Nifft the Lean

Nifft the Lean is four linked stories about Nifft, a master thief, and the friends who share his dangerous jobs, presented as tales gathered by a scholar named Shag Margold, who admits he was present for none of them and has had to rely on the accounts of others. The world is strange and old, full of demons and the dead, and it may be a very distant Earth.

In the first story Nifft and his companion Haldar meet a dead woman at a place of sorcerous power who asks them to deliver the lover who betrayed her to the realm of the dead; they ambush the Guide of Ghosts to do it, and in the end she rejects the lover and chooses Haldar. In the second, Nifft and his friend Barnar go into monster haunted swamps after black pearls and then blackmail the Vampire Queen who controls the trade. The third and longest, "The Fishing of the Demon Sea," takes Nifft and Barnar down into a demonic underworld to rescue a merchant prince's son who has misused a powerful spell. The rescue fails when the young man repeats his mistake, but they free a once human privateer from the Demon Sea. In the last story, set in the mining city of Anvil's Pasture, Nifft helps stop a mountain from collapsing, and the book reveals that some of the powers in this world are not magic at all but alien, relics of ancient travel among the stars.

Shea writes dense, ornate, elaborately descriptive prose in the manner of Jack Vance and Clark Ashton Smith, and his imagination runs to the grotesque: rotting corpses that regenerate into women, crabs with human lips, and demons rendered in exact physical detail. The characters are thin and the plots episodic, and the Margold prologues slow the start. What carries the book is its underworld, vivid and disgusting in equal measure. Readers with strong stomachs who like Vance's Cugel or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser will find it worth the effort.