I read M. John Harrison's Light and liked it enough to pick this book off my metaphorical ebookshelf. I regret almost everything. Viriconium is three novels and seven short stories set in and around a fantastic city of the same name. It's firmly of the dying earth sub-genre (see Vance, Jack and Wolfe, Gene), where the diminished inhabitants of a high-tech civilization try to make sense of their lives in the wondrous and deadly ruins of the past.

The first story, The Pastel City is a solid and straightforward fantasy quest, with sword-swinging heroes trying to stop a deadly ancient superweapon. But the rest of the book is a slog of a fever dream, with assassins and artists and strange cults and plagues and godlings. The characters move like marionettes through a world where Time itself has worn thin. A more generous review might say that Harrison is aiming for some sort of Mythos Affect, where Sign and Signifier circle each other in an Eternal Ouroboros (annoying caps placed deliberately). I find that it has all the tedium of listening to someone else's dream, and very little of the charm. The last three quarters of the book where at first a desperate hope it'd get better, and then a miserable journey to prove it wouldn't.

Read the first bit and stop.