Madam Lucifer, You Never Looked So Sane (original) (raw)

Something About Eve: A Comedy of Fig-Leaves, by James Branch Cabell – The books in this series that I’ve read so far are pretty formulaic, usually about a somewhat sleazy guy who philosophizes a lot without doing much of anything, and has multiple women fall for him. This one largely follows the pattern, with a magician named Gerald Musgrave, who’s a descendant of Dom Manuel, but lives in the United States in the early nineteenth century instead of in Poictesme itself. A demon offers him the chance to separate from his body and go on a journey to the magical land of Antan, where he’ll take over the country from Freydis and the Master Philologist. And he declares himself a god pretty much just because he can, naming his horse after Kalki, the steed of the future avatar of Vishnu. Along the way, he runs into a bunch of women with names that are varieties on Eve, starting with his cousin Evelyn, and resists most of them. He ends up marrying a woman named Maya, who gives the two of them a son with magic, and the child goes on to destroy Antan. So he never gets there, but he finds contentment, and that the demon who had taken over his body had become a noted writer. During the course of his stay with Maya, he chats with Odysseus, King Solomon, Merlin, Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew, Yahweh, and Satan. I read this on Project Gutenberg, and it’s disappointing that it doesn’t include the Frank C. Pape illustrations, but I don’t know about the rights for those.

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, by Seanan McGuire – Antsy, the protagonist of the previous book in the Wayward Children series, finds out that she has the power to find doors to other worlds. She journeys back to Shop Where Lost Things Go with her new classmates to sort things out there. There’s also a visit to another world inhabited by dinosaurs, where another human child has chosen to stay. There’s a lot of speculation how the doors actually work.

The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales, by Richard Garnett – The author was a librarian at the British Museum, and this is a collection of fantasy stories set in many different times and places, often taking cynical views on different religious traditions. They’re full of gods, demons, priests, and magicians. There’s a good amount of whimsy and satire, and while some of the stories didn’t really stick with me, there were definitely moments throughout that worked quite well. The titular tale has Prometheus being freed from his captivity by a young woman in the fourth century, and the two of them dealing with the new religion that’s become prominent in the area, and the Titan is made a Christian saint. “The Demon Pope” has a Pope trade places with the Devil, to the approval of the treacherous cardinals. In “The Claw,” a magician, Peter of Abano, reveals to a young man that he’s under an obligation to procure souls for the Devil, and these have included many members of the clergy. Peter was an actual thirteenth-century physician who was accused by the Inquisition of practicing magic. Also mentioned in two different stories is Michael Scot, a Scottish mathematician and astrologer who had an interest in the occult, and also eventually garnered a reputation as an evil magician. Whether the character from The Office was named after him, I couldn’t say. “Alexander the Ratcatcher” has Pope Alexander VIII hire a man to exterminate the rats in the Vatican, and he turns out to be his predecessor Alexander VI (otherwise known as Rodrigo Borgia), who has become the ratcatcher in Hell, and gets rid of the rodents in exchange for a better reputation. “The Rewards of Industry” follows the general structure of a tale about three brothers seeking their fortunes. In this case, they’re Chinese, sons of a mandarin, and the ones who spread knowledge of printing and gunpowder to the West are treated with contempt, while the one who’s obsessed with chess grows rich. In “Madam Lucifer,” the Devil falls in love with a widow, but will lose his reign over Hell if he leaves his wife. The description of Lucifer’s wife is amusing: “This lady’s black robe, dripping with blood, contrasted agreeably with her complexion of sulphurous yellow; the absence of hair was compensated by the exceptional length of her nails; she was a thousand million years old, and, but for her remarkable muscular vigour, looked every one of them.” Now that’s what I call a Dis track. “The Talisman” is a pretty funny one, in which a student wizard stops time, arousing the ire of a watchmakers, an almanac writer, and a meteorologist. In order to claim a talisman, the student has to swallow ninety-nine poisons, marry and divorce a salamander, become engaged to a vampire, and sacrifice his mother and sister to the infernal powers. In “The Bell of Saint Euschemon,” three saints bicker over which of their church bells is the most important, only to find out that their powers are actually caused by a demon. There’s a scene in it with the demon teaching the bell-ringer to play cards, and another with a bishop and a sorcerer playing off each other. And “The Poison Maid” is about a magician who raises his daughter to be incredibly toxic, but she meets her match in a prince who was brought up on a regimen of antidotes.

Fox Snare, by Yoon Ha Lee – The third book in the Thousand Worlds series alternates chapters between the perspectives of the protagonists of the other two, the fox Min and the tiger Sebin, who are both present on a mission to try to bring peace between the Thousand Worlds and the Sun Clans. They’re accompanied by a government official who’s also a fox spirit, but isn’t aware that any others of her kind still exist, and has her own agenda. The mixture of Korean mythology with a spacefaring society works well. This is billed as the final book, and as such, I feel like the ending wasn’t really as developed as it could have been; it didn’t feel final.