I first read Roger Zelazny’s Jack of Shadows in the late summer of 1972. I read it before I read Nine Princes in Amber, which I read immediately thereafter. The storylines are not related. Jack of Shadows is independent of Zelazny’s famed Amber series, of which Nine Princes in Amber was the first volume. Jack of Shadows was a mind-boggling watershed book for me. Like so many of us, I associate certain books with the era in my life when I read it. I was still in High School, which was an unpleasant period in my life. The books saved me. About this time, I had read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, all still favorites of mine. But Jack of Shadowswas different. This book had vivid imagery and a tough-guy attitude. Jack’s world was frightening, chock full of political intrigue, strange lands, and merciless villains. Jack himself was fascinating; a vengeful man, but intelligent and not without compassion. I couldn’t put the book down. The first sentence wasn’t the usual fare in a fantasy book: “It happened when Jack whose name is spoken in shadow went to Iglés, in the Twilight Lands, to visit the Hellgames.” What happened? Who was responsible, and what were the Hellgames? What are the Twilight Lands? I had all of these questions from reading one sentence. I realize now what a superb craftsman Zelazny was. In that one sentence he had created a framework for a character and another world that would carry the story through thirteen stunning chapters on an epic adventure unlike anything I had read before. Jack is no square-jawed hero with a cleft chin, no, he is much different, a thief, and he dies in the first chapter. Then he comes back to life in the second chapter, and that’s when things heat up. Jack’s world is split between light and darkness, a recurring motif in Zelazny’s work. Jack of Shadows commences as a revenge story, but metamorphoses into something larger. Jack wants to bring peace to Shadowguard, but first he must find Kolwynia, the Key that was Lost. With elements of an epic quest, a world with a new gothic mythology, and traditional swashbuckling intrigue, Jack of Shadows was unlike any fantasy novel I had read. From this point on I was and remain a fan of Roger Zelazny. I own everything he published. He was gone too soon. Zelazny was only 58 when he died in 1995. I celebrate his contribution now and again by pulling a book from the shelf and reading it again. Isle of the Dead, Lord of Light, Damnation Alley, Madwand, Eye of Cat or any of the Amber novels.
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