Death's Master by Tanith Lee

So I loved Night's Master so much that I did what I usually never do and immediately dived into the next book of the series because I was devastated that it was over. This novel won a bunch of awards, but I can't say that it's better than the first novel, it's a natural continuation in terms of style and inventiveness, and I actually think I might have liked the first one better. The main difference between them is that while Night's Master was a series of interconnecting stories, this one more or less follows a single narrative, though it branches off in a million directions and can be very fragmented (in a good way). Since I have something of a preference for the picaresque, I probably enjoyed the separate stories of the first book more, but Tanith Lee does a wonderful job of weaving a complex narrative. I liked the characters in the first book more than the ones in this one, especially because Azhrarn, the demon who is the connecting link of the first book, is so much cooler than Uhlume, the lord of Death, after whom the book is named (maybe). Azhrarn appears in this one too, but I liked it when he did more. The two sort-of-main characters, the magical hemaphrodite Simmu and his/her friend/lover Zhirem, weren't really that interesting. By far the best character in this book was Narasen, a lesbian queen who makes a bargain with death, knows how to hold a grudge and destroy everyone, and winds up by kicking Death out of his own kingdom and living there with her witch lover (who killed her when they were alive). Unfortunately, Narasen appears and disappears throughout the novel, and I would have liked it better if she had been the focus of the whole novel. This book is considerably longer than the first, and I thought some of the parts dragged slightly, like the underwater kingdom. There's just too much of everything sometimes, it's like Tanith Lee was just trying to stuff all of the produce of her clearly overabundant imagination in there. But overall, the book was absolutely amazing. Something that struck me as particularly unusual was the way the characters transform. Normally, character development is combined with some sort of consistency, but Tanith Lee goes absolutely, bizarrely wild on transformations. Characters become the polar opposite of what they were before, they forget their pasts (sometimes by magic, sometimes not), renounce and destroy former lovers. One of the main characters gets physically almost completely obliterated and remade as a demon, and his memory of the past and who he was is completely erased. I think this is a really bold and scary view, in which there is no inner essence, everything is subject to change, and selfhood is radically unstable. I don't think I've ever read a book that goes so far in this direction. I'm torn between grabbing the third book immediately and saving it for later so that I don't exhaust all the delights of this life at once.