American Gods
Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Bram Stoker awards in one sweep — the codifying text of the gods-among-us genre — and a Starz television series besides.
Book Entry · Fantasy
Night's Master
by Tanith Lee · 1978 · Tales from the Flat Earth, book 1
What is Night's Master about?
Beneath the Flat Earth, in Druhim Vanashta the demon city, dwells Azhrarn, Night's Master, Prince of Demons: beautiful, bored and given to interfering with mortals as an artist interferes with paint. The linked tales — a boy raised underground in perfect love and ruined by a single flaw of pride, a collar of hate that passes from neck to neck, humanity's near-destruction and its salvation at a demon's whim — read as The Arabian Nights rewritten by a decadent poet. Lee's prose is incense-thick and precise at once, and Azhrarn, wickedness itself capable of one redeeming act, is her most seductive creation.
Why it matters
World Fantasy Award finalist and the founding volume of the Flat Earth cycle — a key text of mythic, eroticised fantasy whose influence runs through Gaiman's Sandman (acknowledged) and modern dark fantasy generally.
Where does it sit in the series?
Lee's cycle of demon lords and mortal playthings beneath an antique flat world — Night's Master, Death's Master and their successors, told in prose like dark silk.
In the Guide from Tales from the Flat Earth:
- Night's Master (1978)
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