Zelazny – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

November 27, 2022

Nine Princes in Amber (Review)

icked this one from the best stocked used bookstore I know, my favorites shelf in my Florida Room. This was one of Roger Zelazny’s best, written all the way back in 1970 (while I was a tiny creature). I picked it up sometime in the early eighties, reading it in college and loving every page. So it’s been forty years and there I am looking for a book and there is my five volume set. And the book series, it really holds up. Written in that era when Fantasy was in the wake of the Lord of the Rings, when […]

December 11, 2022

The Guns of Avalon (Review)

ook two from the 1970’s classic series, the Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon. As I mentioned in the first review, nine princes scrabble for the throne of the primary realm in a sea of shadow possibilities after the king goes missing. Our protagonist, Corwin, just made an attempt to seize the throne from his brother Eric, leading a massive army in a truly epic series of battles that I remembered some forty years later. Corwin loses and is thrown into a dungeon with his eyes burned out of his skull. But the princes of Amber are of strong […]

January 1, 2023

Sign of the Unicorn (Review)

ook Three of the Nine Princes in Amber was a pretty interesting continuation. Corwin, now holding the throne of Amber, tries to figure out where this shadow road leads to that is dumping all sorts of dark creatures into his realm. Another one of his brothers is killed and if it isn’t apparent that we are heading towards a whodunit, it becomes clear when the entire group (brothers and sisters, both) stage a rescue to get another brother back from a shadow-world prison. While they do get him and pull him back into Amber, someone slips a knife into his […]

January 23, 2023

The Hand of Oberon (Review)

don’t think I’m a very good reviewer at times. Like now, when I have to check the wiki page for The Hand of Oberon, the fourth book of the Amber series. I read about a part where (near the end) the evil guy uses his jewel to freeze a second-class good guy, but the guy’s hand (artificial) reaches up and strangles the crap out of the villain. And even through the baddy teleports out of danger, the heroes decide that somehow, someone set things up so that the bad guy would get close to this good guy (and with a […]

February 5, 2023

The Courts of Chaos (Review)

nd here it is, the conclusion to the original Amber series, written in the 1970s, read by me in the early 1980s, carted about from place to place by me for forty years and eventually reread. The end! So, we have the world (bigger, reality itself) falling apart, an evil brother revealed and on the loose, and hero Corwin riding hard to reach the Courts of Chaos (basically, the Castle at the End of the Universe) to save things. Very exciting and very interesting. Of course, these days some readers might think of Corwin as “woke” (in that he attempts […]