This fifth volume which concludes the series consists of shorter works set in the time of the previous book, and sometimes featuring characters from that book, such as Azhriaz, daughter of the demon Lord of Night. Love is a main theme as before and in the last one, which ties up with a previous tale in the book concerning a gift made to Azhriaz when she was living as a self-made goddess, we learn what happens to her soul in her next incarnation.

I must admit, after finding that previous volumes 'dragged', I did skim read this and so only fully read about three of the stories. I enjoyed what I read but didn't feel compelled to spend more time to read all of it, so am awarding it a 3 star satisfactory rating. ( )

This series is one of my all-time favorite fantasy series, but it's been probably 10 years since I read the original trilogy. This one didn't blow me away like those books, but it had the same fantastical, emo, gothic, fairy tale feeling. Tanith Lee is often hit or miss with me, I've read many short stories from her that bored me to tears, but I liked ALL the stories in this collection, so I definitely recommend it, especially if you've read the other books and you like dark, fantastic fiction. ( )

This last of Tanith Lee's Tales of the Flat Earth books consists of seven distinct stories, set mostly in chronological parallel to the novel Delirium's Mistress that preceded it. Thus it returns to the looser form of the earliest books of the series. The Lords of Darkness and their ladies make occasional cameos among the first five tales of this book, but there is no development of their larger biographies. Lee does expand her fantasy cosmography a little, notably with an adventure on the moon. Among these stories, the ones I found most enjoyable (and which would probably best stand on their own as examples of Lee's work in this series) were "The Prodigal" and "Black as a Rose."

Only with the final two stories does Lee take up and extend the ending of the story of Atmeh that she had reached at the conclusion of Delerium's Mistress. Accordingly, in both form and content, this book feels like a relaxation and a winding down from the climactic antepenultimate volume of the series, but there is no slackening of quality. The human protagonists are a robust mix of types, and the story resolutions vary widely from happily-ever-afters to catastrophic demises. The prose is measured and beautiful, and the plots satisfyingly exercise deep tropes of traditional storytelling without becoming predictable.

The final story of the book is "The Magician's Daughter," and the first of its five chapters involved magical eugenics in a way that reminded me of Aleister Crowley's Moonchild. Where these books generally seem to occupy a somewhat eroticized band of the Dunsanian part of the fantasy spectrum, this story added some of the the style and substance favored by Clark Ashton Smith. Witness the sentence: "None of the windows or doors would give save at the recitation of a particular vernacular rhomb" (240).

I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who had enjoyed its predecessor volumes. Although composed of short stories and novellas with their own plot arcs, it relies on the prior mythopoeia of the other books, and I'm not sure it would serve so well as a starting point. It does bring the full series to an over-brimming richness of super-completion.

Read, favourite. ( )

The Basics

Night’s Sorceries serves as a companion novel to the previous volume in the series, Delirium’s Mistress. While the events of Azhriaz’s story are unfolding, she and the other players are inadvertently affecting the human lives that stray too close. These are their stories.

My Thoughts

At first I wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that this story is not a continuation of the Tales of the Flat Earth so much as an expansion upon the last book. Yet like most of Lee’s books, it endears itself so quickly that I couldn’t be annoyed by that for long at all. Each of these tales has a different tone to it, some light and fluffy, others dark and cynical. Each one brings something fresh to the table.

One of my favorites was “Children of the Night”, wherein a young woman is betrothed to an evil lord. That sounds pretty straightforward, but the story is anything but. It has a decidedly Midsummer-Night’s-Dream feel to it, with a lot of whimsy and humor. In the same vein as that play, dark and powerful creatures are about their business, and humans get caught in the crossfire.

The hardest part of reviewing a book at the end of the series is my fear of spoiling someone into not wanting to read it at all. That would especially be a shame with a series as amazing as this one is. Having said that, in the spirit of not giving away too much about the ending, the last story, a substantially long one, does turn out to be a continuation. It’s beautifully done and as well crafted as I could hope. A wonderful note to end on, though I am hopeful that this won’t be the last we see of this series.

Final Rating

5/5 ( )