n  “Long time ago when the Earth was Flat...”n

The fourth and final* full-length novel in Lee's Flat Earth fantasy series - inspired by ancient mythology and Biblical stories (although the content is FAR from religious in any traditional sense) charged with a high degree of romance and sexuality - brings the story to a beautiful conclusion. Unfortunately, to get to that conclusion, you have to slog through a very long, very slow meandering first 80% that can really try the reader's patience, even if you are a fan of Lee's ornate prose. But that last 20%, if you make it, ties in many of the characters and events of the earlier books in a very satisfying way for those who have read the entire series.

*the fifth and sixth installments are short story collections
 
n  “What is any of this to us? Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.”n

This book is a mess. It is a disaster of a mess. It is perhaps the biggest reading disappointment I’ve experienced this year. I had waited over a year to continue with the Flat Earth series. I had waited due to lack of availability of the books. So you can imagine my excitement at the DAW reissue. Tanith Lee is one of my favorite authors so I was salivating in anticipation to continue with this awesome series. Except that this book wasn’t as awesome as the previous books. It has some good moments with some interesting ideas touched on here and there but it doesn’t all come together into a cohesive tapestry like Night’s Master. The stories feel disjointed with tenuous connections between them. The interweaving of stories that made Night’s Master such an interesting read fell flat and simply didn’t work in this one. None of it really made much sense. Tanith Lee also added in a story with strong horror elements that felt jarring because it was out of place, this series being epic fantasy. The character of Aziziaz isn’t nearly as interesting a character as her father. Except maybe for at the beginning I never really felt for her plight. The characterization in general felt weak as the descriptive elements and random stories that didn’t fit well within the overarching narrative were emphasized to too great a degree. Tanith Lee normally writes great but even the writing itself seemed inconsistent in this novel. The writing was lackadaisical in places, while rising to Tanith’s typical magnificence in others. All in all it was an uneven effort that did not entirely consistent with the rest of the series. I was considering giving it three stars but that would seriously be going easy on it so I decided to give it two stars and treat it just like any other novel. Tanith Lee doesn’t get a free pass just for being one of my favorite authors. Hopefully I’ll like the next book in the series better.

I read Night's Master a while back and loved it. Tanith Lee's sumptuous prose and intriguing, unique characters left me wanting to delve deeper into the Flat Earth series.

I, however, have had to curb my spending, and am currently relying on my city's library system for my reading material. The library doesn't have Death's Master or Delusion's Master available to check out, so I had to jump right into Delirium's Mistress. I read summaries of Death's Master and Delusion's Master before starting on this one so I wouldn't be completely lost. They only helped a little, as there were a number of references to the previous books that I didn't completely 'get'.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed it. The Flat Earth series has some of the most imaginative settings and descriptions that I have ever read. Tanith Lee has an imagination on par with Alejandro Jodorowsky, in my opinion, and it is always a pleasure to dive into the visions of such a creative mind.

The story itself meanders along in its way. It's a little slow and I found myself regretting that Chuz wasn't in it more, as I found him to be the most compelling character in the book (obviously I need to read Delusion's Master). The ending was incredibly bittersweet and succeeded in bumming me out a little. Overall, it had a good sense of finality to it, even though this isn't the last Flat Earth book.

I'll definitely be renting Night's Sorceries once I finish a couple other books I have waiting for me.

Beautiful language as to be expected from Tanith Lee. I found it hard, however, to follow the plot in this book. Took me forever to finish it. Still a great work of fiction.

This book is one of a series that are wonderfully written. They are adult fairy tales not for the faint of heart, where demons are unbearably lovely yet they are prone to damaging those things they take an interest in. You can start anywhere in the series, but it's best to get the backstory by starting at the beginning and working up to this one.
Tanith Lee's language is the main draw in these books. They are lush and opulent to a fault but they are well plotted and nicely paced so that you're not left floundering in a sea of purple prose.

Many years ago, a friend of mine suggested the Flat Earth books from Tanith Lee. I immediately fell in love with the first three books and Tanith Lee became one of my favorite authors. I tried to collect everything she wrote. I'm kind of a slow reader and she was a fairly prolific writer, so I figured I'd never catch up. Then she died and it was sad, but there was hope that I might read everything she had written. BUT then I started not enjoying her writing. Most of the stuff I read from her now I either find extremely boring, or I love it. But none more than those original 3 Flat Earth books. I was really hoping that this 4th book would recapture the magic, but it fell short. The style was the same, but it seemed to drag and just wasn't as engaging.

Maybe it's me that has changed. I mean it has been probably 30 years since I read the original trilogy. Maybe I should go back and read them again, but I worry about ruining the memory of loving them.

NOTE: These books have nothing to do with QANON conspiracy theories. So if you got excited when you saw the words "Flat Earth", I suggest you go back to YouTube and do your "research" there.

I had been kind of resentful with this book for many years. But after listening to the audio version of the whole series, I felt I could appreciate the series, especially the last few volumes, truly now. So I got so excited when the e-book version of the series started becoming available and felt grateful for that. This book reminded me that this series is also stories of mankind.

As much as I love this series, I have to dock it points for rampant colorism— I’m sorry, one of the few brown-skinned women in this book is compared to a CAMEL, and Lee’s preference for blond and pale skinned heroes and heroines becomes very uncomfortable when you remember how heavily inspired the series is by Persian and Middle Eastern aesthetics. Also, the book barely passes the Bechdel test and,,, would it kill her to have a FEW magical women who aren’t either evil or dead?

Aside from that, it is tightly plotted with Tanith Lee’s usual deft hand with gorgeously gothic description, so it still evened out for a generally enjoyable reading experience.

magic + wisdom = awesome
I mean really, this book explains how humans came to be, no kidding.

This is my least favorite of the Flat Earth books. It's as long as Death's Master, being roughly twice as long as both Night's Master and Delusion's Master, but it failed to hold my attention all the way through like Death's Master did. The overall premise is simple enough: in the previous book, Delusion's Master, Azhrarn hatched a scheme to punish the mortals of Earth and teach them that worshiping the gods is foolish. Here, that scheme comes to fruition – Azhrarn has sent them a goddess-queen to rule them with a platinum fist and to show them first-hand, up close and personal, how capricious and indifferent the gods really are. His plan is so audacious that finally even the actual gods of Upper Earth are required to take notice and act. Shenanigans ensue.

It'll help if you have a pretty good recollection of the events of Death's Master and Delusion's Master, because they'll be referenced a lot. There will be a repeat visit to the city of Simmurad, and those crystalline drops of Azhrarn's blood will continue to have an important part to play. And if you wanted a more definitive end for Zhirim/Zhirek in Death's Master (I know I did), well, it turns out he's still around. It seems he's been sitting in that same cleft in the rock tower in the desert for a few centuries. And he'll come out of the rock a different person.

There is some cool stuff here – as always, Lee's prose and worldbuilding are a delight. This story features a visit to a city of vampires, a repeat visit to the Undersea in a marvelous Drinn-built ship, a titanic clash between the powers of Under Earth and Upper Earth, and a coup d'etat in Under Earth. And it is quite satisfying to see people who perpetrated great crimes see the error of their ways and voluntarily spend mortal lifetimes atoning for them.

But the downsides are primarily two-fold:

First, we follow Azhriaz for the entire story, but for most of that journey, I never really connected with her as either a heroine or an anti-heroine. She spends the early part of the book in the teenage rebellion stage, even changing her name for a while because she wants nothing to do with Dad. Then she gives in and agrees to go along with Dad's scheme, which involves playing the role of goddess-queen to a rather large nation and being as temperamental, demanding, and arbitrary as she wants. She's been godlike in power her whole life, but she has all the foibles of mortals, and after spending years as the most pampered queen on earth, she's never had to do anything for herself. I never felt she matured beyond the sulky brat stage. In her sojourn in the Undersea, where her powers were greatly diminished and she was in real danger for the first time in her life, she resorted to threatening to call her daddy on them. That was a real low point.

Azhriaz is an example of the maxim that familiarity breeds contempt – we've only ever seen Azhrarn as a fully formed adult and the ultimate example of his kind, and he awes and terrifies us while also delighting us. It's hard for us as readers to feel that same level of awe for Azhriaz because we literally saw her born, knew her as a baby, and we know that while she's part demonic, she's also part mortal, and that mortal part is an inexperienced, sheltered, indulged young woman. She reminds me a bit of Kylo Ren, the super-powerful brat of Star Wars infamy – the audience couldn't take him seriously as a villain because all they could see was the spoiled, rebellious teen. Azhriaz has a similar credibility problem. But I will admit her character arc, although it took far too long and there was a mess of BS along the way, was ultimately satisfying, as she finally undergoes a real growth process late in the game and matures into herself and her own, nothing more nor less.

Second, the plot is a bit of a sprawling, pointless mess – nearly the exact opposite of the tidy, perfectly crafted jewel that is Night's Master. People, demons, and angels are tramping around all over the place, and a lot of it doesn't advance the plot at all – a prime example is the visit to the city of vampires. It was a long, detailed sideshow that had no apparent point except perhaps to let everyone see the power of Azhriaz first-hand. Ditto re-visiting the ruins of Simmurad, which was tantalizing, but proved to have no point at all. And there were several points in the final quarter of the book where Lee had good opportunities to wrap it up and make a satisfying ending of it, but she passed them by and kept on writing. Not that the final ending she actually wrote was bad, but it was at least the third ending in the excruciatingly long denouement.

So. I think Lee's fundamental mistake was trying to write a full-length novel focusing on a single protagonist and a continuous plot, which is just not her forte. She managed it, just barely, in Death's Master by splitting the narrative among several significant protags, but making us care about only ONE protag for an entire 400 pages was a bridge too far. I'm convinced Lee is at her best when telling a short fable, as we see from the story of the moon and sun late in the book, which is the most superlative chapter in the whole book even though it's a complete sideshow and doesn't advance the plot at all. In that tiny story, we don't need to connect with the characters as PEOPLE, and it doesn't much matter if it has a point, because it's such a delight all on its own. Night's Master was such a gem because it was a string of exactly those kinds of small self-contained stories, with just enough connection between them to form a satisfying whole. Like pearls on a string, each one a small perfection in its own right, and together forming something even more beautiful.

Nevertheless, a bad book by Tanith Lee is... still decent. 3 stars. Enjoy it for the prose and the scenery, and try not to fret about the shortcomings of the characters and the plot.

Audio Notes: I've seen saying all along how damn good narrator Susan Duerden is, but here she impressed me all over again because we meet a character who's almost but not quite exactly like Azhrarn in every way, this being one Hazhrand, the SECOND most powerful Vazdru in Under Earth. His voice is almost but not quite exactly as seductively breathy as Azrahn's, but is audibly distinct from Azhrahn's, being sightly lower and even more musical. I haven't been this impressed by a narrator's ability to give similar characters distinctive voices since Aldrich Barrett made every Oonkali sound totally unique and yet all recognizably Oonkali in the Xenogenesis trilogy.

Another consistently brilliant installment in the books of the Flat Earth series, Delirium's Mistress describes the rise and fall of Azhrarn's daughter, Azhriaz. She is arguably the most developed character yet in Lee's defining series, as well as providing deeper insight into previous characters (most notably Zhirek) through the foil of her own adventures. The prose poetry of these novels is crystallized here, every page containing playful, artful and startling turns of phrase and pointedly improper and thought provoking word usage. This is a classic novel of fantastic literature that deserves more recognition than that which it has received from the rabid, disparate members of the Tanith Lee Cult.

I seem to be enjoying each volume less than its predecessor. Perhaps I am wearying of the storytelling style. As the longest of the Tales, it did tend to ramble at times, almost to the point of incoherence. Or else it was just a matter of my waning interest.

The ending was poignant, however.