Nifft the Lean

Nifft is a master thief of the world's warmer and more corrupt cities, and his friend Barnar Hammer-Hand is a Chilite of considerable size and patience, and between them they have a talent for accepting commissions that require descending somewhere they should not go. In four linked novellas, presented as the recovered papers of a scholarly admirer with footnotes to match, the two of them rob a demon-worshipping city, are sent alive into the subworlds to deliver a message to a dead man, deal with a giant parasite in the flesh of a monstrous host, and encounter a series of infernal geographies each stranger and more anatomically inventive than the last. Shea wrote in open homage to Jack Vance, and the surface pleasures are the same: ornate diction, courteous villainy, and characters who negotiate with monsters in the language of contract law. What is his own is the imagery, which is genuinely grotesque in the older sense, a taxonomy of hells rendered with the enthusiasm of a naturalist. It is picaresque horror written for the sentence, and there is nothing else quite like its combination of high style and low appetite.