Lilith’s Castle - Softcover

Alderman, Gill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006482724 ISBN 13: 9780006482727

Publisher: Voyager, 1999

In this sequel to The Memory Palace, fantasy crosses over to the real world as the Malthassan Archmage Koschei Corbillion becomes Guy Parados, his creator.

When the magician Koschei escaped through the mind of his creator Guy Parados into the world where he is fiction, he became Guy Parados. And Parados became the Red Horse in the land of Malthassa... his own invention, he believed. But Malthassa has deeper roots, as deep as hell, and it is there the Red Horse must go.

Gry’s father passed along the road to the Palace of Shadows where Asmodeus rules, King of the Lightless Garden. Pursued by the shaman Aza and riding the Red Horse, Gry must follow the same road, though it is the road to hell.

From hell all other places are accessible: this is a reason to go there, the only one not steeped in madness. But it is not Gry’s reason. Gry is only running from home, riding the Red Horse which was once her father’s horse – not a woman’s. And surely she is mad, for the Red Horse talks to her...

At the Fortress of Lilith the two worlds will meet, and between the two walk the Gypsies.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Although the publishers don't tell you so, this is a sequel to Gill Alderman's strange, metafictional fantasy The Memory Palace (1996). In that novel, real-world author Guy Parados becomes absorbed into what he thinks is his creation, Malthassa, a fantasyland richly flavoured with Russian and gypsy folklore--whose archmage Koschei the Deathless eventually displaces Parados from his own body. Lilith's Castle sees Parados incarnated as that tribal totem the Red Horse, ridden on an unusual quest by the young girl Gry. Gry wants to travel to the afterlife Palace of Shadows to give her dead father his favourite knife, a quest which becomes a shamanic rite of passage, with a vengeful shaman pursuing on a headless horse of bones. Meanwhile, having usurped Parados's role as author, Koschei is interfering with the world--sometimes murderously. After bizarrely original adventures and a passage through Hell, the rival authors of Malthassa meet again in the third reality of a fantasy computer game. The levels of what's real and unreal have become inextricably tangled, like Escher's picture of two hands each of which is drawing the other: Koschei may write THE END to Gry's story, but his and Parados's continue. Ingenious, colourfully evocative and full of the unexpected. --David Langford

Review:

‘Alderman is perverse, bizarre and charming’
Locus

‘A new visionary’
The Sunday Times

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.