The books never feel like they are set in a specific era, but rather the eternal now. We get the drumbeat of chapter-chapter-chapter- cliffhanger! repeated three times. Reading it light of this knowledge, it seems more liked four linked novellas than one complete work. It was serialized in Galaxy magazine over the course of four months and it shows. It seems like the interesting part of the story was that mystery and that's why CoC is a bit of a letdown for me.This felt like a protracted denouement. He knew, for really the first time, what was going on, and the steps that need to be taken to fix things and this is just going through the motions.

Corwin never knows who he can trust for the first four books.

I don't know if I'd call it noir precisely, but I don't think it's a stretch to claim that Amber had its roots in some of the same antecedents that inspired Raymond Chandler. It has its moments, but for some reason it doesn't appeal to me as much as the earlier books. I think Courts is the second weakest of the Corwin Chronicles. When I installed it on my phone, it prompted me for my password, so I signed in using my old account and there was Lord of Light!Īnyways, back to this review. I had only opened it in the first place because that was the only place I could find Lord of Light on audiobook. I'd had a membership a while back, but the files are in some weird format that wouldn't play on my cheap mp3 player, so I canceled it. I downloaded the Audible app for my phone on Friday. LoL because I found an audio version of it, Jack of Shadows, because it's next chronologically.

Lord of Light or Jack of Shadows is probably next. I'll probably cover the Merlin books in one post and then move on to some of Zelazny's other work.

The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny