Books like Viriconium Nights

This fourth and last volume of the sequence is not a novel, but rather a series of melancholy mood pieces--Schumann's "Night Pieces" come to mind--in which the ill-fated inhabitants of many versions of Viriconium engage in inconclusive quests and rescues while the city that sustains their imaginative existence sinks into inevitable decline. Each of these stories is worth your while, since each is a representative example of Harrison's incomparable prose, but my two favorites are "The Lamia and Lord Cromis," a beast quest that approaches in tone the elegiac spirit of the first two novels, and "Viriconium Knights," a treasure hunt by the unscrupulous swordsman Ignace Retz, which takes place in a wasteland on the fringes of an extraordinarily degenerate Viriconium presided over by the crone-queen Mammy Vooley, who looks suspiciously like Margaret Thatcher.