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I got really sick in the middle of reading this -it honestly doesn't take me a month to read a couple of hundred pages.

Vance's world is a dreamy, fin de siècle where the world is ending not with a bang but with a slow and decadent slide. His characters (with a few remarkable exceptions) are horrible people doing horrible things to other horrible people, speaking the sort of flowery language that make Fritz Lieber seem like he's writing a Norse saga, but somehow it all works and you're immersed in it.

Few writers could pull off dialogue like

“We go in the mental frame of adventure, aggressiveness, zeal. Thus does fear vanish and the ghosts become creatures of mind-weft; thus does our élan burst the under-earth terror.”

or

"Guyal turned away and they continued down the gallery. Past the real expression of man’s brightest dreamings they walked, until the concentration of so much fire and spirit and creativity put them into awe. “What great minds lie in the dust,” said Guyal in a low voice. “What gorgeous souls have vanished into the buried ages; what marvellous creatures are lost past the remotest memory … Nevermore will there be the like; now in the last fleeting moments, humanity festers rich as rotten fruit. Rather than master and overpower our world, our highest aim is to cheat it through sorcery.”

(both from the closing novella, Guyal of Sfere)

completely straight-faced and have it work, but Vance manages it. It's pulpy and funny and cynical and reasonably unlike anything else I know of (though I need to investigate M. John Harrison's The Pastel City which I suspect may have the same energy).

A very interesting read, as a precursor to the urban fantasy genre, an adventure where you don't quite know what magic is real, what rules it follows, even as you are told directly and not exactly what it is. A wonderful romp through the magical land of Seattle.

A very interesting read, as a precursor to the urban fantasy genre, an adventure where you don't quite know what magic is real, what rules it follows, even as you are told directly and not exactly what it is.