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SWORD OF THE DEMON by Richard A. Lupoff

SWORD OF THE DEMON

By

Pub Date: Feb. 7th, 1976
ISBN: 1587154145
Publisher: Harper & Row

Lupoff, author of last year's remarkable The Triune Man, seems to try something different every time. Now it's a brief fantasy-epic derived partly from Shinto legend, partly from wide-ranging invention. A nameless androgyne, fleeing from another realm of space and time, escapes into this world as the woman Kishimo. Her task, she learns, is to help the godlike infant Miroku regain the kingdom of Tsunu. In sometime alliance with the man-god Aizen, Okinu-nushi the magelike Spirit Master, and Susano-wu the seeker for a lost sword, Kishimo travels through (and beneath) sea and land in search of Tsunu. Lupoff's combination of spare, fablelike narrative with rich inventive detail is sometimes brilliant, sometimes uneasy. But at its best this is a particularly stimulating tangent to the supernatural-quest genre--cool, tantalizing, skylit.