Stunning, vivid dark fantasy
"The Incompleat Nifft" comprises two of Shea's ingenious heroic fantasy novels featuring the thief Nifft. This is solid, captivating work from a real writer of prodigious imagination. His work is often, and justly, compared to that of masters Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber. Shea's inventions are characterized by dry, sardonic humor, outrageous Technicolor imagination, and wild set pieces. The Nifft tales are unburdened by the overwrought internal mythologies of the tedious modern "world-building" style; Shea's touch is light and sure, never devolving into labored humor and always supporting his outrageous flights of grotesque invention. His reluctantly heroic characters speak and behave with just the right degree of world-weary understanding of human nature and of the evils of society. Two of the interrelated tales take Nifft and his companions on quests to Hell, where Shea's gifts are on full display. Shea's Hells are decadent, pulp echoes of Bosch and Lautreamont, appallingly vivid and teeming with deeply weird detail. Other stories pit Nifft against various fantastic menaces which aptly embody the self-destructive greed and arrogance of society pitted against the individual.
This is rare, substantial and meaningful work in a sorry, misunderstood genre clogged with thinly-felt exercises. I recommend very highly.
