Book Review: Trumps of Doom

Roger Zelazny
1985
Awards: Locus (Fantasy)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Trumps of Doom is the sixth novel in Zelazny’s ten-novel Chronicles of Amber series, and it is the first novel in the second five-novel sub-saga of that series. So it’s really not a stand-alone book; you have to have read the first five novels to make heads or tails of it, and you have to read this one before being able to make heads or tails of any of the subsequent books. Zelazny is no fly-by-night author.

In spite of the fact that it comes smack in the middle of the Chronicles, Trumps starts out as if it is a whole separate story, unrelated to anything Amberific. The main character is different; it has a different tone, almost like a murder mystery; and—at least at first—there are no trumps, no mythic creatures, and no psychedelic hellrides.

The main character of Trumps of Doom is “Merle Corey.” To all appearances, “Merle” is just an everyday guy on contemporary Earth. When the book opens, it is the day he has quit his job of eight years to do some “wandering.”

It is also a day when he also feels certain that someone will try to kill him. Because it is April 30, and someone has tried to kill him (unsuccessfully, of course) on April 30 for each of the past seven years.

Before he heads out of town, he has drinks with Luke, one of his former coworkers, who is convinced that Merle has been working on a special secret new product idea outside of work, and he wants in on it. In spite of all Luke’s pumping, Merle denies any knowledge of such a thing. Luke then suggests to Merle that he might want to say goodbye to his old girlfriend, Julia, too—and then slips in, oddly, that Julia has become involved with some weird people and may be “in trouble.”

Merle goes to Julia’s building and finds her dead on the floor of her apartment. And then Merle is attacked by the beast that killed her: an outsize, three-toed, wolf-dog monster. This is the first clue we have that we’re not really dealing with an everyday Earth murder mystery.

Merle kills the wolf-dog and then searches Julia’s apartment for clues, only to find a pack of trumps. He pockets the pack and goes to see her current boyfriend, who tells Merle that Julia had recently joined a sort of cult. This cult is apparently into dark magic and is led by a guru of sorts, a painter named Melman, who starts to sound suspiciously like another magic painter we know.

At this point, Merle realizes he probably has started this whole thing, and flashes back to a time when he showed Julie around Amber. For Merle is, of course, not an ordinary human, but is actually Merlin, the son of Corwin of Amber and Dara of Chaos. He took Julia on a trippy trip around Amber in a fit of romance, and, after that, she was perfectly aware that magic was real, and went in search of somebody who could put her in touch with it again.

Merlin goes to see Melman to find out who killed Julia (and who likely wants him dead as well). And, of course, Melman tries to kill Merlin by pulling him into swirling Chaos, and Merlin has to kill Melman in self-defense before he can find anything out. At this point we go into full-blown Zelazny mode, with a scorpion woman coming in from Chaos to try to disable Merlin with a paralyzing sting; she almost succeeds, but he escapes through a trump of a Shadowland sphinx. After beating the sphinx at its riddle game, he runs through a dreamscape of trees, flowers, and streams back to Earth.

Troubled and annoyed, he tracks down Luke again. They dance around for a while, pretending they’re talking about normal non-magical Earth stuff, but finally they drop the pretense and Luke describes a crazy evening with Julia and Melman, in which Melman conjured monsters out of nothing. They are then shot at by somebody; Luke kills the shooter, but is then possessed by something and tries to kill Merlin himself, and Merlin has to escape again.

Merlin really would like to consult with his father, but Corwin went missing after the great “Patternfall Battle” at the end of the previous book, and nobody knows where he is.

So, to get his head on straight, Merlin goes to see someone he trusts—Corwin’s old friend and neighbor in upstate New York, Bill Roth. (At this point, because of his connections, Bill is now not only a country lawyer on Earth, but also the Counsel to the Courts of Amber.) They have a good time; Merlin amuses Bill (and us) by pulling cigars and cold beers out of Shadow for both of them, and Bill tells him everything he knows about Corwin, including some funny reminiscences about digging through his old compost pile with a fine tooth comb for some fancy jewel.

Merlin reveals to Bill that, as a child of royalty of both Amber and the Courts of Chaos, he has some advantages that the regular Princes and Princesses of Amber may not have. First, he has sets of trumps from both kingdoms. And he has also walked both the Pattern and the Logrus, the Pattern’s equivalent in Chaos. Theoretically you can’t keep both patterns in your head at the same time without going crazy, but apparently that doesn’t apply to Merlin.

At this point, they answer an emergency trump call from King Random of Amber. Someone has been taking pot-shots at princes and has killed Merlin’s uncle Caine. Everyone is wondering if it is yet another internal family vendetta—after we thought that had all been resolved!

Thinking it may help the king, Merlin shows him the special secret project he actually has been working on outside of work. He calls it a “Ghostwheel,” and it is a sort of computer that monitors all activity in the Shadowlands. It can be accessed by remote terminals, and can be used to observe or to conjure up storms and other forms of energy from anywhere, to anywhere in Shadow.

Random is appalled and tells Merlin to shut it off. But when Merlin then tries to approach his Ghostwheel, which has been running for months on its own, he is attacked by a crazy assortment of phenomena: nasty purple and red beasts, a living prison made out of giant coral-like crystals, an earth-shattering earthquake. The whole time, he hears voices warning him to go back. What has happened is that the Ghostwheel has become sentient; it doesn’t want to kill its creator, but it doesn’t want to be shut down, either.

Just as Merlin is just about to reach the Ghostwheel, who should appear again but… his old coworker Luke. For Luke is actually his cousin Rinaldo, and he’s the one with a vendetta against the royal family of Amber, because Caine killed Rinaldo’s father. Luke is hoping the Ghostwheel will be the weapon he needs to destroy all of them. He is unable to get the Ghostwheel himself, fortunately, but he imprisons Merlin in a cave nearby, and Trumps of Doom ends somewhat anticlimactically with Merlin pacing and pacing around in his cell.

It’s no wonder Trumps of Doom is the one in this series that won the Locus award. It is a more solid and consistent story, with a tightly crafted plot, and better pacing and characters and action than the other five so far.

And, for all that, it is just as beautiful and imaginative and totally out of left field as any of Zelazny’s other work, and contains plenty of the trademark synesthetic imagery that makes Zelazny’s work into art. Here is just one small portion of Merlin’s journey to the heart of the Ghostwheel:

    Three days in as many heartbeats…I breathe the air spicy…Swirl the fires, descend to purple earth…Prism in the sky…I race the course of a glowing river across a field of fungus the color of blood, spongy…Spores that turn to jewels, fall like bullets…
    Night on a plain of brass, footfalls echoing to eternity…Knobbed machinelike plants clanking, metal flowers retracting back to metal stalks, stalks to consoles…Clank, clank, sigh…Echoes only, at my back?
    I spin once.
    Was that a dark figure ducking behind a windmill tree? Or only the dance of shadows in my shadow-shifting eyes?
    Forward. Through glass and sandpaper, orange ice, landscape of pale flesh…
(p. 683)

In spite of the fact that the major battle for the survival of Amber happened in the last book, The Courts of Chaos, to me it also feels like this one is the novel where every major piece of the previous five actually comes to fruition. It is the culmination of everything we have learned about so far: Amber and Chaos, the royal families of both, the Shadowlands, the trumps. I might even venture to guess that this is the one Zelazny may have thought of writing first, and then wrote the others to set this one up.