Here is a fun new game. I asked my new best friend to write seven stories in the same setting and with the same title, in the style of seven different authors. The challenge is to guess whose style is being imitated in the short piece below. I’ll post the next one tomorrow.
The Librarian of Forgotten Sundays
The Library stood at the end of a street that wasn’t always there. Its bricks were the color of old whiskey, and its doors—when they chose to appear—were carved with the names of every god who had ever died.
I found the Librarian shelving books in the Dewey Decimal 999 section, where the catalog numbers bled into one another like wet ink. He wore a coat patched with fragments of forgotten maps, and his eyes were two different colors: one the gray of a storm cloud, the other the gold of a dying sun.
“You’re late,” he said, without turning.
“I didn’t know I had an appointment.”
“You didn’t. But the book did.”
He pulled a volume from the shelf and tossed it to me. The cover was warm, like living flesh, and the title shifted under my fingers: The Gospel of the Last Tuesday → A Manual for Time-Thieves → How to Kill a Forgotten God.
“It’s not the same book twice,” I observed.
“Nothing is,” said the Librarian. “Except the ending. That’s always the same.”
I opened it. The first page read: This is the story of how you die.
The second page was blank.
The third page was on fire.
I’m not going to lie, that’s a really good start. It almost makes me want to continue with the story. This is a hard one, but if you know, you know.
UPDATE: The answer is ROGER ZELAZNY.
Why This is Zelazny-esque
Mythic Prose Meets Noir Punch:
- Amber’s “storm-gray” meets “the book did”—Zelazny blended high fantasy with hardboiled wit (“Lord of Light”, “Chronicles of Amber”).
- Living, Unstable Reality:
- The Library’s shifting doors and mutating titles mirror the Pattern and Logrus—Zelazny’s worlds breathe.
- Protagonist as Pawn (or King?):
- Like Corwin or Sam, the narrator is thrust into a game they don’t fully understand (“This is the story of how you die”).
Sacred Absurdity:
- A “Gospel of the Last Tuesday” next to “How to Kill a Forgotten God”—Zelazny loved mixing the profound and the ridiculous (“Creatures of Light and Darkness”).
Ambiguous Authority Figures:
- The Librarian is part Merlin, part Sandman, all Zelazny.
Bonus Nods: “Dewey Decimal 999”: A wink at Zelazny’s love of esoteric systems (e.g., Tarot in Amber).