Customer Reviews

Delusion's Master (Daw science fiction)

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In the third book of the Tales of the Flat Earth, Tanith Lee once again takes us into the dark and mystical world where five Lords Of Darkness reign over the inhabitants of the Flat Earth. One is Azrharn, Night's master, whose beauty and cruelty riddle the lives of the mortals with living nightmares and sensuous wickedness. Another, Uhlume, Lord Death...and a third - Delusion's Master. He is Prince Chuz, and he plagues the world with madness. When his sights are set on touching Azhrarn with a bit of lunacy, he begins a war of the titans, which cannot be resolved until justice has been served..

From the first scene of the woman cradling the finger bone of her dead son to the final stoning in the city of dreams, this book is what fairy tales and fantasy should have been all along. Mystical this book puts you into a completely different universe and wakes you to possibilities unimagined. More profound is the painter's aesthetic running through the book. Color, lights, shading, description without running into the awful Victorian novel trap. Tanith Lee is definitely a voice to be reckoned with.

Delusion's Master is the third book in the Flat Earth books by Tanith Lee. While the first two (Night's Master and Death's Master) stand very much on their own, Delusion's Master is the beginning of a story that will take the Flat Earth stories through two more volumes.

In Delusion's Master, Lee introduces us to Chuz, the eternal master of insanity. He stage manages the fall of a great nation which indirectly leads to the strange love affair between the Master of Night and the Daughter of the Comet.

The Flat Earth books are structured more as a series of linked stories than as traditional character-oriented narratives. They are short and pleasant to read. Lee herself is a master of dark fairy tales and uses the structure admirably.

While you can begin with Delusion's Master, it probably makes the most sense to go back and read Death and Night first. Although the sexual content seems rather tame by the standards of today (this was written in 1981) these are still adult-themed books and probably not suitable for very young readers.