by Roger Zelazny
Avon Books, 1972

In “The Guns of Avalon,” Prince Corwin of Amber, having recently escaped from dungeon captivity at the hands of his brother Eric, vows to return to Amber and seize the throne from his brother. En route to the legendary city of Avalon, he is sidetracked in a land called Lorraine by the plight of the people there as they confront an ominous black circle which is spreading across the land, and the strange and hostile creatures emerging from it. Swordplay ensues, armies are raised, demons are slain and secrets are learned.

Except, that’s just the framework for a story that is so much stranger. “Guns” is the second of five books about the somewhat immortal royal family of Amber, the one true kingdom, of which all other realities, including our own, are just shadows, echoes or dimensional permutations. When Corwin travels to Avalon, he walks across dimensions, shifting the world around him a piece at a time until he’s arrived at the place he imagines in his mind.

The royal family derives its powers from walking The Pattern, a great design etched on the floor of a giant chamber beneath the palace, and the family members are an integral part of the one true kingdom and cast their own shadows across creation. Indeed, nothing in the universe existed prior to the reign of their father, King Oberon, who has been on the throne for thousands of years. Oh, and Corwin has the strength of a superhero.

None of this, we concede, sounds very good, but Roger Zelazny’s storytelling fuses sword-and-sorcery archetypes with trippy dimensional metaphysics into a deft, quick, matter-of-fact, first-person narrative that we imagine could only have been pulled off in the early 1970s. While it draws many of its elements from preexisting material, it’s how they’re put together again that makes these books a whole new vision of their own.

The whole series rushes along at full throttle, often racing into unexpected quarters. Get your eyes burned out and spend five years in prison? Sure! Concoct a way to smuggle machine guns right to the seat of creation? You bet! Have hunting hounds rip apart a car? Of course; makes perfect sense!

It works partly because of the aplomb with which our narrator, Corwin, tears through these events. His story originally begins in a hospital on our Earth. His memory is gone, but since he’s a bit of a scoundrel and a bluffer who never lets the people around him know how much he does or doesn’t know, he handles all the subsequent revelations about himself and his strange universe with great composure. It should be no surprise that the author, in turn, uses Corwin to continually misdirect us, control our attention and, well, keep us calm.

It’s hard to imagine that Zelazny knew where these stories were going when he started them, but he lavished enough care and affection on both the characters and the world that they all feel right in the end, like some strange dream of our own.