Delirium's Mistress

Tales from the Flat Earth, Book Four

De: Tanith Lee

Narrado por: Susan Duerden

In the age of demons, when the Earth was still flat, a daughter was born to a mortal beauty and Azhrarn, Demon Lord of the Night. This Daughter of the night was called Azhriaz, and she was hidden away on a mist-shrouded isle, spirit-guarded, to spend her life in dreams. But Azhriaz was destined for more than dreaming. For if her father was the Lord of Night, her mother was descended from the Sun itself.

Her beauty and power soon called to another might demon lord, Azhrarn's enemy, Prince Chuz, Delusion's Master, who worked a magnificent illusion to free Azhriaz from her prison and transform her into Delirium's Mistress.

As Mistress of Madness and Delirium, she would become known in realms of both demon and humankind. And her destiny would make her goddess, queen, fugitive, champion, seeress - and her to whom even the very Lord of Darkness would one day bow down.

©1986 Tanith Lee (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Best series in Fantasy EVER

All 5 books took me into another world. I am now spoiled as none since have been so captivating.

Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth

Susan Duerdan's rhythmic and sonorous narration is a bit of an acquired taste that I've come to believe is perfectly attuned to the Eshvaesqe mystical and dreamlike myths of Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth. Tanith Lee's writing is evocative, brilliant, and unique. And these five are my favorite books from adolescence onward.

Fathers, Daughters, Lovers & a Quest for Mortality

Tanith Lee’s fourth novel in her Tales from the Flat Earth, Delirium’s Mistress (1986), incorporates characters from the first three books as it tells the life story of Azhriaz, the daughter born to Azhrarn (Lord of Darkness) and a mortal woman who was stoned by an angry mob and, apparently, killed by a drop of Azhrarn’s blood thrown with a stone at the instigation of Chuz, Lord of Madness.

The three Books of the novel depict:

--Azhriaz (AKA Sovaz) and her relationship with Chuz as they meet and become lovers, until Azrharn bestirs himself from his relentless mourning to punish Chuz for the death of Azhriaz’ mother.

--Azhriaz becoming an unfeeling goddess to satisfy the will of her father Azhrarn, dedicated to teaching people what they ever refuse to learn, that the gods are indifferent to them, until she attracts the attention of the gods of the Upperearth.

--Azhriaz (AKA Atmeh) searching on her own for mortality in order to become truly immortal, until a moving Epilogue ends the novel.

Azhriaz is often an unappealing protagonist. But her experiences are often fascinating, and her growth is poignant, and her relationship with her father Azhrarn is compelling. Though most of the novel is not narrated from his point of view, the way he gradually changes from seeing his daughter as purely his creation to purely her mother’s is quite moving. Will the climax of their reconciliation ever come?

Throughout Azhriaz’ pilgrim’s progress, Lee writes many scenes of fantastic interest: a region terrorized by a sadistic magician-prince, a city dominated by vampiric ghouls, a city-empire ruled by an appalling goddess, an underwater city aping cities above ground, an ancient ruined city, the annhilation of a city, the epic battle between the Lord of Darkness and an angel born from the sun, a transcendent sex scene, a spell for mortality, a rebellion in the Underearth of the demons, and much more.

The themes of the novel concern the indifference [if not cruelty] of gods (“The gods have no care for men”), the nature of (im)mortality, and various kinds of love (“in the end, love alone remains”), from sexual to spiritual, familial to romantic, and destructive to creative.

Lee writes in the tradition of oral tales like the Thousand Nights and One Night, so she tells some stories in stories, and her narrator is often only repeating what she has heard, as in lines like, “They say the smoke of burning rose up from her footsteps a while then.”

I love Lee’s harrowing, moving, and wise fantasy:
--“That was the bitterness of joy, that it cannot last or turn stale.”
--“Ten years of evil cannot cancel out one day of good.”
--“There’s no worse curse than to sour the sweetness in yourself.”
--“What was the world, but passing things?”


And her potent, poetic fantasy:
--“a wood famed for the egress of things irregular.”
--“husks of petrified poppies.”
--“black and boiling, sudden as meteors.”
--“They passed over geographies magnificent or pestiferous”

Another appealing thing about Lee’s novel (and her work in general) is its ironic humor, like Azhriaz having to listen to men telling her lengthy stories that she only just manages to tolerate, or the sea folk who live in a city where slaves tend to fall from the higher aristocratic districts to their deaths in the lower slums.

Her weird wit makes me smile:
--“It was perhaps foolish to expect good taste among ghouls.”
--“Though they were beautiful, so are fires and leopards.”
--“Even a skull grins cheerfully, as if it knew something the flesh did not.”
--“Its ruin was not epic, only utter.”

Here’s one of my favorite passages, full of rich poetry, vivid description, and bleak wit:

“The dawn had turned to blood and the sun to tarnish. The groaning and the screaming, the prayers, useless and known to be useless, the exhortations, scrabbling attempts at exodus, the burrowings that would yield no safety, the ecstasies of madness and immolation, each and all occurred, the correct paraphernalia of catastrophe. But, seen from the heavens, what was it, but a fomentation in a hill of termites.”

I like how in her Tales from the Flat Earth series, she uses immortal beings to explore the human heart. For demons, who invented love, the carnal act is art and pleasure but never procreative; wizards have prodigious power but often fail spectacularly; the Prince of Darkness Azhrarn must learn how to be a father and can only shed tears with words. Lee’s fantastic beings are sublime and transcendent but also human, distorted funhouse mirrors of ourselves: “So, yes, you are a goddess, so strong with riches and enchantments you might as well be destitute. And so beautiful, you might as well be faceless.”

The audiobook reader Susan Duerden does splendid vampire-ghouls and magician-princes, saintly demons and angelic monsters, and the like! Her base narration has the same singing, endlessly looping rhythm (e.g., “Raising its PLUUUMES to the SKYYY” and “Well BOOORN but POOOR”), which almost put this listener to sleep, but then her excellent character voices, especially her outre ones, vivified me.

The second book in the series (Death’s Master) is my favorite, with the first and third close seconds, but this fourth book also gets five stars because it’s so ambitious, twisted, beautiful, and funny. I’m looking forward to the fifth book in the series.