Zelazny, Roger, and Robert Sheckley. Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming. Millennial Contest No. 1. Bantam, 1991.
About a year after Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchett collaborated very successfully on Good Omens, Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley began what would become a trilogy of similar novels. In Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming, a demon hopes to win infernal fame by outdoing the forces of good in a contest held every thousand years to determine which side would control humanity for the next thousand. His plan is to create a beautiful princess and a handsome prince out of spare corpse parts and ichor to reenact Sleeping Beauty. But he will fix it so that they will choose evil and bring the fairy-tale to an ignoble end. He has a lot of trouble getting it all done, which produces a lot of predictable humor. The novel seems a little rushed and the style is not up to Zelazny and Sheckley’s usual standard, but the next two novels in the series work much better. Even when these two writers are not at their best, they are better than most fantasists who go in for lampoons.