The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth

Zelazny was exploring the topic of divinity and the rights of gods for his whole career. He investigated shifting surrealist events and landscapes in his short stories as well as his other works.

It is apt that one of his short story collections is called "the road to Amber", but I think that most of his works can be roughly divided into "the road to Amber" and "the road to Lord of Light".

It is uncanny how good his language is too. He is a true American classic. American because he was as good at filigree details of landscapes and environments as he was at writing action scenes.

Absolute highlights of this collection for me, in order:

1. The Keys to December (just love it! Sentient cats, arctic cold, the rights of small nations to exist)
2. The Mortal Mountain (please treat it as a mystery you have to solve. All the clues are given to you. I was blindsided by the fact that it is possible to figure out the ending, but it really-really-really is a fair play piece. Absolutely loved it)
3. The Rose for Ecclesiastes (some say it is the best thing Zelazny wrote. I loved it thoroughly, and the fact that it's only #3 in my review, should really tell you all about how good the other two are).

For Amber fans:

1. Love is an Imaginary Number

For Douglas Adams appreciators:

1. The Great Slow Kings

I leave you with a semi-obligatory quote of the book:

They're here and we're here, and they think we're gods—maybe because we do nothing for them but make them miserable. We have some responsibility to an intelligent race, though. At least to the extent of not murdering it.

So the copy of the book I read was an audiobook recorded for the Library of Congress's Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Apparently that's not a version Goodreads has records of, and I can't find anything substantial about the recording online. The narrator was Eric Zwemer, and he did an amazing job with the material. The recording was done in January of 1980, and Zwemer's voice has a delightful timbre and rhythm that's both excellently suited to Zelazny's writing style, and curiously absent from the field of modern narrators.

The stories themselves (this is a collection of 15 stories, rather than a single piece of prose) are all delightful, and range from silly though experiment pieces to fleshed-out longer pieces. Of those stories included here, A Rose for Ecclesiastes is probably best well known, but I was partial to Devil Car (which one reviewer called a "post-apocalyptic answer to Christine", but I prefer to think of as a direct ancestor of KITT and Knight Rider) and A Museum Piece.