Synopsis
What if you could live for centuries, and the only price was your soul...?
Agyar is a man who has paid this price. Born over a century ago, and once a frivolous young man in search of pleasure, he found instead immortality in a woman's blood-red lips.
Now he roams from woman to woman, from decade to decade, and from land to land. Death does not bind him. Only one thing does - and that is a bind he has vowed to break. It has brought him to modern day Ohio and an abandoned house in a quiet college town. Here he plays his familiar role: the handsome drifter, the mysterious stranger, the sharp-tongued and heartless Lothario. But in this town are two women, one young and one as ageless as he. And one of these two women will cost him much more than his blackened soul.
Once again author Steven Brust proves himself to be one of the most dazzling new stars of the fantasy field with this dark, sharp urban fantasy of the immortal, amoral Agyar.
Reviews
Brust has concocted a marvelous fantasy, a vampire novel in which the word "vampire" never appears. Jack Agyar is, if not quite immortal, very long-lived. He writes the story of his life on an old typewriter in the attic of an abandoned house in an Ohio university town where he lives with the ghost of an ex-slave named Jim. In Brust's world, vampires don't necessarily kill their victims, but, rather, feed off them for lengths of time. Through one of those victims, Agyar meets Susan, an enchanting young dancer with whom he is shocked to discover himself falling in love. Meantime, the vampire who made Agyar plans to set him up for a murder she commits and he finds himself less and less willing to do her bidding. The plot may seem elementary, but Brust is a master stylist who creates such intricate characters that plot is almost irrelevant. (Brust adds the initials P.J.F. after his name. They stand for Pre-Joyce Foundation, a group whose members, among them Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, and Jane Yolen, believe that James Joyce ruined modern literature.)
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A mysterious young man appears in a midwestern college town, takes up residence in an abandoned house, and awaits his death at the hands of the woman who controls his destiny. As John Agyar attempts to reconcile himself to impending doom, he discovers another woman whose love for him leads to a dangerous revelation--and his only hope to escape his fate. The author of The Phoenix Guards (Tor Bks., 1991) and the "Vlad Taltos" series offers a fresh perspective on a popular theme of dark fantasy in this penetrating look at an individual caught between life and death. A good choice for fantasy collections.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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