Nate D's Reviews > Nightwings

Another impulse $2 street-vendor paperback from the 60s. I would probably not be all that likely to read this if someone actually tried to pitch it to me (in the post-utopian post-post-apocolyptic future, the remainder of human civilization has reformed into a quasi-medieval guild system intermixed with interstellar visitors/invaders, mutants, etc, and our protagonist must move, with earth, through a series of stages towards a sort of redemption). But found at random with a vaguely surreal cover involving ruins, a wizard, and some kind of psychedelic wing-moon-head thing (I mean, look at it below), I would totally read this. So I did.



First complete edition, Avon, 1969, cover artist unknown.

The novel, in fact, collects a sequence of three previously published novellas, each setting up a few characters en route to a new city (Roum, Perris, Jorslem, guess which those are), then inevitably shaking them out in some kind of reckoning. There's a sort of diminishing returns: though each develops the world and its progress further, the first when all is kept vaguest and strangest is really most involving, its conclusion punchiest and most ambiguous (and so free of clumsily lofty aims). I enjoyed it. For that matter, I enjoyed the others well enough too I suppose, but they just felt much less original and essential.

Star breakdown over the three novellas: 3, 2, 2.