Lyorn is the seventeenth installment in Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series. For some reason I’d believed this would the final book, as there are seventeen houses in the Cycle of his fictional universe, and one book title now corresponds to each individual house. I was, apparently, incorrect, as this novel does not tie up loose ends. Instead it ramps up the stakes and raises more mysteries surrounding Vlad Taltos and his place in the greater scheme.
This grand scope does not help in classifying the series as S&S. While it arguably began that way, with Vlad as a street level crime boss, as the story has progressed with more and more pieces placed on the board, and the backstory reaching back into the mists of a science-fictional antiquity, the series has inched its way into epic fantasy territory. And as it increased in scope, it also decreased in action, a fundamental component of S&S.
But damn it, I could’t ignore titling this blog post entry as I did. Because Lyorn is set in a theater, specifically one in rehearsals to put on a musical. As usual with the last several Vlad Taltos books, Brust takes his theme and runs with it, incorporating it in the narrative up to and including metafictional levels. Here we get chapter entries consisting of song parodies, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Broadway musicals. The lyrics are all clever and entertaining, though I experienced an extra level of enjoyment when reading those I recognized. That was hit-and-miss, I acknowledge a dearth of knowledge of musicals. (Here is a cheat sheet, that I wished I’d encountered earlier, though it wouldn’t have helped me with all them.)
Lyorn is not a welcoming entry to the series. If you haven’t read any of them, I don’t recommend starting with book 17. But if you’ve read previous entries, you know what you’re going to get.
In Lyorn, Brust works in a historical world-building element, as the play is a revival of a once banned production. It was banned during the Lyorn cycle. Lyorn’s represent tradition and duty/honor, a sort of quasi-Samurai house. The conflicts involved in differing views regarding what duty consists of runs as a theme throughout the story. Most of the tale occurs within a theater, where Vlad is in hiding from a sorceress who wants him dead, and is putting together a plan to deal with this as well as a few other related problems, tying it all up at the end during the premiere of the show. There isn’t much action. Most of the reader’s enjoyment derives from Taltos’ inner monologue and his banter with others. Brust is, as always, a clever writer. He clearly enjoys playing games with his writing, setting himself a challenge, and creating puzzle-box narratives. Therein lies the potential weakness: readers who want to get on with the story might not appreciate what he is doing. Happily, I’ve long bought into the first-person smart-ass story telling style (cf Roger Zelazny and Glen Cook) so I’m here for it, as I have since the early 1980s when the first book in the series was published.
How much more of it there will be, I don’t know. But I’ll be waiting.
Speaking of waiting, there will be a bit of a wait for the next books by yours truly. But they are in the pipeline. Cesar the Bravo should be available for purchase from Cirsova by the general public within a couple of months. If you’ve already received a copy, please drop a review somewhere. Somewhat further down the calendar, Raconteur Press has announced a three-book series of mine, due for publication over the course of 2026. (With respect to the video announcement, and for what it is worth, my Americanized last name is pronounced “Lit-zee”, with the stress on the first syllable. One does not, for example, pronounce “pizza” as “pizz-uh” but rather as “Pete-zah.” Not that it matters. I’ll answer to most anything.)