Just as able, as in his Lord of Light, to conjure a new mythology out of old religion, to mingle future science with a primitive past in a context of magic, to narrate the battles of gods on a cosmic scale and single combat on a heroic scale, [in Creatures of Light and Darkness Zelazny] takes the religion of ancient Egypt as his raw material. But whereas, in Lord of Light, we thought on the whole we could identify with Sam, a kind of Christ-Buddha, in this second novel we are often not sure where our sympathies lie. The awful grotesque is replaced by the comic grotesque; imaginative response is inflated only to be punctured; even comment seems parody of the earlier style: 'the motorcycle that is Time backfires as it races by.' Vigorous imagination, effective narration and powerful visual presentation are still there: but what are...