If you loved watching Harold Shea use symbolic logic to blunder from Norse sagas to Spenser’s court (and woo Belphebe) only to find himself hilariously out of his depth, you’ll relish how The Anubis Gates hurls linguist Brendan Doyle through a magical gateway into 1810 London. The book blends witty fish‑out‑of‑water scrapes with intricate occult mechanics—Egyptian sorcery, time‑loops, and body‑stealing villains—capturing that same heady mix of portal mishap, ingenuity, and swashbuckling close calls you enjoyed in The Incomplete Enchanter.

You liked how Harold Shea crashed into living myth—from Valhalla to the pages of The Faerie Queene—and had to outthink gods and heroes with wit and logic. In Lord of Light, Zelazny recasts Hindu and Buddhist deities as ultra‑advanced humans ruling a colony world, while the trickster‑hero Sam (Mahasamatman) wages a sly, idea‑driven war against the "gods." The audacious remix of mythology, sparkling banter, and cerebral gambits echoes Shea’s brain‑over‑brawn scrapes—only here the stakes span an entire civilization.

If Harold Shea’s comic misadventures—miscast spells, literal‑minded heroes, and literary worlds skewered with a grin—made you laugh, The Colour of Magic will hit the same sweet spot. Hapless wizard Rincewind and tourist Twoflower careen across Discworld as satire and spectacle collide—the Luggage rampages, dragons are powered by belief, and every epic turns delightfully sideways. It’s that same blend of playful cleverness and genre in‑jokes that made Shea’s jaunts through Spenser and the sagas such a hoot.

Harold Shea’s symbolic‑logic spellwork gave you a kick—equations as keys to other realities. In The Atrocity Archives, Bob Howard practices computational demonology for a secret British agency, where the right algorithm can summon things that should stay uninvited. The procedural, systems‑savvy magic, deadpan humor, and bureaucratic chaos echo Shea’s rational tinkering with the uncanny—only with IT tickets, eldritch audits, and world‑ending edge cases in the mix.

If the wide‑eyed delight of stepping from Gloriana’s court to Valhalla—discovering rules of each realm on the fly—hooked you, Bridge of Birds offers that same sense of exuberant discovery. Number Ten Ox and the irrepressibly brilliant Master Li (“with a slight flaw in his character”) chase cures, legends, and riddles across an enchanted, myth‑touched China. Like Shea’s quick‑witted fixes to magical quandaries, each revelation unfolds with warmth, wit, and a cascade of marvelous surprises.