#nights master

[sharkchunks]

Covers of the first four Tanith Lee "Tales of the Flat Earth" books

[knightofbluh]

I just finished reading Night's Master by Tanith Lee and I deeply love the prose and the mythic fantasy of it. It sprawls as individual stories loosely tied together by several elements, Azhrarn the Prince of Demons, several mortal characters etc. It's all very ornate and lush 90s fantasy baroque which is an aesthetic i really fuck with. The played-straight fantasy where demons and underearthers delight in misery, demonic baubles have an inexplicable sorcery that compels humans kind of fantasy is something I've missed in my recent readings.

I suppose i have just outgrown aspects of it, where teenaged me would have voraciously gone through all of it without batting an eye. Now there are many parts that just bothers me with the gender and whiteness of it all. The gender part encapsulating really bioessentialist assumptions of sex and gender, and while I really like glittering beauties and handsomeness in prose, I feel like I'm being flashbanged everytime paleness/white skin is synonymous with beauty in this world. Which is kind of a shame because there is so much gender fuckery with the male characters. It's really just-- a product of its time. Tanith herself was writing around feminists but wasn't really one until much later on and Night's Master is one of her earliest works so it might change. I've read reviews of her later works that branch into scifi and other spec-fic genres which might have better articulations of gender/race etc but for now it bothers me.

[libraryofnika]

˖ ࣪⭑ :･ﾟ✧ 📖 𝟕𝟖: 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭'𝐬 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 (𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐥𝐚𝐭 𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡 #𝟏) 𝐛𝐲 𝐓𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐋𝐞𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰

I don't know if you've heard of this series before, but I really want to share this one with you all about a classic fantasy series I started that I also discovered on booktwt last month.

This first book delivers this kind of dark, weird, and fairytale like world and formatted like an interconnected collection of mini/ short story within the same world lore or realm.

There's a whole rich and established world or lore here, like Gods and Goddesses, origins of the world that I believe would be expanded more in the next books.

It was a really intriguing read for me. I would say I would recommend this. If you're interested in my full thoughts of this first book, my review is at the end.

P.S. Read this last April for the classic fantasy book club on booktwt 💗

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[tyresw]

Qebba should be allowed to ascend to Odium, as a treat