The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories [Paperback]

From his career's inception, Zelazny had a distinctive style: fast, poetic, allusive and dense sometimes to the point of being a trifle obscure. Characterization was one of his strengths. He also had a deft way with mythological reference: he wove it into his stories, either symbolically (e.g., in "He Who Shapes") or by science fictional means, as in his novel _This Immortal_. Early and late, the story rather than the novel seems to have been his true metier.

In this collection of early stories, we see a nice harvest from the first 5 years of Zelazny's career. A goodly number of the best stories he wrote between 1962 and 1968 are included.

The whole book makes for pleasant reading, but I'd single out the following stories as being particularly worthy: "The Man Who Loved the Faoli," "This Mortal Mountain," and "This Moment of the Storm," the classic "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," and of course, the title story.

One of the mild peculiarities of Zelazny's collections is that stories he wrote at the beginning of his career are spread across a number of books, where they may in many cases be found side-by-side with later work. A reader wishing to explore his early short stories can't go to a single book.

The early stories span 4 collections: this book, and _Four for Tomorrow_, _The Last Defender of Camelot_, and at least one story ("But Not the Herald") in the book _Unicorn Variations_. A reader taken with Zelazny's early work should search out these collections for that reason alone.

(Note that a number of later stories are also worthy.)

Of the early work excluded from this volume, I'd single out "He Who Shapes," "The Graveyard Heart," "The Furies," and "For a Breath I Tarry" as the stories worth a look.

Although Zelazny's work has become widely available, there is a need for a _Collected Stories_. Such a compendium could put his work into historical context, as well as provide access to some stories not widely available or in some cases never reprinted.

Until such a publishing event occurs (knock on wood), we've got the story collections he published himself, for which we should feel gratitude.

(4.5 stars. "He Who Shapes" and "For a Breath I Tarry" would have made it 5.)

*****
An addendum much later: The iBooks edition of this book differs from the original book issued by Doubleday, in that the iBooks edition is enlarged to include several stories not in the original collection, among them "The Graveyard Heart" and "The Furies."

Using the same title for the collection will cause a certain amount of headache for collectors.

*****
Addendum 2011: The NESFA editions of the complete stories of Zelazny now satisfy the needs of people who want to read everything in the order that it was written. Collections like this one are still useful for introducing readers to Zelazny's work.

"The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth," by Roger Zelazny, is a collection of 17 science fiction tales that range in length from two to 88 pages. Altogether the collection is over 500 pages long. Some of the most striking selections in the book are as follows.

"The Keys to December": A group of bioengineered intelligent beings seek to re-shape a planet in order to suit their unique needs, but the massive project has some unintended--and ethically challenging--consequences. "Devil Car": In a future where cars have artificial intelligence, a human and his heavily armored vehicle embark on a mission to hunt down a killer rogue car. "This Moment of the Storm" takes place in a human colony on the planet Tierra del Cygnus, a world of monstrous beasts and dangerous weather. This story's main character is almost 600 years old, but has spent most of his life "sleeping" during long interstellar space voyages. In the quirky "A Museum Piece," an unappreciated artist decides to live in a museum, posing as a statue--thus becoming a living work of art. "Divine Madness" is a stunning tale about a man suffering from a condition in which time seems to be moving backwards. And the book's title story tells of a quest to catch a gigantic sea monster on the planet Venus.

Zelazny has crafted some remarkable gems in this collection. These stories, while clearly in the great tradition of science fiction, often have the flavors of myth, fantasy, and folklore. Zelazny's prose is truly a sumptuous banquet; his style is extremely literate and learned, with a crisp, clean elegance. He weaves many cultural references into his writing; along the way he cites Dante, "Aida," Dylan Thomas, Miniver Cheevy, the Iliad, Poe, Havelock Ellis, Vishnu, Rimbaud, and more. Such references strike me as an integral and intriguing part of Zelazny's style.

Zelazny succeeds in marrying strong science fiction concepts and settings to some really "down-to-earth" emotions and situations. He creates well drawn characters, and is skilled at fashioning alternate worlds and cultures. The stories touch on many powerful and resonant themes: love, loss, religion, crime, the passage of time, man's relationship to technology, the desire for a home, etc. Lovers of serious literary science fiction should not miss this fine collection by a truly gifted prose stylist.

This is a collection of "classic" short stories from the 60s, when Zelazny possesed that ability to dazzle the entire sf-world (I wasn't around then, but that's what they say). It is a wonderful book, and I know I will return to it more than once before I die.

The great thing about Zelazny is, he had both an extremely vivid imagination and was enough of a good stylist to make his visions credible. Though the stories take place in different times, on planets far away, both beautiful and strange, the surroundings seem just as natural as any other place here on Earth. The main character - not seldom of the type the-tragic-and-lonesome-hero - frequently talks in a street-wise, realistic way, so that you never feel alienated to the strange surrounding he is moving through. (Exept when the "hero" feels alienated too, which, when I come to think of it, is most of the time. Still, that is not the point - the point is that though perhaps alienated, you feel like your there.)

But anyway - since you see the world through the eyes of the main character, coloured by his mood and his problems, the stories revolves mainly around the human mind, and deals with problems that might just as well be observed in the people next door. There's a beautiful example of this human-centered way of storytelling from the book: The story "Divine Madness", where a man suddenly discovers that his perception of time for no explicable reason has changed, and time is moving bakwards. Instead of trying to figure out the science of this phenomenon, like any other sf-author, Zelazny concentrates on how the man painfully watches yesterday come closer, fearing the moment he has to relive his last, fatal quarell with his partner.