Nifft the Lean - by Michael Shea (Review) (Sword & Sorcery) 

Great passage. I really hate it when the paperbacks are out of print and the prices go higher and higher and that's even if you're lucky enough to find them.

It was reprinted in Incompleat Nifft with the second novel, this omnibus is also rare now. I'm glad I got books 1-3 before they became so scarce. A fourth book remains unpublished, his wife is getting some of his work back in print and I hope that fourth book will get there (an excerpt has appeared in anthologies).

Read this back in the mid 80s and immediately added portions of it to my D&D game world/campaign. Lost the book late 90s but just recently scored a copy on ebay UK for 10gbp... glad to have a copy back and hopefully this time wont lose it

Love all the Shea Nifft books. All incredible. Mines of Behomoth and The Arak just great. Shea with spiders is disturbing. I read it all as digitally. Hopefully someday there will be new physical copies. The recent interview with Shea's widow on the podcast Udda Ting was interesting.

This book really is amazing. (Amazingly I found a cheap copy of the DAW edition.) I read it last year. I was really surprised by how much I liked it, because lengthy S&S/fantasy books like this usually war me out by the drawn-out narrative. But this was really amazing. (To be honest, I skipped the framing introductions by Shag Margold after reading the first one. Tedious.) Very rich storytelling without a lot of over-overwriting. I wonder how long it took Shea to write each of those tales? It's truly inexplicable that a book like this is out of print--it's SO far head-and-shoulders above so many contemporary books. AND it's a long, tome-like book, which seems to be a popular package for books these days. A note about the Michael Whelan cover: I thought this was just a semi-representational image to capture the mood of the book. When I got to the scene in the book that's accurately portrayed on the cover, it was completely horrific! Wow. Nice review!

Just found a cheap copy of this book in the UK. Can’t wait for it to arrive!

I got damned lucky when I found a copy of The Incompleat Nifft at a used bookstore last month. I got it for $1.80!

I do want to read these. I'm a huge fan of his Lovecraftian stories. There's a few episodes of the HP Lovecraft Literary Society podcast where they go through his individual Lovecraftian stories with Patton Oswalt, and Oswalt's breakdowns of the stories are fantastic.

I wanna know that those other four fantasy novels on your top five list are 🤔

is it not on the internet archive either?

All the used copies i see online are around $50😢

from wiki: "In 1994 Darkside Press published a limited edition of Nifft the Lean with a very long subtitle in "440 signed, numbered copies, bound in 'demon-skin'" (ISBN 0-940841-39-8).[3][11][a]"