Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming

A satire of epic proportions from the masters of comic fantasy Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley

People feared, back in the Middle Ages, that the world would end with the millennium. They weren’t wrong. It does this every millennium, only nobody notices—except for the Forces of Good and Evil who vie for control of the universe every thousand years.

Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming concerns the efforts of one Azzie Elbub, demon, to win the Millennial Evil Deeds award for the year 1000, given to the being whose acts do the most toward reshaping the world. Azzie’s proposal to the Powers of Dark is simple: He will create a Prince Charming and a Sleeping Beauty. In time-honored fairy-tale fashion, the prince will fight his way through numerous perils to reach the side of the spellbound princess—at which point Azzie’s evil twist will ensure that the Powers of Dark will win the grand prize. But even with an unlimited satanic credit card to order up any evil he needs, Azzie’s plan is in trouble from the beginning. . . .

“Zelazny and Sheckley make for a synergy that’s just about unequaled in . . . fantasy humor.”—Minneapolis Star TribuneRoger Zelazny burst onto the SF scene in the early 1960s with a series of dazzling and groundbreaking short stories. He won his first of six Hugo Awards for Lord of Light, and soon after produced the first book of his enormously popular Amber series, Nine Princes in Amber. In addition to his Hugos, he went on to win three Nebula Awards over the course of a long and distinguished career. He died on June 14, 1995.