James Blaylock is one of the finest writers in the fantasy field. Sixteen of his acclaimed short stories are collected here for the first time. Included is "Thirteen Phantasms," his brilliant World Fantasy Award-winning story of a man who returns to the Golden Age of science fiction through an ad in a pulp magazine. "Myron Chester and the Toads" recounts one man's encounter with aliens and the effect it has on him and his neighbors. And in the strange otherworldly California of "Paper Dragons" one man's obsession with the creation of a dragon slowly destroys him.
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACKTM series celebrates Clark Ashton Smith with 17 of his classic fantasy & horror stories from WEIRD TALES and other sources! Included here are: THE ABOMINATIONS OF YONDO THE THIRD EPISODE OF VATHEK THIRTEEN PHANTASMS THE CHARNEL GOD THE COLOSSUS OF YLOURGNE THE CHAIN OF AFORGOMON THE BLACK ABBOT OF PUTHUUM THE VOYAGE OF KING EUVORAN THE MAZE OF THE ENCHANTER THE DOUBLE SHADOW A NIGHT IN MALNEANT THE DEVOTEE OF EVIL THE WILLOW LANDSCAPE THE EMPIRE OF NECROMANCERS THE ENCHANTRESS OF SYLAIRE THE INVISIBLE CITY MOTHER OF TOADS If you enjoy this volume of classic stories, don't forget to search your favorite ebook store for "Wildside Press Megapack" to see the 240+ other entries in this series, including not just weird fiction, but mysteries, adventure, science fiction, fantasy, horror -- and much, much more!
For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. As Scores demonstrates, his devotion to the task of understanding the central literatures of our era has not slackened. There are jokes in Scores, and curses, and tirades, and apologies, and riffs; but every word of every review, in the end, is about how we understand the stories we tell about the world. Following on from his two previous books of collected reviews (Strokes and Look at the Evidence) this book collects reviews from a wide variety of sources, but mostly from Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly. Where it has seemed possible to do so without distorting contemporary responses to books, these reviews have been revised, sometimes extensively. 125 review articles, over 200 books reviewed in more than 214,000 words.
Once upon a time all literature was fantasy, set in a mythical past when magic existed, animals talked, and the gods took an active hand in earthly affairs. As the mythical past was displaced in Western estimation by the historical past and novelists became increasingly preoccupied with the present, fantasy was temporarily marginalized until the late 20th century, when it enjoyed a spectacular resurgence in every stratum of the literary marketplace. Stableford provides an invaluable guide to this sequence of events and to the current state of the field. The chronology tracks the evolution of fantasy from the origins of literature to the 21st century. The introduction explains the nature of the impulses creating and shaping fantasy literature, the problems of its definition and the reasons for its changing historical fortunes. The dictionary includes cross-referenced entries on more than 700 authors, ranging across the entire historical spectrum, while more than 200 other entries describe the fantasy subgenres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism, and the intimately convoluted relationship between literary fantasies, scholarly fantasies, and lifestyle fantasies. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography that ranges from general textbooks and specialized accounts of the history and scholarship of fantasy literature, through bibliographies and accounts of the fantasy literature of different nations, to individual author studies and useful websites.
“...[A] twisted but delightful fantasy tale... Mystery, mesmerism, murder, and mayhem combine into a jolly good time. Blaylock’s fans will be gratified.” —Publishers Weekly When coffins bearing what might be living corpses are discovered in a sea cave long used by smugglers, Langdon St. Ives and his wife Alice are precipitated into a hellish mystery involving an ages-old house standing on the chalk cliffs of the Kentish coast. The strange house, shunned by the people Broadstairs and Margate, caters to a century-old eating society that offers a secret catalogue of corpses for sale and a menu for wealthy members with... eccentric tastes. When the society sets out to entrap St. Ives, an onrushing adventure ensues as Alice and the formidable Frobishers fight for their lives—an adventure that seems to ensure a deadly ending.
Deep within the cavern-riddled chalk cliffs above the English Channel there brews a threat to the very sanity of the people of Britain. A startling madness infects the members of the Explorer’s Club in London, the debacle coinciding with the disappearance of Alice St. Ives and the murder of the lighthouse keeper at Beachy Head. Langdon St. Ives sets out to rescue his wife and to stop the accelerating train of events hurtling he and his friends into a dark tunnel of madness and death.
A biblical betrayal drives this trilogy from the World Fantasy Award–winning author, “a singular American fabulist” (William Gibson, author of Neuromancer). The price of immortality . . . Two thousand years ago, there lived a man who sold some valuable information for a fee of thirty silver coins. His name was Judas Iscariot, and he is no longer with us. The coins, however, still exist—and still hold an elusive power over all who claim them . . . Like Andrew Vanbergen, whose attempts at innkeeping bring in stranger business than he ever expected. And Aunt Naomi, whose most prized family heirloom is a silver spoon—with a curiously ancient-looking engraving. And especially old Mr. Pennyman, who is only five silver coins short of immortality . . . “The Last Coin should confirm Blaylock’s position as a trendsetter, breaking new ground rather than just exploring the old.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Against a lyric vision of the Southern California coast, cosmic conspiracy theories bump heads in a gleeful farce to produce another strange and wonderful book from the idiosyncratic author of Homunculus and Land of Dreams.” —Publishers Weekly “Weird and wonderful touches abound; Blaylock makes good use of his coastal setting, extracting his own brand of magic from familiar places and familiar things. While Biblical conspiracies and revisionist scriptures are all the rage now, Blaylock got the jump on the current crop by several years.” —SFF Chronicles
“Blaylock is one of the most brilliant of that new generation of fabulist writers: All the Bells on Earthmay be his best book . . . Enthralling” (The Washington Post Book World). In the dead of night, a man climbs the tower of St. Anthony’s Church, driven by a compulsive urge to silence the bells. In a deserted alley, a seemingly random victim is consumed by a torrent of flames. And in the deceptive light of day, a mail-order businessman named Walt Stebbins receives a bizarre artifact—a glass jar containing the preserved body of a bluebird. Things like this don’t usually happen in a town like Orange, California. Ordinary people don’t expect to face evil—real evil—in their backyards. But as Walt unravels the mystery of the bird in the jar, he learns that the battle between good and evil takes place every day . . . “An absolute page-turner . . . A terrific novel by a master of the offbeat and the absurd.” —The Washington Post Book World “In the best tradition of The Twilight Zone, crossed with wacky characters, humor and moments of real love stunningly portrayed.” —Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column “With acrobatic grace, Blaylock, winner of two World Fantasy Awards, once again walks the dividing line between fantasy and horror—this time, as he relates a deal-with-the-devil story set in suburban Southern California.” —Publishers Weekly “While juxtaposing subtle humor with grim horror, the author portrays a world in which human virtues become mystic weapons and unlikely heroes grope their way toward salvation.” —Library Journal
