The Vengeance Of Rome: The Fourth in the Colonel Pyat Quartet

(Paperback)

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Byzantium Endures, the first volume of Michael Moorcocks legendary Pyat Quartet, appeared in 1981. The Laughter of Carthage (1984) and Jerusalem Commands (1992) followed. Now the quartet is complete. Pyat keeps his appointment with the ages worst nightmare.

Born in Ukraine on the first day of the century, a Jewish antisemite, Pyat careered through three decades like a runaway train. Bisexual, cocaine-loving engineer/inventor/spy, he enthusiastically embraces Fascism. Hero-worshipping Mussolini, he enters the dictators circle, enjoys a close friendship with Mussolinis wife and is sent by the Duce on a secret mission to Munich, becoming intimate with Ernst Rhm, the homosexual stormtrooper leader. His crucial role in the Nazi Partys struggle for power has him performing perverted sex acts with Alf, as the Fhrers friends call him.

Pyats extraordinary luck leaves him after he witnesses Hitlers massacre of Rhm and the SA. At last he is swallowed up in Dachau concentration camp. Thirty years later, having survived the Spanish Civil War, he is living in Portobello Road and telling his tale to a writer called Moorcock.

This authoritative edition presents this work for the first time in the United States, along with a new introduction by Alan Wall.

Reviews

"The Vengeance of Rome comes along to remind us of what we have been missing: the dynamism of a nineteenth-century master operating with all of the darts and shuffles of our electronic, amnesiac, fast-twitch culture."
--Iain Sinclair, The Spectator

"Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy flux itself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things. Posterity will certainly give him that due place in the English literature of the late twentieth century which his more anaemic contemporaries grudge; indeed he is so prolific it will probably look as though he has written most of it anyway."
--Angela Carter, Guardian

"A wonderfully vivid evocation of Europe in its darkest hour."
--Mail on Sunday

"A final, breath-stopping moment of deeply ironic self-delusion at the end of a grandiose, beautifully modulated quartet."
--Scotland on Sunday

"Of Moorcock's characters...it is Colonel Pyat who is the richest, the deepest, the most complex, and who casts the strongest and most penetrating light on the century we erroneously believe we have left behind."
--Charles Shaar Murray, Independent

Author Bio

Michael Moorcock is an award-winning author of more than 80 works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Cornelius Quartet, Doctor Who, and Elric: The Stealer of Souls. He has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, and British Science Fiction Awards and is a Grandmaster of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. His nonfiction has appeared in Financial Times, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Bastrop, Texas. Alan Wall is a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, an essayist, and a professor of writing and literature at the University of Chester. His novels include Bless the Thief, China, The Lightning Cage, The School of Night, and Sylvie's Riddle.