Search Results for: cursed,-the

Nick Lewis certainly has no liking for his TV historian brother, Laurence. Aside from anything else Nick blames him for the death of their mother, the beautiful actress Claudia Martin. And so, is it possible the off-handedly childish trick played by Nick on Laurence really does cast some kind of curse? Bizarre and unpleasant things begin to happen, without a doubt. And Nick himself is hardly immune. As the pattern of his secure yet eccentric life starts to come undone, he finds himself without remedies. Where has Laurence vanished to? What is the creepy Mr Pond’s part in it all? And who is the apparently sinister Kitty Price? Can repressed hatred cause such disruption, danger, even death? Or has the object caused it, as Nick pretended it could: that little ivory counter from a stolen drawer… This is probably not a supernatural story. It might be less unsettling if it was.

The siege was over. The citadel of Avillis had burned, burned through the night, with its terrible Lord and his monstrous children in it. Nothing remained now but broken walls, charred stumps where trees had, grown, tattered lattices open to the sky. But at the heart of the palace the great Cup of Avillis stood untouched: pure gold, crusted with jewels each worth an emperor’s ransom. Small wonder that Kachil, common thief, should covet it. Or Feluce, dapper arrogant climber; riches would mean much to him. But why did Havor of Taon, the hawk, join them to carry the cursed Cup away? For it was Havor who found that the Chalice once stolen could not be lightly cast aside, even in horror and despair. While always, inexorably, half-seen, slipping through shadows, shapes in the mind’s eye, three phantom riders followed after it across the winter-blasted plain.

This chilling tale of flight and inescapable pursuit rises to a confrontation of ghostly powers. Havor thought his story could have only one ending, but the spirit world can summon Forces of Light as well as Dark.

After his father’s interference in Irish politics ends with a band of killers arriving on Christmas night to assassinate him, young Charles Peridore finds himself master of the estate. During idyllic school holidays, Charles enjoys riding to hounds and hunting geese and snipe while his friend Tommy Marlin tells stories of Tir-nan-Og, the land of eternal youth that lies just beyond the bog. But when Progress arrives in the form of an English corporation determined to convert the landscape into factories and housing, it appears that an entire way of life is destined to vanish. Only one thing stands in the way: the sorcery of an old witch, whose curses the English workers do not even believe in. In the novel’s unforgettable conclusion, the ancient powers of the wise woman will be pitted against the machinery of modern corporate greed, with surprising and thrilling results.

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. As Scores demonstrates, his devotion to the task of understanding the central literatures of our era has not slackened. There are jokes in Scores, and curses, and tirades, and apologies, and riffs; but every word of every review, in the end, is about how we understand the stories we tell about the world.

Following on from his two previous books of collected reviews (Strokes and Look at the Evidence) this book collects reviews from a wide variety of sources, but mostly from Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly. Where it has seemed possible to do so without distorting contemporary responses to books, these reviews have been revised, sometimes extensively.

125 review articles, over 200 books reviewed in more than 214,000 words.

The magician’s eyes gleamed with emerald hellfires as he looked at the council of nine.

“Let us enact upon Thongor of Valkarth the most terrible punishment conceivable to the human intelligence…the eternal slavery of the soul to Chaos.”

If the curse is carried out, Thongor’s body and soul will suffer throughout eternity. But much more than only Thongor’s fate is at stake. The Magicians of Zaar plan the conquest of the whole of Lemuria – and only Thongor stands in their way.

Can Thongor’s mighty sword keep his world from being enslaved by the sinister servants of Chaos?

Kelder had always dreamed of a life more exciting than what waited for him on the family farm. So when a fortune-teller predicted a glorious future, that he’d roam free and unfettered and be a champion of the lost and forlorn, he immediately set out on the fabled Great Highway to Shan in search of adventure.

But once he was on the road, life was hardly as exciting as he’d hoped – until he met Irith. She was the most beautiful girl, and the only girl with wings, Kelder had ever seen. They teamed up to see the world, and then Kelder found adventures aplenty: there were bandits and demons, and there were curses to lift, wizards to seek spells from, orphans to champion, and legendary cities to visit. For the young and carefree, life on the Great Highway was filled with fun, action, and magic.

But Kelder began to wonder about his beautiful companion. Irith certainly had seen a lot of the world for one so young – and everyone along the highway seemed to know her . . .

Soon, discovering Irith’s secrets became Kelder’s greatest adventure of all . . .

The mortal kingdoms are caught up in a shared catastrophe, cursed with sterility by the magic of the dark elves. Still, what elves have caused they may perhaps put right.

Humanity’s last hope hinges on a magical talisman-the Pica Stone. One of only nine solid objects ever created by magic, the Pica Stone was shattered in the days of the last Wizards. But when Captain, oldest of the elves, joins with his fellow light elves to work a spell to draw together all the scattered pieces of this legendary gem, eight shards remain missing, lost on worlds throughout the planes of existence.

The elves spell-shift a party of questers to each of these worlds to find the shards. Among the chosen are the Renshai warrior Kevral, her husband Ra-khir the knight, and Tae, a newly made prince and former thief. Each world offers unique challenges, but with the extinction of the human race as the price of failure, there can be no turning back….

For Al Larson it all began with his death in a fire-fight in Vietnam. He woke from this certain death to find himself alive – in a body and a world that was not his own! Transformed into an elven warrior, he became an unsuspecting pawn of the Norse gods, claimed as a weapon by both the forces of Chaos and of Law. Faced with challenges that would take him to Hel and back, Al made a place for himself in a land of swordsmen and spell-casters, and, after slaying one god, he found himself leagued with sorceresses and a master thief in the endless battle against Chaos.

But when Al and Shadow the thief slew the Chaos dragon, they unleashed a magical force beyond anyone’s power to contain. And Al and his companions would be forced to work a desperate magic to flee back to a twentieth century America which was not quite the one from which Al had originally come. But Chaos would not let Al, Shadow, and the Dragonrank mages Silme and Astryd escape so easily, and, a mortal man once again, Al would find himself caught in a desperate fight to save everyone he held dear, as Chaos pursued him into the heart of New York City.

In a distant future, on an Earth populated by a scant few hundred thousand humans, the Atkins’s Thomas performs without question the duties for which he was genetically bred. Called “Soldier” by one and all, he is a man of honor and ability, responsible for keeping the peace, for maintaining the status quo . . . and, most important, for guarding the great Book House on the hill – a vast repository of Last Culture knowledge presided over by Libary, Soldier’s mentor, the most senior of the mystic Celibate scholars.

Such is Thomas’s life in the serene, semi-primitive world without nations and cities and governments – until the night the starship comes home. Having fled a dangerously overcrowded Earth years before the Collapse and the Twilight that followed, for seven centuries the men and women of the space-going vessel Search have been combing the galaxy for inhabitable planets – their aging processes dramatically slowed by the relative magic of light speed travel and cryogenic sleep. And now, lonely and frustrated, the weary voyagers have returned to a homeworld unrecognizably altered by the relentless tides of time – a world that does not want them back.

A bitter welcome awaits the Searchers, as old Libary gathers Earth’s Ordinands and Elders together to tap the terrifying power of the collective unconscious – in preparation of the Carnival night when they will sweep the helpless intruders back to their lonely sky in the name of Holy Science. And it is Soldier who stands in the middle, silent and alone – bound by duty to evict the homesick star-travelers . . . yet cursed by a preordained genetic destiny that has decreed their eviction will mean Soldier’s death.

At times literary, at other times surreal, this collection offers an eclectic group of stories that deal with real-life conflicts, human values, and coming-of-age experiences all placed within fantastical settings. One tale recounts the author’s search for a Kafka story that can only be found in an elusive and quite possibly cursed edition. Other stories feature humans dressing in full-body protective exoskins in the personas of old Hollywood movie stars to barter old Earth movies for an alien aphrodisiac and a young boy coming to terms with creation and moulding his own man out of detritus from a nearby forest. In the title story, a great fantasy writer loses touch with the world he has created and pleads with his young assistant to help him visualise the story’s end and enable him to complete his greatest novel ever.

Cam is quick-witted and clever – sometimes too clever for his own good. When he finds himself in a spot of trouble, he’s keen to take a job that will get him out of the way for a while, even if it means he doesn’t look at it too closely.

Tasked to take a letter to a far-off city – simple enough, you would think – he instead finds himself caught up in intrigue and dangers beyond those he was escaping, and in possession of a cursed knife he cannot get rid of. And that’s before he even looks at the city’s cats.

The city’s very unusual, unexpectedly intelligent cats.

The city’s unusual, intelligent and slightly magical cats, whose fates are now entwined with his.