Sekenre: The Book of the Sorcerer, by Darrell Schweitzer (Paperback)
Brand : Wildside Press
- SKU:
- 0809510782
So wrote one of the many characters in this book of his encounter with Sekenre the Sorcerer, who may look like a fifteen-year-old street urchin, but is actually a centuries-old, awesomely powerful servant of those same Shadow Titans whom even the gods fear. He contains multitudes, for to kill a sorcerer is to absorb that sorcerer's soul, and the souls of all that sorcerer's victims, until one's haunted mind echoes with terrifying voices receding into infinity. But part of him, just barely enough, is still a child, desperate to remain himself, struggling to avoid becoming a total monstrosity, even as he may hold the key to the destiny of mankind. He dwells both in the ancient country of Riverland and in the Country of Dreams, which borderlands the realm of the Dead, and he appears from time to time to subtly manipulate history, as nemesis, savior, and trickster all at once.
A self-standing companion to Darrell Schweitzer's British Fantasy Award-nominated The Mask of the Sorcerer, the present volume collects all the Sekenre stories, which proved very popular when originally published in Weird Tales, Interzone, Adventures in Sword & Sorcery, and elsewhere.
Illustrated by Stephen Fabian.
"If ever your heart has said, The great days are no more. The golden afternoon of golden tales has faded into night, and I came late, born out of time, to warm my hands at the embers that flicker and fade hour by hour — read this . . . Here are ghosts grim and gentle, red gold of Ophir, and fell weavings. Here is a tale to keep Scheherazade talking a hundred years."
— Gene Wolfe (about The Mask of the Sorcerer.)
"Schweitzer is a story-teller, by whose smoky fire one may sit spellbound."
— Tanith Lee
"Darrell Schweitzer's fiction shocks, surprises, and delights the reader. He is a talent to reckon with in the genre of Dark Fantasy," --William F. Nolan
"The real imaginary country is where all fantasy writers are this good."
— The New York Review of Science Fiction.