Fictional Tarot books: Tarot trilogy by Piers Anthony

Has anyone ever read the Tarot trilogy by Piers Anthony? It's good but frustrating at the same time. He gets the meaning of cards really well and creates these elaborate scenes for them but he also adds his own cards, then works into the story that this was the ORIGINAL deck and all other(current) decks are wrong. Somewhat annoying, but he seems to know his stuff.

(On a non tarot note, he also portrays women as either sex-objects or children, which pisses me off. (Big feminist right here.)

Also I got a book of short stories about Tarot, but I don't know what happened to it so I can't tell you what it's called. I read it before I lost it though, and I found it really...good. I can't think of another word for it. Interesting?

That's the same problem I had with Piers Anthony's writing, he's very down on women characters. They generally don't have intelligent minds or any confidence, much less respect given them in the stories.

Charles di Lint has MUCH better women characters, but his male characters are too weak *sigh*. He brings divination into his books, but usually not tarot.

I did really enjoy The Labyrinth Gate, which had a tarot deck in use in that one.

And the Doris Egan series called Ivory (3 books) used a non-standard tarot deck that could change people's lives. The main character was hired by an investigator to use her deck to help solve whatever he was investigating. The deck was his, but it 'bonds' to people and the last helper he had that it had bonded to had been killed or died tragically. She needed the money and took the job (it's science fiction, and has a nice love story).

There was a book of short stories put out where tarot decks were a main part of each story. I think the publisher was Tor, but I can't remember the name of the book. They were doing theme books, one was about dragons, one was witches, one was unicorns, etc. It came out a few years back.

A dear friend of mine gave me Italo Calvino's fabulous The Castle of Crossed Destinies, a series of short stories in fable form, using the tarot cards and spreads. I was moved and amazed when I found out that Italy's greatest post-war writer had written about the Tarot - from the land of its birth. It's an imaginative, fantastic and humane book, around the central theme of people who can only communicate through the Tarot because they were left speechless after experiences they've been through. Wonderful. (Translated by William Weaver and published by Harvest/HBJ Book)

Two tarot short story collections here

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet....x=0&kn=short+stories&tn=tarot&imagefield.y=0

Curious??

Cerulean

THAT'S the one! I found it in our west side library a year or so ago & read it then but couldn't remember the title.

Don't forget...

...the Charles Williams books (titles escape me)....quite a dated style but real classics...

Couldn't get on at all with the Piers Anthony tarot series, though I enjoyed the first couple of his Xanth books, though they ran out of steam pretty quickly imho...

Stop me now, before I suffer the worst of all fates, and become a critic!


Wildwood

Earthquake Weather and Last Call by Tim Powers feature a very powerful and dangerous tarot deck used by evil Las Vegas gamblers in weird poker games to steal souls, among other things. Very well written science fiction, in a mind-blowing, far-out way!

The first one

Cerulean said:

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet....x=0&kn=short+stories&tn=tarot&imagefield.y=0

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Exactly. And HudsonGray, I've read the Ivory series as well. I had forgotten that it had a tarot-like deck in it.

All worth reading, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Two of my favorite books have not-quite tarot decks in them.

Little, Big by John Crowley is about a family that has a special relationship with faeries. The matriarch, Violet, has a deck of cards that are like tarot, but have different trumps, like the Vista and the Seed. Violet passes the cards down to her daughter Nora, who passes them to her niece Sophie. The story spans four generations and is quite long, but very good. I think it's my favorite novel ever.

Moonwise by Greer Ilene Gilman has a deck that is not tarot, but the way it's described it sounds beautiful. One of the two main characters made it, and she and her friend use it to play a storytelling game about worlds they invented. The premise is that one of them gets "lost" in the game (and the other world) and the other goes to find her. It's a magical story with tons of fairy tale and folklore references... the prose is beautiful but difficult at first, as Gilman's sentence structure and vocabulary are a bit odd. I found it worth it, but a couple of my friends have handed it back to me after the first chapter or two - so ymmv.

L'Etoile said:

the Tarot trilogy by Piers Anthony

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just being pedantic here, it's not really a trilogy: Anthony wrote it as one long novel but the publishers insisted on breaking it up into three for marketing reasons. A similar fate once befell an even more illustrious author, JRR Tolkien ...