The Eyes of the Overworld is the to begin Vance’s picaresque novels about the scoundrel Cugel. Here he is sent by a magician he provides wronged to a distant unknown country to retrieve marvelous lens that reveal the Overworld. Conniving to steal the lenses, he escapes and, goaded by a homesick monster magically mounted on his liver, starts to find his way home to Almery. The trip requires him across trackless mountains, wastelands, and seas. Through cunning and dumb fortune, the relentless Cugel survives one catastrophe after another, fighting off bandits, ghosts, and ghouls-stealing, lying, and cheating without understanding or remorse leaving only wreckage behind. Betrayed and betraying, he joins a cult group on the pilgrimage, crosses the Silver Desert as his comrades die one by one and, escaping the Rat People, obtains a spell that comes back him house. There, thanks to incompetence and arrogance he misspeaks the words of a purloined spell and transports himself back to the same dismal place he started his journey.