Night's Master
core novel 1978 Tales from the Flat Earth
Record
| First published | 1978 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.06 (4,021 ratings, collected 2026-08-26) |
| Page count | 208 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780879976576 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
Night's Master, published in 1978, opens the Tales from the Flat Earth series with Azhrarn, Prince of Demons and ruler of the underground city of Druhim Vanashta, who regards mortal suffering with indifference and has long treated humans as playthings for his own amusement. Among his diversions is a beautiful mortal boy whom he abducts and raises apart from the sorrows of the human world, sheltering him from grief and loss within his subterranean realm. When the boy grows curious about the earth above and asks to return to it, his request sets off a chain of encounters between Azhrarn and humankind, some of them cruel, some unexpectedly kind, gradually drawing the cold demon prince into affairs he would normally disdain. The tales that follow, framed in a mythic, Arabian Nights-inflected style, trace the ripples of that first encounter outward across the mortal world.
Where it sits
- Universe: Tales from the Flat Earth
- Series: Tales from the Flat Earth core; position 1 of 5 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Tanith Lee
Awards (verified)
- World Fantasy Award (Best Novel), 1979: nominated
Notes
- From the series record (Tales from the Flat Earth): A cycle of interlinked, Arabian Nights-inspired dark mythic fantasies about the Lords of Darkness who rule a legendary flat world before the age of humanity as it is now known. The author died in 2015; treated as complete at the five novels published as the main sequence.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Tales from the Flat Earth: position 1 of 5: next Death's Master (1979)
Sources
- Wikipedia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night's_Master
- World Fantasy Convention: 1979 (5th) convention winners/nominees (official)
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