A Stark And Wormy Knight

Tad Williams is an

acknowledged master of the multi-volume epic. Through such popular

series as Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and Otherland, he has acquired a

huge and devoted body of readers who eagerly await each new publication.

A Stark and Wormy Knight offers those readers something both special

and surprising: a virtuoso demonstration of Williams's mastery of a

variety of shorter forms.The range of tone, theme, style, and

content reflected in this generous volume is nothing short of amazing.

The title story is a tale within a tale of dragons and knights and is

notable for its wit and verbal inventiveness. "The Storm Door" uses The

Tibetan Book of the Dead to forge a singular new approach to the

traditional zombie story. "The Terrible Conflagration at the Quiller's

Mint" offers a brief, independent glimpse into the background of

Williams's Shadowmarch series. "Ants" provides an ironic account of what

can happen when a marriage goes irrevocably wrong.Two of the

longer entries show Williams working, with great facility, within the

fictional creations of other writers. "The Thursday Men" is a hugely

entertaining foray into the world of Mike Mignolla's Hellboy comics. The

wonderfully titled "The Lamentably Comical Tragedy (or the Laughably

Tragic Comedy) of Lixal Laqavee" is both a first-rate fantasy and a

deeply felt homage to Jack Vance's immortal Dying Earth. Two other

pieces offer rare and hard-to-find glimpses into other facets of

Williams's talent. "Bad Guy Factory" is the script for a proposed series

of DC Comics that never came to fruition. "Black Sunshine" is the

immensely readable screenplay for a movie that remains, at least for the

moment, unproduced. One can only hope.These and other stories

and novellas comprise a stellar collection that really does contain

something for everyone. For longtime Williams readers, and for anyone

with a taste for literate imaginative fiction, A Stark and Wormy Knight

is a welcome, and indispensable, volume.