Lilith's Castle Book

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 LangfordRead More