Web of the Spider by Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon

His laugh was part irony, part true amusement.  That Tiana woman was a magnificent fool.  He had explained to her the hopelessness of the odds against them...and she remained arrogantly confident.  The fire-haired beauty was certain that her wit, strength and skill would bring her out victorious!  If vanity and confidence were gold, he mused, it's she who'd be the owner of the world!

It is time to finish Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon's War of the Wizards trilogy--here is the third volume, 1981's Web of the Spider.  Web of the Spider was part of Pocket's Timescape line; "Timescape," we see on the publication page, is a trademark owned by Gregory Benford.  (That's a little SF trivia for you.) 

Like Part Two of War of the Wizards, The Eyes of Sarsis, Part Three has a cover by Rowena Morrill.  I think this is one of Morrill's better paintings--the flying woman's pose seems more balanced and less static, and her face has more life than the people in many of Morrill's other covers.  I am apparently not alone in thinking this an above average sample of Morrill's work--this painting was the cover for 1983's collection of Morrill's work, The Fantastic Art of Rowena.

This third volume of Offutt and Lyon's trilogy is an elaborate production, with 24 pages of glossary and gazetteer in the back, and a two-page map of Tiana's world in the front.  (A look at the map and gazetteer reveals that some of the geographical names are homages to Edgar Rice Burroughs.)  Preceding the main text, there's even a (terrible) poem about Tiana, Pyre and Ekron!  War of the Wizards is a labor of love, and Offutt and Lyon put real effort into it, which you can see in the text, and which is a welcome contrast to things like Ken Bulmer's Kandar, which feel like they were just thrown together haphazardly to meet a deadline.

Back in 2015, when I read Andrew Offutt's The Iron Lords, I reported that Offutt used repetition to give that novel a poetic and epic feel, and in the brief "Prolog" to Web of the Spider, in which we gain insight into the character of antagonist Ekron, the wizard, we see him employing these devices again.  For example, in just three short pages Ekron is described numerous as he whose "soul was that of a toad and whose god was the Spider."

The beginning of the main text feels like a mash up of elements from the earlier Tiana books.  We find our heroine a captive of King Hartes of Thesia, and it isn't long before the Thesian High Magistrate is pressuring Tiana to go on some dangerous mission--the same sort of thing happened to Tiana, and to other pirate captains, in The Eyes of Sarsis.  The High Magistrate knows a way Tiana can fake her death and escape being burned alive in the execution scheduled for her--quite reminiscent of the aristocrat in The Demon in the Mirror who knew a way Tiana could play possum and be buried alive in order to sneak into the royal tomb she wanted to loot.

(In case you are wondering, that is Tiana on the cover in the costume she was given to wear for her theatrical execution ceremony, in which she is to portray a bird in a gilded cage set over a fire.  As crazy as this may sound, there is evidence that the Romans would dress condemned criminals up and force them to play some theatrical role as they were executed; check out this blogpost and the scholarly article upon which it is based.)

Tiana escapes her execution, in the process immolating the entire Thesian ruling class, and then discovers a magical artifact, a skull in a box, in the tunnels under Thesia's capital city.  While she is making her way back to the port, dealing with soldiers hunting for the artifact as well as a dangerous witch as she goes, her foster father Caranga and the crew of her ship, Vixen, are making themselves the new rulers of Thesia.  Shortly after Tiana and Caranga are reunited, while they are trying to consolidate their rule over the kingdom, an international naval task force arrives to restore their idea of order by overthrowing the new pirate government.  Tiana and company escape by sailing the Vixen down some river rapids no ship has ever successfully navigated before.

Tiana is informed by the intelligence apparatus of her native country that the magical skull is somehow connected with the secret ruler of the world whom those in the know call "the Owner."  The Owner lives on a distant island and periodically requires tribute from the mortal kings of the world in the form of particular magical items and shiploads of attractive women, four hundred women a year!  (The fact that Tiana and Caranga, who spend all their time at sea and in ports talking to other sailors, haven't heard of this guy, who receives shipments of esoteric valuables and female slaves from all corners of the globe multiple times a year, and who has destroyed "vast armadas" sent to bring him to justice, is something of a plot hole.)  The Owner sends a heavily armored dragon to burn up the Vixen, but Caranga spots a vulnerable patch on its belly and, Bard-the-Bowman-style, kills it with a thrown harpoon.  Then Tiana contrives to have herself captured by the Owner's mysterious henchmen, the "Moonstalkers," and added to the cargo of comely women aboard one of his mysterious black ships, bound for his secret island HQ.

The character of Tiana presents a problem to the authors (and to readers.)  She is the best at swordfighting, the best archer, the best at detecting poison, the best at picking locks, the best at climbing, a skilled surgeon, and able to beguile any man she meets with her body, so she is never in any kind of physical danger.  Tiana is also never in any kind of psychological danger.  She lacks any kind of strong motivation or goal that might be frustrated (she just seems to care about stealing stuff and selling it and only gets involved in all these crazy missions because wizards manipulate her) and she doesn't feel any need to prove anything to others or to herself--the authors actually make a joke out of her boundless self-confidence and self-esteem.  Tiana has convinced herself that she never feels any fear, she has absolutely no doubt that all the killing and stealing she does is fully justified, and she is constantly complimenting herself on her looks.  It is hard for readers to care about or identify with such a character, and it is hard for the authors to generate any tension in a narrative about such an invulnerable character's adventures.  This might not be much of a problem in a short and brisk piece of fiction, or a piece of fiction meant primarily as a comedy, but in total War of the Wizards is like 600 pages and (I believe) is trying to provide "thrills and chills."

Offutt and Lyon solve this problem by surrounding Tiana with, and devoting large portions of the books to, characters who are more psychologically complex and more fallible than their lead character.  Pyre, Bardon and Caranga all face serious psychological challenges, so I could put my feet in their shoes, and I was never sure they would have happy endings, so I was genuinely curious as to how their stories would work out.

Interspersed with the chapters about Tiana's adventures are chapters about the adventures of another of these memorable secondary characters, a knight.  In a little homage to medieval literature, the authors describe this dude as "dolorous," and well they might!  Pyre, one of the world's greatest wizards and inveterate foe of Ekron, manipulates the knight in such a way that he guides him to his castle, and then erases his memory.  The knight doesn't know his name or nationality or anything!  Pyre even puts an enchantment on him that makes it impossible for anyone to see his face, including he himself--when he looks at a mirror or other reflective surface, he just sees a blur!  Pyre teleports the Grey Knight (as he takes to calling himself) across the continent, putting him in charge of an attack force of Northerners (Viking-type guys) and sending him off to the nation of Naroka, where Ekron is based.  In The Eyes of Sarsis Pyre equipped Bardon with a magical devices, and the sorcerer similarly provides the Grey Knight with a box of goodies that will help him in his dangerous mission.  The knight uses these goodies to infiltrate the court of the king of Naroka, as well Ekron's own forbidding castle, to gather valuable information, and then to sneak aboard the black ship upon which Tiana is held captive. 

The black ship is crewed by the living dead, and the women aboard are confined to tiny filthy cells where they eat maggoty rations; Matrix-style, these beauties suffer the illusion that they are inhabiting luxurious apartments and supplied with gourmet meals!  Of course Tiana is able to see through the illusion and sets about hijacking the ship, a task she accomplishes with the aid of the Grey Knight.  (War of the Wizards is full of the undead and full of illusions, and it is not just evil magicians using such sorcery to bedevil Tiana--a friendly wizard like Voomundo used animated corpses to aid Tiana, and much of the magic provided by Pyre that smooths the Grey Knight's way consists of illusions.)

In the last hundred pages or so of Web of the Spider things take an apocalyptic turn.  For one thing, Tiana, who has been fending off men unworthy of her throughout the trilogy, falls in love with the nameless and faceless Grey Knight and the two are joined in a rough and ready impromptu wedding ceremony.  Equally revolutionary, on the Owner's island the newlyweds--and the Grey Knight's father-in-law Caranga, who arrives in the Vixen, bearing that magic skull, not far behind the black ship--precipitate a cosmic battle between good and evil of world-shattering proportions.  In a perhaps shopworn bit of imagery, the battle is manifested as an enthroned white-clad and white-haired man seated across from a throne inhabited by a shadowy blackness, between them a chess-like game board with pieces in the shape of Caranga and other pivotal individuals and objects.  Should the darkness win the game, the world will be enslaved, but, because all humans carry within them at least some small proportion of evil, in the event that the figure representing pure Goodness triumphs, all human life will be extinguished!

(I wonder if all this imagery and cosmology owes anything to Michael Moorcock's Law and Chaos and Balance themes, seen in his many Eternal Champion stories.  Also, there is a scene in which Tiana explains to another character how to correctly pronounce her name, which reminded me of the scene in Fritz Leiber's Nebula-award-winning 1970 story "Ill Met in Lankhmar" in which Fafhrd explains to the Gray Mouser how to pronounce his name.)

Fortunately, our heroes figure out how to assure the battle is a stalemate, and then, when Ekron launches his final attack, Tiana, with her detective brain solves the mystery of who the Grey Knight really is and with her quick wits tricks Ekron into destroying himself.  The status quo of the world and the human race is preserved, and our heroes get a happy ending.

The apocalyptic ending goes on a little too long (the final battle in The Eyes of Sarsis was better), but I enjoyed Web of the Spider and the entire War of the Wizards trilogy.  The magic is interesting, most of the action scenes are entertaining, and the three books feel like the work of people who put some serious effort into writing them derived some pleasure from their work.  One telling piece of evidence is the minor characters: Offutt and Lyon make them, all the many monarchs and aristocrats and lesser witches and magicians whom Tiana exterminates as well as her friends and supporters, interesting by providing each with some memorable personality quirk or motivation or relationship with some other character.  I recommend Web of the Spider as well as its predecessors to sword and sorcery fans as a fun read.

The Eyes of Sarsis by Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon

Tiana looked at the broken body of the bear.  It was true.  What had seemed a sighted eye now appeared to be a large diamond, the same stone she had seen on Kathis's throat.  The sight triggered an avalanche of realization in Tiana's mind.  There had been too many mysterious happenings; at last she understood them.

Here it is, the sequel to The Demon in the Mirror, Part Two of Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon's War of the Wizards trilogy, The Eyes of Sarsis.  While The Demon in the Mirror had four distinct editions, today's subject appears to have been published only once, in 1980.  Not a hopeful sign!  My copy was previously owned by a Landon.

What can we say about the cover by Rowena Morrill?  Morrill's work, to me at least, often feels very static, even when she is trying to convey motion, and I feel that way about this one.  Tiana, the voluptuous red-haired pirate captain, certainly has a strange pose here, with her left arm foreshortened and her right leg up in the air for some unknown reason, while the male figure is standing inert like a statue, not even looking at Tiana, even though Tiana's contortions suggest she is responding to some sudden move by him.  And what is up with that gem in the guy's throat?  (We can all draw our own conclusions about the placement of Tiana's right hand.)  I like the chameleon on the boat's bowsprit (hmmm, this boat doesn't have a mast or any oarlocks...is it propelled by magic?) and hope he is a character in the book--maybe a wizard's familiar or the vessel for a wizard's soul while his human body is incapacitated?  Well, let's read The Eyes of Sarsis and see if the mysteries of Rowena's cover painting are solved to our satisfaction.

You may recall that I thought the ending of The Demon in the Mirror had some of the feeling of a detective story, with the authors tying together various plot threads and Tiana, the heroine, adding up all the clues she had collected over the course of the novel and resolving the conflict with that knowledge.  Well, Book I of The Eyes of Sarsis (the novel's 200 pages of text are divided into three "books") has even more in common with such a tale of sleuthing.  The plot is quite convoluted from the start, involving sorcery that animates the dead and compels said zombies to deliver encoded messages that Tiana and Caranga have to decipher, a series of bizarre murders committed by a house cat with a diamond necklace who can hypnotize people (it makes its victims slit their own throats so it can lap up their blood), the discovery of a strange artifact--the Left Eye of Sarsis--and the kidnapping by a wizard based in the Orient, Ekron, of Princess Jiltha, the daughter of King Hower of Ilan (Tiana's home country).  Holonbad, the Duke of Reme (Tiana's hometown), and Hower have Tiana and her crew, including her black foster father, master pirate Caranga, arrested, shanghaiing them into the Jalitha recovery force.  You see, Hower tried to ransom Jiltha, offering Ekron the Left Eye of Sarsis for his daughter, but the ship carrying the Eye east and the ship carrying Jiltha west have both disappeared in the middle of the ocean!  Who better suited to find these valuables than the two best pirates in Reme?

Fellow sword and sorcery fan
Landon, we salute you!

At the end of Book I, Tiana and Caranga, having wiped out a cult of demon-worshipers, saved Duke Holonbad's life, and figured out who sent them via zombie courier an encoded map to the Kroll Isles, current location of Jiltha and the Left Eye (their benefactor was Voomundo, "a mighty ju-ju man" from the Dark Continent and a hero in the "shadow war" of mankind against the serpentine race who once ruled the world and would rule it again), set sail from Reme.  In the first chapter of Book II our point of view is directed to some of our villains: Ekron, the wizard you looks like "a yellow toad," and Hartes, the King of Thesia.  In the same way that the Ilan nobles took Tiana and Caranga into custody in order to hire them to search for Jiltha, the Thesian king and the anuran sorcerer have seized a blonde barbarian, Bjaine, a pirate captain from the frigid far North, in order to impress his services--he also sets out to the Kroll Isles to retrieve Jiltha and the Left Eye.

The Kroll Isles are a den of pirates ruled by ace pirate Storgavar.  (These Tiana books are full of ace pirates!  To support such an elevated population of nautical thieves, this world must have a tremendous volume of legitimate international trade, but Offutt and Lyon never introduce us to any honest sailors or respectable businesspeople.)  Storgavar has Jiltha and the Left Eye locked up in his castle, but the hypnotic powers of the vampire cat, which stowed away on Tiana's ship, the Vixen, throw his corsair fiefdom into total confusion and the pirate king is deposed.  The forces of Tiana, Storgavar, Bjaine, and the diamond-bearing cat all fight each other, and then the three pirates make common cause against the vampiric beast.  The monster shifts form, first taking over one of King Hower's best soldiers, Kathis--hey, that's the guy on the cover!-- and then a huge bear.

When Kathis turns on Tiana she finds he has the diamond embedded in his neck, and when the bear appears the jewel is set in its forehead--Tiana realizes that the diamond is the Right Eye of Sarsis, a malevolent living thing!  Storgavar is killed, and Tiana, Bjaine, and Princess Jalitha are all taken captive by the Right Eye, who has taken command of Storgavar's pirate fleet via hypnotism.  The Right Eye takes his captives to a barren island where lightning storms are endemic--this natural source of electricity will enable it to awaken the Left Eye.  Our heroes escape, and in the ensuing desperate battle Bjaine refuses to accept Tiana's orders and even tells her that fighting is a man's work and she should go cook him something!

The Eyes of Sardis's dedication

In my last blog post I made passing mention of the issue of gender roles in The Demon in the Mirror.  The Eyes of Sarsis addresses what we might call women's issues or feminism more directly.  In Book I, Tiana directly upbraids King Hower for his patriarchal verbiage:

"I sinned in disturbing the Sacred Grove.  I do not want that sin compounded into black disaster for all humanity.  Save my daughter if you can, but do what is best for all men."

"And women," Tiana asked innocently, "lord King?"

"Figure of speech," Hower grumped, giving her a look.

In Bjaine, who is obviously intended as a sort of male parallel to Tiana (he has a career similar to hers and got mixed up in this Jiltha/Eyes of Sarsis caper in exactly the same way) we have a character who is an unreconstructed male chauvinist; he gives speeches in which he asserts the subordinate role of women and even beats young ladies who disobey his commands!  In the chapter in which we first meet Bjaine, King Hartes describes the transgressions that provided him a pretext to arrest the Northern barbarian:

"You claim that what truly happened was that you ordered the royal princess to fetch you wine.  When she naturally did not obey, you beat her!  That shocked my court and council, Bjaine--naturally.  Then you proceeded to discourse at length on the natural superiority of men over women, whose place it is to serve man, while every man has the right and duty to beat any woman to teach her her place."

Tiana, of course, proves to be a smarter person and better warrior than Bjaine, and she humiliates him when he tries to discipline her.  Bjaine contributes little to the effort to save mankind (er, humankind.)

Offutt and Lyon do a good job of leading the reader to believe that, with the help of Lightning Island's native population of non-carbon-based lifeforms, our heroes have buried both Eyes under an avalanche--then the authors craftily let on that this victory was one of the Eyes' illusions and our heroes were in fact defeated!

Recaptured by the reanimated but decaying corpse of the dead bear, which now has both Eyes of Sarsis in its fleshless skull, Tiana, Jiltha and Bjaine are taken to yet another island to be sacrificed in the kind of ceremony that is very common in these sword and sorcery tales and all sorts of genre fiction.  Should this ceremony come off, the planet will become as warm as it was eons ago and the cold-blooded snake people will again rule the world!

In Book III, Caranga, accompanied and directed by one of the world's greatest wizards and the human race's foremost leader in the Shadow War, Pyre, sails to the aid of Tiana.  Pyre's first step is to overthrow the ancient reptilian overlords of a town where pampered humans are bred as cattle with the help of Bardon, one of Tiana's lieutenants, whom the wizard provides a powerful magic sword.  This adventure gives Pyre (and the authors) the occasion to wax philosophical, musing on the topic of whether a life of freedom and self-responsibility is worth the trouble, or if a life as a coddled pet or spoiled child is to be preferred.  Then comes the climactic battle in which Pyre's sorcery, Caranga's swordsmanship and Tiana's wits foil the plans of the Eyes of Sarsis and the serpentine ancients.

I thought The Demon in the Mirror felt a little like a bunch of short stories as Tiana and Caranga traveled around the world, collecting plot coupons, but The Eyes of Sarsis does not suffer this problem at all, instead feeling like a coherent and carefully plotted-out novel.  I liked many of the minor characters, in particular Pyre, the philosophical wizard, and Bardon, the heir of a decayed noble family who lacks confidence and became a pirate in hopes of winning enough money to restore his once elite family's fortunes.  The Eyes of Sarsis also is more comedic than its predecessor, and I felt Book I had perhaps too many jokes, but Offutt and Lyon dial it back in the later books and avoid letting the humor overwhelm the drama.  The many depictions of magic are all good, and the fight scenes and scenes involving climbing walls and mountains and crawling through tunnels and creeping through secret passages are fun.  Thumbs up for The Eyes of Sarsis!  

I think I enjoyed The Eyes of Sarsis a little more than I did the first volume of Offutt and Lyon's War of the Wizards, even though my hopes of seeing a chameleon in a starring role were disappointed.  I am looking forward to the concluding volume of the trilogy, Web of the Spider.

The Demon in the Mirror by Andrew Offutt & Richard Lyon

Tiana's long career as a pirate asea coupled with her certain knowledge of her own bastardy, had given her an ever-fierce thrust for independence and a will that was passing strong.  Both drove her now.  Her being flashed with scarlet anger.  Every ounce of her strength channeled into the arm that strove to drive her sword into this monster in human form.

I purchased my copy of the 1980 edition of 1978's The Demon in the Mirror because of my interest in Andrew J. Offutt's odd career.  I had no idea who Richard Lyon was.  A little googling indicates that Richard K. Lyon was a successful research chemist and a SF fan who, inspired by Robert E. Howard and by his own wife, wrote The Demon in the Mirror but found himself unable to sell it.  He shared the manuscript with Offutt, who revised or rewrote it and succeeded in selling it to Pocket Books.  (Lyon tells the tale of The Demon in the Mirror's genesis and talks about his career as a scientist at the website Bewildering Stories, a sort of web magazine devoted to speculative writing.)  The Demon in the Mirror is Part One of a trilogy entitled War of the Wizards; I own all three volumes of the trilogy, and if I like this first book, I'll read all three, one after the other.  If I can trust Andre Norton and Jerry Pournelle, whose gushing blurbs (Norton likens Lyon and Offutt's work to that of sword and sorcery icons Howard, Fritz Leiber and C. L. Moore, while Pournelle suggests Offutt and Lyon have contributed something innovative to the field) adorn the back cover of my copy of the novel, I can be certain I am going to love it!

Tiana is a beautiful lady pirate ship captain!  She fights with a rapier and wears a tight shirt so her boobs will distract the people she is trying to murder in the course of her profession!  She and the crew of her ship, the Vixen (sexy!), have just captured a heavily armed merchant ship and exterminated its crew.  While her men are drunkenly celebrating their victory, Tiana explores the prize, overcoming hideous monsters and deadly traps to get her mitts on the treasure the vessel was transporting--books of magic and a mummified hand.  The hand, as all readers were no doubt hoping, is still alive!

Squint or click to read the
ecstatic praise for The Demon in
Mirror from Andre Norton and
Jerry Pournelle

After the exciting opening chapter we learn our heroine's backstory, and as authors of popular fiction so often do, we find Offutt and Lyon trying to give their protagonist the cachet of both a rebel and an outlaw and an aristocratic establishment figure in order to appeal to people's democratic and elitist prejudices.  (Tarzan lives like an animal in the jungle but is also an English nobleman, Conan is not only a barbarian and a thief but also becomes a wise king, Elric is an emperor who becomes a wanderer and destroys his own society, and on and on.  Isn't that Harry Potter brat people are always talking about raised by evil stepparents in a slum but, in reality, the chosen one whose veins pulse with the blood of the grand dragon of the wizard church or something?)  Tiana is the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Reme, who was killed during an abortive coup while she was a child; her half-brother Bealost (oy, the names!) was the rightful lord of the Duchy of Reme, but presumed dead.  Tiana was adopted and raised by a black pirate and reformed cannibal, Caranga; this aged seawolf now serves as Vixen's first mate.

Back ashore, Tiana sells the magic books to a mysterious and sinister wizard going by the name of Lamarred; the sorcerer explains that the living dead hand is that of the wizard Derramal.  (Oh, boy.)  Some time ago, Derramal was chopped into pieces and the pieces scattered about the globe, but he can be brought back to life if all the pieces are assembled.  Why should Tiana put back together this human jigsaw puzzle?  Because Lamarred te;lls her Bealost is alive, but only Derramal knows where he is!

The meat of the book that follows, as Tiana and foster father Caranga split up to gather up all these dismembered wizard parts, is episodic, almost like a series of short stories, in each of which a fragment of Derramal's body is recovered.  Tiana retrieves Derramal's other hand from a cult of vampire women who worship a giant bat, and then a burglar called Bandari the Cat helps her defeat a tribe of barbarians and get to the top of an unscalable mountain, the burial site of Derramal's right arm.  The ascent is achieved by what amounts to parasailing on the updrafts generated by a thunderstorm--Bandari's  people call this "highriding."  This whole highriding bit was like something out of a SF story, as it is entirely based on chemistry and physics, not magic or supernatural powers.  To get down the mountain Tiana and Bandari slide down an ice field, a scene I suspect is an homage to a similar scene in Leiber's memorable Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tale "The Seven Black Priests."  Derramal's left arm is in some royal family's catacombs, and to spirit herself into and out of the closely guarded subterranean vault Tiana must outsmart doublecrossing aristocrats, torturers and guards; within the catacombs she has to contend with the resident ghouls before she can retrieve the grisly object of her quest. 

Meanwhile, Caranga, hunting for Derramal's legs, sails Vixen to an island where he and the crew outwit an evil alchemist and battle an army of spider-women who have the power to cloud the human mind with illusions.  Later, in this world's equivalent of Africa, they battle invisible monsters in the abandoned city where rest Derramal's feet.  In an interesting change of pace from the rest of the book's third-person narration, Caranga's adventures are related in the first person by Caranga himself.

Later editions of the novel crop Boris
Vallejo's painting, I guess to make it
uniform with other books
in the "Timescape" line 

Like so many of these swordfighting adventure heroes, e.g., John Carter, Conan, the Grey Mouser, etc., Tiana is the best swordswinger in her milieu.  The authors, however, don't just have her swordfight her way through every obstacle; instead Tiana uses a variety of strategies to defeat her enemies and accomplish her goals, ranging from negotiations and laying pitfalls to disguises and the aforementioned highriding.  Offutt and Lyon add variety and interest to the book by portraying Tiana not as a static character but as a person engaged in a continual process of learning; Caranga taught her to be a pirate, for example, while Bandari teaches her woodcraft and how to highride.  To secure the last part of Derramal, his head, Tiana has to break a siege of the town in which it lies; she accomplishes this by highriding into a thundercloud, where she bombards the besiegers with lightning bolts by seeding the cloud as  Bandari the Cat taught her.

In the last few chapters of the novel, by adding up clues she has collected along with Derramal's body parts, Tiana figures out the tragic truth of Bealost's fate and the horrifying relationship of Derramal to Lamarred.  (The ending of the book actually has some of the feeling of the climax of a detective story in which the protagonist explains how he or she figured everything out and exposes how earlier events held a significance the reader may not have realized at the time.)  By stitching together the body of Derramal (did I mention that Tiana is also a skilled surgeon?), Tiana precipitates the inevitable world-threatening showdown with a Lovecraftian alien entity that the world's most powerful wizards had been cowardly postponing, and via detective work and trickery she neutralizes this extradimensional menace and saves the world.

At 180 pages, The Demon in the Mirror may be too long, and the tomb-raiding episodes that make up much of the middle section of the book may be a little too similar; too many of them seem to involve Tiana or Caranga spotting a structural weakness in the temple or tomb they are raiding and taking advantage of this Achilles's heel to demolish the structure.  On the other hand, each individual episode is entertaining, and at the end Lyon and Offutt make an effort to neatly tie the whole novel and all its threads and incidents together with a bow, so that even if, as you were reading it, the book felt a bit like a series of self-contained stories, when you are finished it does feel more or less like a coherent whole in which early events and lines of dialogue were laying the groundwork for some kind of pay off later on.  I'd judge The Demon in the Mirror moderately good, and definitely more polished and better structured than the two sword fighting capers we recently read, Kandar by Ken Bulmer and Kothar and the Wizard Slayer by Gardner Fox; Offutt and Lyon's book feels like something the authors put some serious time and effort into.

What to make of our heroes, Tiana and Caranga?  The fact that The Demon in the Mirror's protagonist is a take-charge woman raises the question of to what extent we should see the novel as some kind of feminist work, and to what extent merely one that uses a female character to titillate male readers.  Obviously there is a lot of room for individual readers to decide this for themselves, but I will note that the text repeatedly draws attention to Tiana's "jiggle and bounce," to her "rounded thighs crowding her snug short breeks," her "large firm breasts" and on and on, and that the threat of nonconsensual sex is an oft-recurring theme, especially the danger of Tiana being raped but also the possibility of men being seduced by monsters that look like human women.  Also noteworthy is the significant number of female villains, and Tiana's repeated use of her sexuality to manipulate men.

Similarly, should we laud the authors for striking a blow against racism with their portrayal of Caranga as a brave adventurer, able leader, and wise and loving father, or cringe at their depiction of him as an oversexed and booze-loving former cannibal who provides much of the book's comic relief?  Is his relationship with Tiana a hopeful vision of amity between the races, or yet another instance of a "magical negro" selflessly guiding white people to success and glory?

Well, we'll see what Offutt and Lyon do with Tiana and Caranga in the second part of the War of the Wizards trilogy, The Eyes of Sarsis.

**********

My copy of The Demon in the Mirror has three pages of ads in the back, presenting to the SF community Pocket Books' line of fantasy and science fiction paperbacks.  Among the promoted books we see Michael Bishop's Eyes of Fire, a 1980 revision or "complete rewrite" of Bishop's 1975 novel A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire.  Since June 2015 I have owned a 1975 Ballantine printing of the original novel under the Funeral title, but have not read it yet.  Joachim Boaz considers the 1975 version "a masterpiece."

Advertised on the same page as Eyes of Fire we see Richard Cowper's Road to Corlay, which tarbandu wrote about in 2012, and Kate Wilhem's Juniper Time, which Joachim wrote about in 2014.  Also promoted is a one-volume edition of F. M. Busby's The Demu Trilogy from 1980; I read a 1974 edition of the first Demu book, Cage A Man, and liked it.

Listed on a page devoted to "science fantasy" (one which I've actually already written about, back in 2014), are the first two Dying Earth books by Grandmaster Jack Vance, the original collection of stories, which I feel is a bit overrated, and the first Cugel book, Eyes of the Overworld, which I adore and strongly recommend as a brilliant entertainment.  On the top of the "science fantasy" page is Cecilia Holland's Floating Worlds.  I don't own a copy of Floating Worlds, but I plan on reading it someday; a few years ago I read something about it someplace that made it sound weird, controversial and challenging.

If you have anything to say about any of the books advertised on these pages, don't hesitate to get it off your chest in the comments!