Prince of Chaos by Roger Zelazny

This is the final chapter in the saga of Amber, if you don't count several later books written by other authors, probably by permission of Zelazny's estate. Merlin learns that Swayvill has finally passed, and journeys back to the Courts of Chaos to join in the funeral proceedings. He finally gets the chance to interrogate his mother, Dara, and elder brother, Mandor, about some of the mysterious events surrounding him through the pentalogy.

It appears that Dara and Mandor may have been behind a number of the assassinations that have taken place in the Courts, all aimed at placing Merlin in the position of heir to the throne. They believe that both through their close connection to him, and through the use of some enchantments they've placed on a magical artifact left for him to find and wear, they will be able to control his actions and be the puppet masters in the realm.

In the meantime, the Logrus and the Pattern are both trying to get Merlin to choose sides in their eternal struggle. Merlin goes on some literal journeys as well as those of the more metaphoric type, trying to find out what's been going on, discover the whereabouts of his father, Corwin, and determine where he will stand and for what.

I've long whined about authors who, as they age, run out of new stories to tell, rehashing old characters and storylines without really telling a good tale. I'm afraid that this was penned at this point for Zelazny. A few puzzles are solved, but nothing of import is really resolved. Read it for completeness sake, but that's all.

Knight of Shadows by Roger Zelazny

Merlin confers with Jasra and Mandor after the assault on the Keep and finds out quite a bit more about what's been going on behind the scenes all these years. A rather fun scene takes place when Mandor is revealed to be a specialist in the sorcery of haute cuisine - he conjures up a wonderful meal on a veranda overlooking one of the realms at the Keep. It turns out that Jasra was responsible for training Merlin's ex, Julia, in the art of sorcery, and that Julia's natural talent caught her by surprise, leaving her as a coat rack.

Julia has allied with Merlin's brother, Jurt, who has had homicidal intentions towards Merlin for a long time, but which have gotten more intense recently as the struggle for succession in the Courts of Chaos has heated up due to the frailty of Sawall, Duke of Chaos. Julia and Jurt have performed a ritual which gives him amazing powers, that Brand (Jasra's husband of sorts) underwent long ago, explaining his near invincibility in the first Amber series at last.

We got set up by Zelazny in the previous book for a shaggy dog type of pun or two here. The chaos demon that serially possesses people near Merlin, the ty'iga, turns out to be named for a specific purpose - so that Merlin can shout, "Hold that ty'iga" at one point and then shortly later, to have to choose between the lady or ty'iga. Groan.

So, as we learned in the previous book that the Pattern is actually sentient, we might surmise that the Logrus (Chaos' version of the Pattern) is also sentient. It appears that they have been in a large scale conflict for ages, and they force Merlin to participate in one of their battles for dominance. He is spirited away to a place or state of being where none of his magic works, the Trumps are dead, and he can't manipulate shadows. There he faces a number of challenges and opponents. Some of these creatures are Pattern-ghosts or Logrus-ghosts.

Whenever a person walks the Pattern (or Logrus) they are "recorded", and can later be reproduced by the Pattern or Logrus, in the same state they were the day they finished walking. So, Merlin is visited by Deirdre, slain by Brand in The Courts of Chaos, Oberon, dead in the same book, an earlier copy of his brother Jurt, his father Corwin (who may not actually be a ghost), Dworkin (thought to be dead) and several others on his quest. Merlin refuses steadfastly to take sides in the conflict, but is tricked into mostly championing the cause of the Pattern.

This one gets pretty surreal for a while before dropping back into a more "normal" narrative. Eventually we get back to the main story, find out what Luke and Dalt have been up to, and solve a few more mysteries.

Sign of Chaos by Roger Zelazny

 Merlin manages to escape from the hallucinogenic world created by Luke, using the Vorpal Blade to get by the Jabberwock (yes, Zelazny steals from Carrol here), though it helps when a Fire Angel (chaos creature) shows up on his trail and the two beasts fight one another. He contacts his aunt Fiona and his older brother, Mandor, and Trumps away from it all. 

Returning to Amber, Merlin works out a way to free Luke's mother, Jasra, from the coat rack curse, and makes plans to use her freedom as a bargaining chip when Luke finally recovers from his far-out trip. A delegate from the kingdom of Begma arrives in town with his daughters, and he is importuned into entertaining one of them, Coral, showing her around town at first. She expresses a desire to see the famous Pattern of Amber, and surprises Merlin by stepping onto the Pattern and walking it successfully. It turns out that Oberon had an affair with her mother, and she (like so many others) bears the bastard blood of Amber in her veins. She uses the Pattern to transport herself elsewhere, leaving Merlin in a bit of a quandry as to what to tell her father.

Zelazny begins to play around with the question here, "What if the Pattern is actually sentient, not just an artifact as we thought in the first five books in the series?" This, of course, leads to some very strange happenings as we progress.

Later, Coral's sister Nayda approaches Merlin, ostensibly to find out what's become of her sister, but it becomes apparent quite soon that she has some other motives, far deeper. When Mandor meets Nayda, he recognizes her as being possessed by a ti'yiga, a chaos demon which can take over human's bodies for a time, and we finally get to know what's been going on with Merlin's odd encounters with people who know far more about his business than they should, and who seem to have a strong urge to protect him from danger. When he checks up on them later, they've usually suffered a form of amnesia covering the time of the encounter. Someone has placed a geas on the ti'yiga to watch over Merlin, and it's been tracking him through Shadow ever since.

The mercenary Dalt appears on the scene and demands that Luke and Jasra be surrendered to him. To avoid a battle between Benedict's forces and Dalt's, Luke challenges Dalt to hand-to-hand combat, with the loser to become the prisoner of the winner. Dalt wins, and disappears with Luke for parts unknown. After that, Merlin frees Jasra and works out an alliance with her to assault the Keep of Four Worlds, freeing it from Mask's domination - at the end learning the identity of Mask and also of another source of some clumsy attacks on his person.

Good fun, still twisty.

Blood of Amber by Roger Zelazny

In Blood of Amber, Merlin begins to acquire bits and pieces of the puzzle he's been assembling regarding who has been responsible for the attempts on his life on April 30 of each year, and probably more importantly, who is trying to kill him now. Flora is able to fill in a few details for him regarding Jasra and the kingdome of Kashfa.

Merlin returns to Julia's apartment to investigate more thoroughly and discovers a hidden portal that leads...somewhere. When he takes that path, he's challenged by a guardian who claims to be "torn from the pure primal Chaos", and both he and we are somewhat surprised when Merlin reveals that he is, himself, a Lord of Chaos. Once past the guardian, he finds his way to the Keep of Four Worlds, where the elemental realms of earth, air, fire and ice meet, and where sorcerors have battled for control of a fountain which contains the power of these four forces for centuries.

The current ruler of the keep is likely to be Merlin's nemesis. Merlin observes an attempted invasion of the keep, in the company of a hermit named Dave (cue all manner of limericks here, and yes he lives in a cave). Dave is full of good gossip and Merlin finally learns about the tie between Jasra and Luke.

When Merlin returns to Amber, he gets a full debriefing from Random, who dispatches some emissaries to Kashfa and its surrounding kingdom. Merlin decides to go down into town from the castle to have a bite to eat, and when leaving the "fine dining" establishment, he is attacked by a group of thugs. He's succored by the armsment of Vinta Bayle, his uncle Caine's former paramour, and she whisks him away to her family estates to lie hidden for a while.

The tale in this tome continues twisty and entertaining. One thing that I didn't particularly like when I first read it was the section at the end of the book where Merlin gets caught up in a hallucenogenic world, complete with Cheshire Cat and Mad Hatter, via a trump contact with Luke, who has been doped up with some mind-bending concoction. It just didn't seem to fit all that well with the rest of the story. Upon further reflection, I decided that Zelazny was actually exploring the ramifications of the concept of Shadow. If Amberites (and Chaos Lords) have, as mentioned by Corwin in an earlier volume, the power to create shadows of their own imagining, what happens when their minds are altered? I still think, however, he could have come up with an original imagining, rather than borrowing from Carroll, but I suppose it was a familiar fantasy that we'd all recognize.

Trumps of Doom by Roger Zelazny

If you get discouraged waiting for the next book in a series to come out, don't feel bad. Zelazny published The Courts of Chaos in 1978, and "The New Amber Novel" Trumps of Doom did not appear in bookstores until 1985. That's a long long time.

Merle Corey is a programmer for a software company called Grand Design, in San Francisco. He has wrapped up his projects and is taking off on sabbatical. As he is wrapping things up, his friend Luke Reynard drops by with a note from his ex-girlfriend, Julia, which prompts Merle to go see her.

The date is April 30, and for the last five or six years, some unknown agency has tried to kill him on that day, for no apparent reason. When Merle arrives at Julia's apartment, he discovers her mauled body, and is himself attacked by a mangey-looking dog analog, which he grapples with, then throws out of a two story window.

Merle is understandably upset by Julia's death, and sets off to investigate the cause, blaming himself a bit. Julia had, from the evidence in her apartment, gotten fascinated with the occult after they broke up, so he heads for the occult bookstore of a mutual acquaintance, Rick Kinsky, to see if he knows anything. Rick tells him that Julia was seeking arcane knowledge that he wasn't able to provide, and she moved on to study under a "master" named Victor Melman, and gives him Melman's address.

When he goes to Melman's apartment to interrogate him, Melman reveals a mural (he's also an artist) on a wall that behaves just like a giant Trump (the cards that transport Amberites from place to place), and is drawn into a confrontation with a cloaked sorceror in a strange Shadow. When he returns victorious from the shadow, Melman attacks him, as well, and Merle ends up killing him before he can get more information.

Zelazny slowly reveals that Merle is actually Merlin, son of Corwin of Amber, and weaves a great tale in the old spirit as Merlin tries to find out who's trying to kill him, has succeeded in killing Julia, and what sort of plots are afoot in Amber this time around. A great return to Corwin's old stomping grounds, and a reunion with the family of Amber.

The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny

This is the grand finale of the first act of the sweeping Amber series. King Oberon has returned to Amber, and has taken over in his usual high-handed fashion, leaving his heirs reeling emotionally. He reclaims the Jewel of Judgement, and is going to use it to attempt to repair the Pattern which was damaged by Brand. The effort may or may not succeed, but it will surely claim his life, either way. He tells Corwin he will name him as heir, but after all which has gone on, Corwin no longer desires it; feeling it was merely a prize in his sibling rivalry with Eric, after all.

Oberon sends Corwin on a mission to ride as far and fast as he can, ahead of the disruption that will be caused by his Pattern restoration attempt, and to receive the Jewel at some point along the way, then bearing it on to the Courts of Chaos, where Corwin can use it to direct the storm to spare the Amberites there. Benedict has been directed by Oberon to gather an army in Shadow and take them to battle with the armies of Chaos, and the rest of the brothers and sisters also join in.

So Corwin begins a strange and metaphorical journey to the Courts, meeting some interesting semi-legendary creatures along the way. Zelazny gets very descriptive and subjective for the middle portion of the book, which breaks from the pace he's set in the early series. Once Corwin reaches the Courts, however, the action picks back up again, and the final confrontation between Amber and Chaos, the fate of Brand, and the disposition of the crown provide a bittersweet and mostly satisfying conclusion to the saga.

The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny

In this installment, Corwin finally begins to figure out much of what's been going on. At the primal Pattern, he and Random and Ganelon discover that the blood of Martin, Random's son, has been shed in the middle of the Pattern, causing damage, with the effects spreading out through Shadow, creating the Black Road which leads from the Courts of Chaos to Amber. Random sets off with Benedict to try to find Martin and determine his fate, as Benedict was one of the last people to hear news of Martin, via some mutual friends in Shadow.

Corwin uses an etching in his old cell, carved by Dworkin, the ancient family wizard to visit Dworkin where Oberon has confined him. He discovers that Dworkin was a rebel son of Chaos who found the Jewel of Judgement on the neck of a unicorn, and used the pattern in the Jewel to inscribe the Pattern, which created Amber and all of its Shadows, unsettling the balance between chaos and order. He is also stunned to learn that Dworkin is Oberon's sire, and thus, Corwin and his siblings' grandfather. Dworkin has gone slightly around the bend, after the damage to the Pattern caused parallel damage in his own mind, and believes the only way out is to destroy the Pattern, while Oberon, when he was last seen, believes there is a way to repair it, using the Jewel as a template.

Corwin journeys to the shadow Earth, where last he left the Jewel, after the attempt on  his life. While he doesn't discover the Jewel, he finds out through his friend and lawyer, Bill Roth, a few more things about the accident that seemed to start off this whole journey. His brother, Brand, seems to be at the bottom of the mess, and he has managed to steal the Jewel to implement his own plans for Amber.

There's a great synopsis of "what has gone before" in chapter 2 of this book, providing a nice refresher for those who wait too long between reading these. I believe the Amber chronicles were originally serialized in one of the pulps, then collected into five paperbacks, and later merged into two volumes by the SF Book Club, so early readers could have easily been left behind.

Corwin also manages to get an entirely different version of the story of the cabals vying for the throne from Julian and Fiona, Brand's former allies. It was they who had imprisoned Brand, fearing his plans for Amber were not really benign. The novel ends with a big reveal of the whereabouts of Oberon, that in retrospect seems almost obvious - the clues were there all along.

More good stuff from a master of fantasy.

Sign of the Unicorn by Roger Zelazny

  Sign of the Unicorn is the third book in the chronicles of Amber. After arriving with an army with firearms when Amber was under attack and Eric lay dying, Prince Corwin is finally at the helm of the kingdom, for the moment. As the story opens, he has been made the prime suspect in the murder of his brother, Caine. He found a note ostensibly from Caine, asking him for a meeting in the Grove of the Unicorn, and when he arrived, he found his brother with a slit throat, killed by a humanoid out of shadow that seems extremely familiar. It's one of the same crew that attacked Corwin, Random and Flora at the beginning of Nine Princes in Amber.

Corwin returns to the castle with the body of the attacker, after placing Caine's body in a shallow grave, and calls Random to his room. He finally gets to hear the story of how Random ended up being pursued. Random was attempting to rescue their brother, Brand, from a strange prison in one of the wilder shadows at the edge of Chaos.

One amusing little passage about his first battle with Brand's jailers:

"Unfortunately, the inconsiderate lout had carried off my blade, snagged in some bony cleft or other he had chosen to interpose when I swung. It was obviously my day for losing blades, and I wondered if my horoscope would have mentioned it if I had thought to look before I set out."

After Caine's funeral, Corwin decides to take advantage of having most of his siblings gathered in one place  and, after having Random relate his tale, uses their combined wills to use the Trumps (powerful tarot cards that allow communication and transport between their wielders) to contact Brand and attempt to set him free. They succeed in this endeavor, but someone in the room attempts to kill Brand as soon as he is in the room with them, planting a dagger in his kidneys. Gerard uses his medical skills to keep Brand alive, and stands guard over him while the others return to their conversation and conspiracies.

When Corwin finally heads off to his room at the end of the evening, he is surprised by an assassin there, and only the effects of the Jewel of Judgement (which occasionally does odd things with time) keep him from being killed, as he manages to partially dodge the lethal blow, and the Jewel teleports him to a place where he subconsciously feels safe, his own bed in his house on the Shadow Earth. While he is there recovering (taking advantage of a time differential between Earth and Amber) he learns a lot more about the accident that put him in the hospital, and becomes more determined to get to the bottom of what's rotten in Denmark...er...Amber.

More good intrigue, and some things that were previously shadowy begin to emerge.

The Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny

  In the Guns of Avalon, we take up the story of Corwin again, sometime after he has escaped from the dungeons where he was thrown by his brother, Eric, after he has recovered at the lighthouse of Cabra enough to travel. He journeys through Shadows to reach a place he once ruled, the realm of Avalon. On the way, he encounters someone who resembles a man who once served him, Lancelot (not a lot of creativity here by Zelazny in naming a noble knight, but he's not central to the long story arc, so we'll forgive it this time. Lancelot has been attacked by a group of bandits, and has managed to kill them all, but is gravely wounded when Corwin discovers him.

On the nature of the multiplicity of Shadow:

"I was drawing nearer to Avalon when I came upon the wounded knight and the six dead men. Had I chosen to walk on by, I could have reached a place where the six men lay dead and the knight stood unwounded - or a place where he lay dead and they stood laughing."

Corwin decides to aid Lance, and so he treats his wounds, gives him something to eat and drink, and then carries him all the way home, to the keep of Ganelon. The name Ganelon gives Corwin pause for a bit, as he once had befriended a man by that name who began as a bandit, but joined with Lord Corwin in ridding his realm of some other villains, and joined his court. But Ganelon felt betrayed by his lord when a title was given to another follower whose daughter Corwin desired, and he turned traitor, then was caught and exiled by Corwin into Shadow, never able to find the way home to Avalon.

But Corwin is far from the man he used to be after his stay in the dungeons, and he decides the risk of being recognized is small compared to the value of having a place to recover his full strength and conditioning, so he names himself Corey, and stays at Ganelon's keep for a while. It becomes apparent to him that this is truly his old retainer, long exiled, and as he begins to regain his abilities, it becomes a little harder to conceal his identity.

Ganelon's land has been beset by horrible creatures out of Chaos, whose number grow daily. When Corwin is visited by one of their leaders late one night, he realizes that this curse upon the land is a direct result of the curse he laid upon Eric and Amber when his eyes were burned from his head and he was thrown in the dungeons. By the way, the royal blood of Amber has always healed quickly, and the recovery of his sight finally proves that even more sensitive tissue than fingertips and patches of skin can grow back with time.

Corwin aids Ganelon and his people in ridding the land of the scourge, then decides he must head for Avalon. Ganelon has by this time recognized him, but has come to realize that he richly deserved his exile by Corwin, and begs to accompany him. They journey through Shadow to that place, and when they arrive, find that Corwin's older brother, Benedict, has become the protector of that land, perhaps in remembrance of his younger brother. They spend some time at his home before going after what Corwin most desires there, which is a compound which behaves just like gunpowder in the realm of Amber, where normal gunpowder does not work. He takes the powder back to the shadow Earth, and has ammunition made, buys weapons, and returns to Amber to continue his assault upon Eric and the kingdom he has usurped.

More great adventure and interesting plots and characters abound.

Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny

This novel is the first in a series of ten chronicles of Amber, written by Zelazny. A group of authors tried to work within the shared world many years later, but didn't produce anything that even came close to matching Zelazny's brilliance.

The story begins in Greenwood Sanitarium, where a man awakens, both legs in casts and with no memory of how he arrived there. It has a bit of a Bourne Identity flavor at first, as he comes to believe he has been kept sedated in order to keep him out of the way of...something. He refuses his meds, and assaults a guard who comes to force him to take them, taking the man's clothes, then intimidates the head of the facility into giving him some information - his name is Carl Corey and his "sister" Evelyn Flaumel has committed him - and some money from the safe. Carl beats feet out of town and heads for upstate New York, where his sister lives.

Still clueless about who he is, Corey manages to trick Evelyn into revealing bits and pieces of crucial information without letting her know about his amnesia. It appears that someone named Eric will not be pleased to hear that Corey has escaped. Evelyn, whose real name, Flora, comes to Corey in a moment of insight, has been sent to the area to keep an eye on him and report if he seems to be regaining his memory. She also calls him by his real name, Corwin. Flora gives him a meal and a place to stay for a while, but while she is off on business during the day, Corwin does some snooping around the house and discovers an odd deck of playing cards hidden in a secret drawer. The Trumps of this deck are painted pictures of a large family, in medieval, court dress, and he is on one of the cards, as is Flora and others whose names he slowly begins to recall.

His sneaking about is interrupted by a phone call from a man called Random, who is one of his brothers, and who is fleeing from some shadowy characters. When he arrives at Flora's house, Corwin discovers that he and his siblings are extraordinarily strong and well-versed in the arts martial, when the three of them dispatch a half dozen thugs with little trouble. Corwin dupes Random into taking him away, and they begin a road trip that rapidly gets strange, as the lands through which they travel rapidly come to resemble no place known on Earth.

It turns out that Corwin is one of nine princes of the realm of Amber.

"Amber was the greatest city which had ever existed or ever would exist. Amber had always been and always would be, and every other city, everywhere, every other city that existed was but a reflection of a shadow of some phase of Amber."

He and Random attempt to reach Amber, but find their way blocked. Along the way they rescue their sister, Deirdre, who has escaped from Eric's hold on her and the city. They make their way to the underwater city of Rebma, where Random is imprisoned for crimes he committed there long ago, and Corwin is allowed to walk the reflection of The Pattern there. The Pattern is a magical creation which gives the royal family of Amber the ability to walk among the Shadows cast by Amber, which includes all the possible worlds, including Earth. Walking the pattern restores Corwin's memory, and sets him on a quest to wrest the kingdom from the usurper, Eric.

An excellent tale, full of sorcery and chivalry and incredible creatures and people.