1992 contemporary fantasy. Former poker player Scott Crane is drinking
himself to death after having lost his wife, and those aren't even the
worst of his troubles.
As in The Anubis Gates and indeed On Stranger Tides, the
trick Powers plays is to be very selective about a set of mythologies,
to pick the elements that will fit together and work with the story he
wnats to tell. Most of the background here is Arthurian myth, combined
readily enough with the year king, but other ideas come in from all
over the place.
What they come in to serve is poker, combined with tarot legendry. As
Steven Wright put it, "I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot
cards. I got a full house and four people died." This is a book in
which that could well be literally true: every hand of cards
symbolises something, and when you win or lose with it, you can give
that something to, or take it from, someone else.
He remembered the night he had first seen a deck of this version,
the suppressed Lombardy Zeroth version, in a candle-lit attic in
Marseilles in 1925; and he remembered how profoundly disturbing the
enigmatic pictures had been, and how his head had seemed to be full
of voices, and how afterward he had forced himself not to sleep for
nearly a week.
This then expands into some splendid ideas, like attaching cards to
the wheels and mudguards of a car so that they make a series of
combinations that register magically as people, thus confounding
attempts to track the vehicle. Shuffling cards muddies probability,
and unlikely things can be made to happen around that. Real world
history is mixed in too: Bugsy Siegel was the previous King, and
that's a lot of why Las Vegas is the way it is. (Elvis doesn't make an
appearance, though.)
Alas, most of the actual characters are fairly lacking in sympathy or
even complexity. Scott has already given up on everything, and even
when given specific lines not to cross doesn't care enough to obey the
rules: our hero, folks. When the heroine is assumed to be dead, none
of the other "good guys" makes the slightest effort to see whether
that might not actually be the case. The villains are a parade of
grotesquerie, but at least they have the excuse of being villains.
As a result, this is quite a bitty book; individual scenes and
incidents can be great fun, as we plumb the depths of the villains'
wickedness or learn something more about how the world works, but then
it's off to a different viewpoint character and a different scene
which may or may not be a useful puzzle piece for working out what,
overall, is actually going on. Moment to moment it's lovely; then one
looks back from the end and wonders, why did I eat the whole packet?
The book was retroactively declared the first of a trilogy, but it
stands well on its own.