The Unholy City

by Charles G. Finney

Surviving a plane crash, Butch Malahide finds himself in a weird and wonderful land. As a guide, few could best Vicq Ruiz, a character of infinite inventiveness. So when they meet, they decide to plunge into a bizarre bacchanal such as only Heilar-wey can offer.

But even before they begin, they have to overcome the fearsome Layya, monster of the primitive Chiam Mings. When they arrive, they find that the unholy city is terrorised by a giant tiger ravening in the streets. And there's no way Malahide and Ruiz are going to escape a terrible confrontation...

Cover Illustration: Peter A. Jones

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction

125 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published June 1, 1937

About the author

Charles Grandison Finney was an American news editor and fantasy novelist, the great-grandson of evangelist Charles Grandison Finney.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles...

Finney was a fantasy novelist. His first novel, "The Circus of Dr. Lao," was selected as the Most Original Book of 1935 at the first-ever National Book Awards.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was attracted to this one in the local used book shop by the cool Peter Jones cover. It has a neat Jeff Jones or Stephen Fabian reptile-critter in the foreground and a nifty Paul Lehr-like city in the background and it projects a good old-fashioned vibe with an unusual colorful difference. And when you lead with the cover, the book itself...well... The story itself is okay, but doesn't manage to get to too much of a point or reach a conclusion. A man on a round-the-world flight of discovery crashes and goes to a nearby very modern city where he falls into some questionable company and they drink a lot. Meanwhile, there's social upheaval and a tiger is eating folks. There are newspapers and prostitutes. I recommend Finney's Dr. Lao and Jones' art, but for social pastiche James Branch Cabell is a much better choice.

[Karl]

I was amazed when I stumbled across this first edition hardcover of this book.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A witty, surrealistic fantasy and parody of modern life. An Arizonan is the sole survivor of a plane crash in Asia. He meets a talkative man who has been exiled from the neighboring city. After nearly being killed by a nomadic tribe, they travel to the city, which proves to be an ultra-modern megalopolis of 23 million inhabitants. They pay off the exiles's debts. They attend a trial. They get tied up in traffic waiting for demonstrations to end and car wrecks to be cleared. They have a bacchanalian revel in the city, with drinking, dining, attending a horrible play at the theater, fighting, and ugly women. The city erupts in a civil war over the municipal treasury while a giant tiger attacks the city. And the only polite person is the policeman who tells them where to find a brothel.

[M.R. Dowsing · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an eccentric book unlikely to please anyone looking for straight SF or fantasy. The "plot" concerns the sole survivor of a plane crash who seeks help from the first stranger he comes across. The stranger is a pompous bullshitter who is nevertheless oddly endearing. The two go to the ultra-modern city nearby and spend the next hundred pages or so getting pissed in and then ejected from a variety of places. I found it very funny and enjoyed it tremendously but I can imagine a lot of people just thinking WTF!

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think Mr Finney wasn't all there, you know. Comedy sci-fi with a little fantasy thrown in for good measure.

I'll have what he's having...

Oh, and what's it all about? Well - blowed if I know...

[Jill Flanagan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book wasn’t entirely lacking in worthwhile material but it really was one of the more repulsive things I’ve read in a while. Not in a gross sense ( except for the overt racism and use of the N word) but there just wasn’t much about this that was interesting or effective.
This fantasy felt vaguely satirical of a capitalist hellscape but was only very shallowly so, there’s a lot of plotless cavorting and drinking and complaining that the loose women you’re with aren’t sufficiently attractive.
There actually was a somewhat interesting ending in which the main character breaks with his friend whose been showing him around bc Ruiz turns out at heart to crave the acceptance of the bourgeois that he’s been mocking the whole book. The main character stubbornly remains an outsider but then when Ruiz dies a couple of pages later, he insists “ he was a great man!” Contradicting everything we’ve read so far.
A baffling and infuriating book, if it hadn’t been borrowed from me by my late father I might have hurled it off the train platform

[Hugo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A phantasmagoric and surreal bit of satire, presented as a sci-fi/fantasy where two characters bustle and carouse through the titular city for 125 pages without so much as a paragraph break, but much more akin to something from the stage, like Waiting For Godot or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, with a healthy—and inebriated—slice of Withnail and I.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finney was a unique one, if nothing else.

[Zander · Rating 1 out of 5]

It seemed interesting at first but I grew bored very fast. The author's style is very dry and repetitive, as are the characters' "adventures" in the city. Also, this might be a slightly anachronistic criticism, but the casual sexism and racial slurs really turned me off. I finished the book on principle because it was so short and not very dense, but in retrospect it wasn't worth it. Oh well.

[Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's about 4 amazing pages in the middle of this book, where a man on trial gives a hallucinatory account of the murder he supposedly committed. The rest of the novel completely baffles me - I can't say it's bad, but it seemed like one of the most aggressively pointless things I've ever read.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting surreal picaresque adventure. One of the source texts for Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, CHRONIC CITY.