnitude and surprising humor. (Sometimes billed as the sequel to Creatures of Light and Darkness, it is not set in the same world)

• The Mask of Loki

  Another book on immortals, this story follows the exploits of an immortal assasin and the constantly reborn avatar of chaos and change throughout the eras, finally ending in a showdown in the near future. (This is another book which is sometimes billed as a sequel to Creatures of Light and Darkness or Lord of Light, but actually has little to do with this. My recollections of this story are hazy at best, so please excuse any factual inaccuracies herein. If you have better information, please email me at msulliva@wso.williams.edu and I'll revise the entry.)

• A Night in Lonesome October

  What other author would tell you the story of why you should cheer on Jack the Ripper through the voice of his dog? This book is light-hearted, a short read, and a bunch of fun. It's great brain candy for one night.

• Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming

  Comedy in a style somewhat reminiscent of Douglass Adams. A demon is sent by the powers that be in Hell to win the millenial contest with Heaven, proving the inherently evil nature of man. However, our demonic protagonist's plans are fraught with the small setbacks that everyone in the modern world is all too familiar with.

• If at Faust You Don't Succeed

  Comedy. The sequel to Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming. More of the same... Human nature and cumulative minor setbacks constantly frustrate a demon out to prove that humanity is inherently evil.

• A Farce To Be Reckoned With

  Another sequel to Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming and If at Faust You Don't Succeed. I have not read it.

• My Name Is Legion

  My memories of this book are hazy in the extreme, but from what I can recall, it's a future-spy story, an almost legendary man who assumes the identities of dozens and even hundreds of people for the, as usual, shady purposes of his parent organization. Damn if I can remember what the plot is.

• Jack of Shadows

  It's been a while since I read this one, so forgive any factual inaccuracies. In a far future world, the Earth has stopped rotating, and the sunlit side is a world of technology, while the night side is one of magic. Shadowjack is caught in the middle. Rather rough, as I remember it, but with some interesting ideas, similar in tone to Creatures of Light and Darkness.

• Changeling

  A great novel, and a little different from the take on fantasy that Zelazny typifies with the Amber series (and so many others). For once, our protagonist is not an immortal, nor, indeed, very knowledgable at all. He is Pol, the son of an evil sorceror exiled in his infancy to a world of technology. To retain parity between the worlds, the infant son of an engineer, Mark, is brought over to the world of magic. However, when Mark grows up, he proves to be more of a menace than Pol ever could have been, and the mage who first made the "Changelings" brings Pol back over to combat his counterpart. The magical system is interesting, and Pol is a pretty solid anti-hero in a book about not belonging.

• Madwand

  The sequel to Changeling, and the further adventures of Pol, who now is trying to take his place among the wizards of his birth-world. Madwand spends a lot more time on the mechanics of the magical system than did Changeling, with (I think), mixed results. I found Madwand not quite as compelling a story as Changeling, but very interesting from the point of view of world-building. (Note: Changeling and Madwand have also been printed in a collected edition titled (I think) Wizard World).

• Unicorn Variations

  A collection of short stories (and it should be noted that Zelazny both liked shorts better than novels and considered himself better at them) with fantasy themes. The only one I remember solidly is the first and titular one, in which a human and a Unicorn play chess for the fate of the world. Needless to say, the human cheats.

• Isle of the Dead

  It's a novel. I've read it. A lot of people really like it. I have absolutely no memories of it, which probably means I read it way too young and didn't understand a word. I think it relates to immortals somehow.

• Donnerjack

  A collaberation novel with Jane Lindskold. It may have been finished by Lindskold after Zelazny's death. In a world in which the 'Net has become almost another plane of existance, Donnerjack is a warrior/programmer poet who faces down three artificial intelligences who have become as gods. I have not read this book, but even from this brief description, fans of Zelazny can no doubt see that it returns to many of the themes that Zelazny has been writing about throughout his career. Whether it was a fresh and interesting look at the epic style, or a boring rehash, I don't know.

• "Harvest Moon"

  "Harvest Moon" is a short story, not a book. It's in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker universe, and is collected in one Berserker book or another. I had to include it here, though, because it's an incredible short story, and ends up tying into a lot of the other stories in the collection-which-I-can't-remember-the-name-of. A soul of a poet in the memory of a machine, trying helplessly to guard a fragile world against the Berserkers, and wow. Read it.

• "Damnation Alley"

  Another short story, this one about a vaguely Road Warrior-like post-apocolyptic world in which a condemned criminal is offered a pardon in return for couriering vital medicine to a plague-besieged town. Action mixed with moral pondering and maybe even redemption. There was a movie made from this story, but I don't know the movie title, nor have I seen it.