paperback

Great collection of short stories!!! ( )

Great collection of short stories!!! ( )

(Original Review, 1980-12-12)

"The Last Defender of Camelot" is not really a new Zelazny book, but is a collection of short stories and novelettes from the very beginning of his career til now. I didn't much care for the title story (Merlin, not Lancelot was always my favorite Arthurian character), but they're all worth reading unless you have them in other collections. Zelazny likes to put his off-hand heroes in situations that are the stuff of legend, and this gets out of hand cases like "Damnation Alley" where the hero is basically a motorcycle thug (aside: everybody, but everybody smokes a lot in his books. Is he himself a chain smoker?), but usually it's just to let you know that he doesn't take this stuff too seriously. He does take it seriously in "He Who Shapes", the original from which the novel "The Dream Master" was derived, and the best story in the book. But then, I'm a sucker for erudition; other people might find the story pretentious.

You wander through the stores, opening and closing, skimming the blurbs, trying to recall snatches of reviews, attempting to parse out how much of what you've heard was meretricious (Quiz for the day: what does "meretricious" mean? (Hint: it does NOT mean "having merit.")

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.] ( )

Meh. If there is some "urban fantasy" bent to this book it escapes me. The first few very brief stories are brilliant. The Four Horseman especially grabbed my attention and made me glad it was re-printed. But "He Who Shapes" put me to sleep during lunchtime (embarrassing) because it just seemed that Zelazny could not really put a point to his endless descriptions or inner thoughts. And "Damnation Alley" - couldn't handle any more destruction in something written under the guise of "adventure story." Have too much of a problem with Man vs. Nature and Nature losing without another thought to upsetting the balance. ( )