10. The Chronicles of Amber
Roger Zelazny

With the Amber novels, Zelazny created a very detailed and intricate fantasy universe. Fantasy fans have called this one of the most engrossing fantasy worlds they have ever read and remains a classic of modern fantasy.

9. The King of Elfland’s Daughter
Lord Dunsany

One of the most influential works of fantasy writing, Lord Dunsany’s 1924 novel of elves, kingdoms and magic laid out the groundwork for much of modern fantasy today. This is truly a pioneering work in the genre which laid out the groundwork for the writers who would come after.

8. A Song of Ice and Fire
George R. R. Martin

George Martin’s series is a richly constructed world grounded in both reality and fantasy. These unconventional plots keep the story fresh. The action is realistic while the events are unpredictable, adding a certain suspense around the characters, as you truly don’t know what will happen to them. The four books of the series thus far have grabbed the attention of high fantasy fans everywhere as they have proven to be some of the best there is.

7. A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L’Engle

This richly layered children’s fantasy has become a favourite to many readers over the years. Its deep themes may remind you of C.S. Lewis, with a hard look at what it means to be a child, as well as just being a great adventure. A Wrinkle in Time is a book which will stand the test of time.

6. The Harry Potter Series
J.K. Rowling

Sure, it may be bold of me to include a series which is so recent as high as #5. However, this is no ordinary fantasy series. This is the series which created a worldwide reading phenomenon, grabbing the attention of both kids and adults everywhere. Yet Harry Potter is not just hype; these are wonderfully crafted stories set in a fully realized magical world. The characters feel real, and even more so since we follow them through their growing years throughout the seven books. There are twists and very interesting plot devices all leading up to a final conclusion which does not disappoint. This series is one of the powerhouses of modern fantasy, and will remain so more a long, long time.

5. The Chronicles of Narnia
C.S. Lewis

Its interesting that most of this list is comprised of stories written for children. Perhaps it says something about the child-like need for discovery in fantasy tales, and none sums it up better than the Narnia books. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has reached instant classic status, and the wardrobe in the title has become an icon for all portals into new and fantastic worlds. Lewis’ Christianity allegories also give this series an intellectual edge which doesn’t distract from the story. These seven books are some of the most beloved fantasy stories of all time.

4. His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman

Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy tells the story of two kids who are able to journey through the different dimensions which exist in the universe. These two children have a great destiny in the future of all the worlds which will affect the very nature of existence and spirituality. Pullman reaches for some pretty big goals here, but does not disappoint. He tackles the domination of organized religion while championing the freedoms of human thought and expression.

3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
Lewis Carroll

Carroll’s fantasy tale of Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole has captured the imagination of youth all over the world. This exercise in nonsensical logic, language and situations has become a book not only to enjoy, bu also to study. The metaphors in these two tales run deep and are often referenced by many other media. Alice and her crazy adventures simply make no sense; and that’s why we love them.

2. A Midsummer’s Night Dream
William Shakespeare

Let’s face it;  Shakespeare is the master.  Many of Shakespeare’s plays have an element of fantasy in them, but with Dream the bard went all out.  Shakespeare mostly played upon the idea of the fairy world and the mischievous creatures’ intrusions upon the lives of us regular humans.  Midsummer night’s dream is perhaps Shakespeare’s most beloved comedy, and its whimsy will live on for many centuries to come.

1. The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien

Choosing the greatest work of literary fiction was an easy task. It is, of course, the Lord of the Rings; the epic high fantasy of one hobbits journey to defeat the powers of evil. No fantasy world is as rich or detailed as Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It is as if he himself believed it to be a real place, complete with a full, fleshed out history and wonderfully detailed geography. And set in this world is a strong, heartfelt story which has proven to be ageless. This is a bold tale of massive proportions which also works on the simplest emotional level. A masterpiece in every way.

It is difficult to write a review of something which is simultaneously forgotten and revered, depending on what group of people you talk to. Writing about the forgotten is easy–you’ve rediscovered something you want to share with everyone else–but writing about the revered and beloved is quite another thing. It’s like writing a review of the Bible. “Dragged a bit at the front–all those begats?!–but then picked up nicely towards the end.” Impossible! Unfortunately, I am in that very same pickle today as I think about Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

Dunsany, real name the wonderful Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, was an Irish baron (thus “Lord” Dunsany) who wrote prolifically in the early twentieth century before he died in 1957 and his work fell into the realms of the forgotten. One of his most famous works is The King of Elfland’s Daughter, a book which various modern fantasy writers (including David Eddings and Neil Gaiman) have credited with launching the modern fantasy genre and/or inspiring them personally to write at all. But today, outside of the circles that know who Eddings and Gaiman are, most people have never heard of Lord Dunsany or the King of Elfland or his daughter.

This is a true shame. The King of Elfland’s Daughter is a delightful little fantasy (or perhaps simply fantastical) story which does not fall victim to the many pitfalls of Victorian fairy tales. As discussed previously in this blog, these were stories written entirely for children, oftentimes taking place in some kind of frilly garden, and involving sugarplums and minuscule tea cups. Instead, Dunsany absolutely does give birth to the modern idea of fantasy and fairies, setting his tale in the kingdom of Erl which is located directly next to the border of Elfland.

The story tells of Alvaric, the prince of Erl, who is ordered by his father to go into Elfland and marry the beautiful fairy princess he will find there in order to bring magic to the kingdom of Erl as requested by the Erl parliament (a group of about six mead-drinking town elders). Alvaric accomplishes this feat, but that is by no means the end of the story. Rather, Dunsany takes a look at what happens after “happily ever after” and uses his story to explore familial loyalties, being careful what you wish for, and journeying long and far to reclaim your true love. In short, the story has everything. Equally impressive is Dunsany’s ability to take any number of hackneyed elements and combine them into a wholly original and magical narrative.

And, on top of an original plot-line, Dunsany is also gifted with an unexpectedly whimsical prose. He primarily writes much like you would expect an Edwardian baron to write, but occasionally he’ll just throw something out there that is so perfect and so whimsical that you are blown away. I don’t want to ruin the surprise of any of them, so I won’t quote here, but I’ll just mention a certain little girl who is saved from Elfland by a jellyroll.

While there were some parts of the story I did not enjoy (including the idea of a girl’s choice between her father and her husband, which was dealt with a very unappealingly heavy-handed way, and the hunting of unicorns, which has never appealed to me), I would absolutely recommend giving this story a go. At the very least, you’ll gain some appreciation for one of Fantasy’s founding fathers and get to compare how far the genre has come since Dunsany’s day. If you’re comparing it to Gaiman’s Stardust, the answer is not much. And that’s definitely a good thing.

Anon – Fifty Masterpieces Of Mystery (Odhams, nd.  [1937])

Crime Stories

Dorothy L. Sayers – The Learned Adventure Of The Dragon’s Head
Austin Freeman – The Magic Casket
H. C. Bailey – The President Of San Jacinto
Anthony Berkeley – Outside The Law
The Baroness Orczy – The Regent’s Park Murder
Margery Allingham – They Never Got Caught
J. J. Connington – Before Insulin
Stacy Aumonier – The Perfect Murder
G. K. Chesterton – The Shadow Of The Shark
O. Henry – The Marsonettes
F. Britten Austin – Diamond Cut Diamond
Augustus Muir – Murder At The Microphone
Milward Kennedy – Death In The Kitchen
Freeman Willis Croft – The Vertical Line
Edgar Wallace – The Clue Of Monday’s Settling
Gerard Fairlie – The Ghost Of A Smile
Bertram Atkey – Sons Of The Chief Warder

Strange And Horrible Stories

Seamark – Query
Ralph Straus – The Room On The Fourth Floor
A. E. W. Mason – The Wounded God
Lord Dunsany – The Electric King
A. J. Alan – Charles
John Metcalfe – The Funeral March Of A Marionette
W. W. Jacobs – The Interruption
C. D. Heriot – Nobody At Home
Agatha Christie – The Blood-Stained Pavement
Mrs. Belloc Lowdnes – St. Catherine’s Eve
F. Marion Crawford – The Screaming Skull
Joseph Conrad – The Idiots
Sydney Horler – The Vampire
Saki – The Interlopers
L. P. Hartley – The Travelling Grave
E. A. Poe – The Tell-Tale Heart
H. Spicer – The Bird Woman
W. Fryer Harvey – The Dabblers

Ghost Stories

Vernon Lee – Marsyas In Flanders
Eleanor Scott – The Room
Marjorie Bowen – Florence Flannery
Ernest Bramah – The Ghost At Massingham Mansions
Norman Matson – The House On Big Faraway
Naomi Royde-Smith – Madam Julia’s Tale
L. A. G. Strong – Sea Air
Ann Bridge – The Buick Saloon
May Sinclair – The Token
Oliver Onions – The Cigarette Case
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch – A Pair Of Hands
H. R. Wakefield – Blind Man’s Buff
Algernon Blackwood – The Man Who Was Milligan
Richard Hughes – The Ghost
A. M. Burrage – The Room Over The Kitchen
J. S. LeFanu – Mr. Justice Harbottle
Anonymous – The Dead Man Of Varley Grange

Includes:

Eleanor Scott – The Room: “I’m not going to try and tell you what it was … I’d as soon try to describe the most loathsome surgical operation or the most indecent physical illness. And if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Thank Heaven, we haven’t made the word for what I saw.”

A room in Massingham’s house has the reputation of being haunted, so when five of his friends answer his invitation to stay with him, naturally they decide to each take a turn at spending a night in the creepy chamber and “do down the spook!” By the time Amery the Parson gets to take his turn, it’s clear from the state of Grindley and Vernon that whatever is in there is far more powerful and evil than a mere ghost. By the following morning, the Parson is a broken man, but Reece, the ’simple’ little curate, is insistent that he’s not going to be denied the experience. Although we’re never told outright what each man endured in the room – the closest we get is with Amery who is confronted by the past crimes of his Church – it hardly makes the goings-on any less unsettling. Not quite as striking as Randall’s classic Celui-La but very deserving of your attention i’d have said. “There must be an amazing amount of goodness somewhere when here is such a quantity of unspeakable evil in men like us, who thought ourselves decent fellows enough.”

John Metcalfe – The Funeral March Of A Marionette: On a snowy, bitterly cold November 4th, budding entrepreneur Alf and little George drag a trolley along the Millbank, collecting a small fortune in coppers from admires of their uncannily lifelike Guy. Unfortunately, old Gus the tramp isn’t equip to handle the sub-zero temperatures ….

A. M. Burrage – The Room Over The Kitchen: A weary rambler arrives in Penhiddoc, his one thought to get a room at the inn for the night. In the doorway, he’s accosted by a fellow who he takes to be the local harmless lunatic who implores him not to take the room over the kitchen. It transpires that twenty years ago, four Oxford students stayed at the inn. For a chuckle, a trio of these fellows, in cahoots with the landlord, convinced the nervous young Mr. Farney that his room was haunted. They pushed the joke too far ….

C. D. Heriot – Nobody At Home: Frank and Maurice have drifted out of each others lives since Oxford, and now the former, learning his old pal has fallen on hard times, is keen to put the friendship back on course. Maurice has tried to make a go of it as a poet, but as soon as he arrives at the decrepit old schoolhouse that serves as his home, Frank realises it’s gone very badly for him. At first, Frank is angry that he may have made a wasted journey as no-one replies to his knocks at the door. But when he takes a look through the letterbox ….

Henry Spicer – The Bird Woman: A young lady answers an advertisement for a position as carer to “an invalid, infirm or lunatic person” at a dingy-looking house which has the reputation of being haunted. “Having little fear of anything human and none at all of apparitions” she’s confident that she’ll be able to cope with her charge – until she actually claps eyes on the owl-like travesty she’s expected to look after.

Sydney Horler – The Vampire: Two Roman Catholic priests discuss the case of a man of whom everyone seemed to have an “instinctive horror”. When a terrible murder is committed, leaving the victim minus most of her throat, the shunned individual confesses to Father ——, who, of course, he is powerless to pass on the information to the police. Sometimes published as The Believer

Richard Hughes – The Ghost: Told from the perspective of Millie, who’s just had her head bashed in by cheating husband Johnny. Having spent her life terrified of ghosts, now she’s evidently one herself Millie intends to haunt the murderer, especially as he doesn’t seem the least perturbed about what he’s done.

H. R. Wakefield – Blind Man’s Buff: Aylesbury, Herts. Mr. Cort learns why none of the locals will approach Lorn Manor after nightfall. In pitch darkness, He loses himself within a few feet of the front door and is pursued about the old house by unseen entities.

W. W. Jacobs – The Interruption: With his wife dead at last Spencer Goddard can get his hands on all of her lovely money! How happy he is! For all of twenty seconds. Hannah, his cook, wastes no time in letting on that she knows more about her late mistress’s “illness” – and his part in it – than he’d prefer and neither is she slow in turning the situation to her advantage. Should she die suddenly – like poor Mrs. Goddard for example – she’s left a letter with her sister , the contents of which he should regret being made known to the police. Now he must think of a way to save his neck and see hers stretched he opts for a high risk solution …

Anonymous – The Dead Man Of Varley Grange: Westernshire. When young Henderson takes over the Grange, he unwisely invites eight friends to spend the Christmas holiday with him. Prior to his arrival the property had remained vacant for years due to the dreadful family curse as it is reputed that, some centuries ago, Captain Varley murdered his sister after she fled the Convent and ran off with her lover. Now their phantoms stalk the Grange and if you’re unfortunate enough to see the dead nun’s face you die within the year!

Dorothy L. Sayers – Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror: 3rd Series (Gollancz, 1934)

Help! Cover Wanted!

1. Detection  and Mystery

2. Mystery and Horror

A.J. Alan – The 19 Club
Martin Armstrong – Sombrero
John  Betjeman – Lord Mount Prospect
Algernon Blackwood – The Wendigo
Ann Bridge – The Song in the House
D.K. Broster – Couching at the Door
Thomas Burke – The Dumb Wife
A.M. Burrage – The Bargain
A.E. Coppard – Arabesque: the Mouse
Oswald Couldrey – The Mistaken Fury
E. M. Delafield – Sophy Mason Comes Back
Lord Dunsany – Our Distant Cousins
J.F. Dwyer – A Jungle Graduate
Leonora Gregory – The Scoop
Alan Griff – The House of Desolation
L.P. Hartley – The Island
W.F. Harvey – Double Demon
Margaret Irwin – The Book
W.W. Jacobs – The Interruption
M.R. James – The Diary of Mr. Poynter
Cyril Landon – You’ll Come to the Tree in the End
John Metcalfe – Time-Fuse
J. C. Moore – Decay
Claire D. Pollexen – Stowaway
Arthur Quilter-Couch – A Pair of Hands
R.E. Roberts – The Hill
Naomi Royde-Smith – The Pattern
Herbert Shaw – What Can a Dead Man Do?
V. Sheehan – The Virtuoso
Lady Eleanor Smith – No Ships Pass
Sir Frederick Treves – The Idol With Hands of Clay
H. R. Wakefield – The Frontier Guards
H.G. Wells – The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham
B. A. Williams – Witch-Trot Pond
Clarence Winchester – Anniversary

Edmund Crispin [Robert Bruce Montgomery] – Best Tales of Terror 2 (Faber and Faber, 1965)

Help! Cover Wanted!

Edmund Crispin – Foreword

Ambrose Bierce – Moxon’s Master
M. R. James – A Warning to the Curious
William Hope Hodgson – The Voice in the Night
John Metcalfe – Time-Fuse
Lord Dunsany – The Electric King
Nugent Barker – Curious Adventure of Mr. Bond
W. F. Harvey – The Dabblers
John Keir Cross – “Happy Birthday, Dear Alex”
Ray Bradbury – The Small Assassin
H. Russell Wakefield – The Frontier Guards
Elizabeth Bowen – The Cat Jumps
Anthony Boucher – They Bite
L. P. Hartley – The Two Vaynes
Kit Reed – Tell Me, Doctor – Please

Vere H. Collins – More Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection Of Uncanny Tales from Sir Walter Scott to Michael Arlen (H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1927)

Help! Cover Wanted!

Sir Walter Scott – The Tapestried Chamber
Edgar Allan Poe – The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar
Elizabeth Gaskell – The Old Nurses Story
Charles Dickens – No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman
J. Sheridan Le Fanu – Squire Toby’s Will
George MacDonald – The Lady In The Mirror
Walter Besant & James Rice – The Case Of Mr. Lucraft
Henry James – The Great Good Place
F. Marion Crawford – The Upper Berth
Arthur Machen – The Novel Of The White Powder
H. G. Wells – The Door In The Wall
E. F. Benson – Negotium Perambulans
Algernon Blackwood – Running Wolf
Lord Dunsany – The Bureau D’Exchange De Main
Katherine Fullerton Gerould – Loquier’s Third Act
Michael Arlen – The Ancient Sin
Maurice Baring – Venus
R. S. Hawker – The Bothanon Ghost
John Metcalfe – Nightmare Jack
May Sinclair – Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched

OKAY, that was weird.

This was one of those fantasy-world type ones you run across every so often, a sort of Kubla Khan opium-dream-type fairy tale.

Oh how I hate them.

Lovecraft was stricken with occasional fits of them, like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which makes me roll my eyes like a teenager every time I skim through it (it’s aggressively unreadable). Just look at a random sample:

At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.

The entire novella is like that! Doesn’t it make thine cryptical eyeballs roll back in thine unimagined skull?

Actually some people genuinely like this stuff. Novels have been based on this world that Kadath takes place in (it’s called the Dream Cycle). I should say that I like Lovecraft but only when he’s sticking (as close as he can) to the reserved, dry, Jamesean style instead of being a Dunsany fanboy. Naturally, I think his best story is The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Anyway, before I got indignant about Kadath, I was talking about The Crimson Weaver. It’s basically just like this Lovecraft/Dunsany nonsense. Some dude and his mentor wander through some nightmarish fantasy world and preciously ponder eternal questions, and then they meet up with this evil beautiful vampire woman who wants to suck their souls out of them or something. And there’s some stuff about TRUE LOVE.

Yeah.

But if you are into all that Dream Cycle stuff, by all means, check it out. With bold entreaty.

I go to church. I frequent grocery stores. I recreate in recreational places with my family. Grownups sit down and cross their legs. They smile and look at me, with a wisdom completely untranslateable and incommunicable. The wisdom lives in their eyes, like candy behind glass windows or an inside joke. They are human, they have been to at least some of the places that I will be. Share with me. Show me that it’s okay to not know.

These grownups look at me like I imagine God looks at me and they ask, “So, what decisions have you made about this or that?” and “What are your plans?”

And I look up at blue sky and think of Thoreau and Durden and Jesus and my children.

And I say, “We’ll see.”

It’s always a strange thing when I decide that I like a certain author’s work. Because, I’ll be honest, the decision itself is probably heavily influenced by various factors
that may or may not have anything to do with the skill of the author in question. It may have been the weather that led me to that certain poem. It may have been the
right music stumbled upon that made this short story seem to perfectly embody my own heart’s struggles. It may have been some of my own writing that led me to an author. Of course, one could argue that these factors are being filtered through me, and the end result of this filtering would simply be what I prefer at the given time. Perhaps all these influential factors that I mention are just life itself. And, at the place I was in life at the time, those authors gave me what I needed or was looking for.

Regardless, please note that the gentlemen pictured are Lord Dunsany, T.S. Eliot, and H.P. Lovecraft, respectively.

Lord Dunsany (or Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, whichever you wish to call him) has been a great source of insight for me. You can find a ton of his work online and free, at sites like this one. I’ve been told that you can’t really be classified as a human being until you’ve read Dunsany. Which, considering how little most people have heard of him, would cause me to conclude that there are actually not very many human beings around these days. Dunsany has also been known to write really short stuff. Like this:

COMPROMISE

They built their gorgeous home, their city of glory, above the lair of the earthquake. They built it of marble and gold in the shining youth of the world. There they feasted and fought and called their
city immortal, and danced and sang songs to the gods. None heeded the earthquake in all those joyous streets. And down in the deeps of the earth, on the black feet of the abyss, they that would conquer Man mumbled long in the darkness, mumbled and goaded the earthquake to try his strength with that city, to go forth blithely at night and to gnaw its pillars like bones. And down in those grimy deeps the earthquake answered them, and would not do their pleasure and would not stir from thence, for who knew who they were who danced all day
where he rumbled, and what if the lords of that city that had no fear of his anger were haply even the gods!

And the centuries plodded by, on and on round the world, and one day they that had danced, they that had sung in that city, remembered the lair of the earthquake in the deeps down under their feet, and made plans one with another and sought to avert the danger, sought to appease the earthquake and turn his anger away.

They sent down singing girls, and priests with oats and wine, they sent down garlands and propitious berries, down by dark steps to the black depths of the earth, they sent peacocks newly slain, and boys with burning spices, and their thin white sacred cats with collars of pearls all newly drawn from sea, they sent huge diamonds down in coffers of teak, and ointment and strange oriental dyes, arrows and armor and the rings of their queen.

“Oho,” said the earthquake in the coolth of the earth, “so they are not the gods.”

T.S. Eliot, widely known among literary circles for his poem The Wasteland, has been a comfort to me. He was, from what I’ve heard, a late convert to Christianity. I tend to think of adult conversions to Christianity as more genuine, simply because they are, by definition, a departure from the established social/mental foundation
of your life. Not say younger conversions are not genuine. I just personally tend to think higher of adult converts.

T.S. Eliot had a nervous breakdown right before writing The Wasteland. For me, this makes the conclusion of that poem “Shantih, shantih, shantih,” very meaningful to me. Those words are the Hindu invocation of peace said at the end of certain prayers. At the end of The Wasteland, Eliot still plants some hope for peace.

H.P. Lovecraft has been an inspiration to horror writers for decades. There is a strange, inexplicable leaning to the mystically mysterious in his writing. Dare to read some of it here. For starters, read “The Dreams in the Witch-House,” “The White Ship,” and “The Colour out of Space.”

Choose to read.

Kisses and goodnight, I leave you with one of mine:

Marriage

God is the blue sky
and the river is His great mirror

that we may all know
in His reflection
He is seen everywhere.

Everyday, a baptism.

daniel

By grace, 2,015 words written on the new book today! Whenever I throw word counts around, it’s not my intention to boast. And sheer numbers of words, of course, mean nothing: enough monkeys with enough typewriters could bang out an enormous number of words. I mean only 1.) to demonstrate that there is forward progress, and 2.) to establish credentials. What gives me the right to hold up my head and talk about writing as if I know something is not the things I’ve published: it’s the fact that, today, I’ve been walking the walk, with my fingers on the keys, choosing certain phrases over certain other phrases, figuring out how to get a little more of the story out of the excavation site without damaging it too severely. So the book is on track and moving ahead nicely. (Or, as Spock says in the recent excellent film: “Thrusters on full.”) Soli Deo gloria! [The story is told that J.S. Bach wrote that phrase on every manuscript when he composed music: Soli Deo gloria -- Glory to God alone.]

That “excavation” theory of writing is set forth clearly by Stephen King in his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I think he’s exactly right. How about this [my own variation]? — “Writing is bagging the smoke.” It’s attempting to throw a curtain around the misty shape that coalesces — just for a moment — within your reach. If you can get the curtain around it, you can preserve it (or at least its shadow) in a fixed form for yourself and others to enjoy. If you can’t, it’s gone again, because it’s always drifting, always changing, like the clouds in a summer sky. Ooo, I like that! (This cloud motion theory explains why, if you would tackle the same idea at different times of your life, you’d get significantly different stories.) Though you may not believe it, I am still on topic here. . . .

So it’s high time we talked about that dragon! To refresh your memory, and so that you don’t have to go back to a previous post to see the poem in question, here again is “Glory Day.” (The term “Glory Day” refers to the Fourth of July, which for me has always been a symbol of the height of summer . . . the time of freedom and imagination, the season “better-than-which-it-does-not-get.” I wrote this poem at some point during my college years. Specifically, I remember that I wrote it on a 5th of July, the day after Glory Day, sitting on a folding chair facing north across the field between my house and Chris’s house, in the shade of the maple trees at the northeast corner of our yard, with the barn directly behind me. The barn is gone now, but most of those trees are still there.)

“Glory Day”

We found the old cat one hot Glory Day

In the steamy weeds, swelled to twice his size;

Green glory thunder echoed in his eyes

As we laid him out where the smell of hay

And green maple shadows would make the flies

Forget him; and watching the heat waves rise

From the wind-mirroring beans we covered him with clay.

There was lightning low in the sky away

Off, and a distant rumbling down the road;

The Virginia creeper whispered to the wagon

It covered like time-snails’ tracks, the old load

Of bricks for building; something like a dragon

Crawled south in the blur of wheat’s golden sway

When we buried a tomcat on Glory Day.

That’s sort of a sonnet: it has 14 lines. But look at the strange rhyme scheme: ABBABBA ACDCDAA. In a departure from normal sonneting (sonneteering?), I compressed the part before the break and expanded the part after the break. See the overlapping effect in what’s normally the first eight lines (now seven)? — ABBAABBA has become ABBABBA. With that overlap, and by carrying that A-rhyme through as I did, I was trying to emphasize unity, that all these elements of the poem are inextricably woven together (“seamless throughout,” like that garment the soldiers didn’t want to tear but cast lots for instead).

In other words, the dead cat is the dragon. The beans, the heat waves, the maple shadows, the creeper, the tracks of time-snails: all these are the dragon, and they are the thunder, and the thunder is the cat, and the dragon is the image of the invisible wind mirrored in the beans that sway. All these things are part of growing up on a farm, where death and life are bound up together; where life bursts from the soil every spring . . . where fragile green things grow from the cracks of old dead fence-posts . . . where everything goes to sleep in the winter, blanketed with snow . . . and where there’s always the smell of something dead wafting from behind some hedgerow (“In ahind yon oul fail dyke / I wot there lies a new slain knight. . . .”) Moreover, it’s all bound up in “Glory Day,” the A-rhyme, the phrase found in the title and in the first and final lines of the poem. “Glory” is freedom and celebration and fireworks in the sky; it’s wonder and youth and being alive, learning and growing; but it’s also a word lodged in the Beyond, isn’t it? Believers in Christ live in “the hope of glory.” We speak of “the glory to be revealed in us.” . . . “We have beheld His glory.” . . . “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” . . . We often set “glory” as the condition opposed to the here and now: there are those of us alive now, and there are “the saints in glory.” So it’s a loaded word — and, I hope, a loaded poem.

Thank you to everyone who put forth a theory as to what the “something like a dragon” is! I appreciated them all, and every one of them was a good answer. A couple of you “went public” and gave us your ideas in official comments; a couple more slipped them to me by e-mail. Your theories about the dragon included:

a rumbling train, the sounds of its progress echoing the thunder;

a row of hills undulating in the distance;

a river, stream, or the Flatbranch Creek;

and even the “raccoon lugging a knapsack” from Maxine Kumin’s “The Presence”!

One might also say a tractor — a solitary tractor crawling across the distance in the vastness of a field can take on a mystical aspect. All these answers are good, and all can be right together.

As for me, I wasn’t thinking as literally as you all were. For me, the dragon isn’t necessarily anything physical or material. It’s more an abstract concept, suggested by those amazing and unsettling shadows the wind leaves in grain fields, which motif I’ve used again and again in my writing. [From my poem The Horror in the Wind: "The wind in shapes / and shadows masks / the dreadful footfalls of the gods." And from "Seawall": "Across the slopes, the wind stirs the green asili stems in vast wandering arcs, as if unseen creatures larger than dragons are playing there."] Jesus mentions this phenomenon, too, doesn’t He, when He’s talking to Nicodemus?

The dragon-like thing crawls south. For me, south is the direction “toward warmth, toward imagination, toward enchantment.” South is the “good” direction. At that time in my life, “north” meant college and cold, hard work and the big city; “south” meant home and freedom.[Treebeard has the line in the LOTR movies about how he's always enjoyed walking south, because it always feels like he's walking downhill. I hear you, 'Beard!]

My intention in this poem, then, is that on the day when all these elements are present: the green, the tree shadows, the dead cat needing to be buried, the heat waves, the passage of time, the thunder — on this day, the wonder and terror and joy and grandeur almost manifest themselves in a tangible shape. That thing crawling south is wonder itself. It’s the shape of something that has no shape; it’s the expression of something that cannot be expressed. (Heh, heh! Sounds like I’m talking about Arthur C. Clarke’s Monolith!) All you can do is get the general idea.

Whew! That’s more than anyone ever wanted to know about “Glory Day”!

I was thinking about this use of a dragon to represent something abstract and larger, and it occurred to me that animals — in particular, big animals — are sometimes used this way. It seems to be an ancient and fundamental device.

I need to quote again from my story “A Tale of Silences,” which appeared in Cicada, January/February 2006. This tale is set in a mountain village in Japan in 1970, about 25 years after the war. The main character is an old man named Jii who has lived all his life in the village, which is now slated for obliteration through the construction of a new dam which will flood the area. The story tells of Jii’s last year in the village.

One night, he is awakened in total darkness by strange sounds, and he realizes a bear has gotten into his house and into the very room where he’s been sleeping. For a long time he lies there, not daring to move, and eventually the bear (for reasons unknown) goes away. Jii ponders what this encounter has meant. Here’s the excerpt:

As Jii sawed, chopped, and bundled sticks, he watched the forest, wondering if his bear would return. At times he was sure he could feel eyes upon him, peering from the underbrush. Once he thought he heard husky breathing nearby, but it might have been a breeze in the pine branches. And once, just as a broken limb he’d sawed off dropped into the decomposing leaves, he saw a bear on the next ridge. It was black against the dull sky and huge, bigger than any he’d ever seen. Slowly its head turned in his direction. When the eyes found him, Jii was somehow sure this had been the bear in his house. It gazed at him for a long time, then ambled into the trees.

Later, at dusk, the bamboo swayed in the wind. Sipping hot tea, Jii watched from the window. He envisioned human figures coming and going among the grove’s shifting shadows: himself and Fusa, sometimes middle-aged, sometimes young, once hand-in-hand for the first time. . . .

Paler each day, the sun sought to warm the land by showering more and more thin light, the last of its summer store. It sparkled from the few sere leaves, blazed on the streams, and suffused morning mists like a golden forgetfulness. Jii felt an urgency in the clamoring light; soon all the bears would go into their dens. Before they began their long sleep, and all the land with them, something must be done. Some secret, Jii began to think, must lie hidden near at hand, some riddle of dying leaf or unturned stone that, if solved, would bring peace and clarity. He became convinced that the bear had come to call him out before the valley was lost, to awaken him from his den in the deep years, to lead him to an answer for which he did not quite grasp the question. All he knew, as surely as he knew the sun sank earlier each evening behind the purple height, was that time was running out.

Later, Jii again encounters the bear up close:

The great bear had come — the mountain’s nushi. As if sunlight were shining on his back, Jii felt a comfort, his fear melting away. The terror of the nushi’s first visit was gone, but still Jii could not turn around. A sense of his own insubstantiality kept him unmoving, as if to stir in the nushi’s presence might cause him to dissolve in light. He lowered his head, filled at once with weariness and a peace he had not known since childhood — the earliest days and nights of consciousness, the only time in mortal life that one rests completely. Sinking to the floor before the nushi’s gigantic paws, Jii slept.

Do not fear, said a voice to him in his dreams.

This Japanese concept of a particular area’s nushi  or “lord” — the guardian and master of a certain mountain, forest, or river — has to some degree been introduced to western audiences through the film Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) by Hayao Miyazaki, in which the Shinto gods of the forested mountain take the forms of gigantic animals.

It’s interesting, this manifestation of things powerful and divine in the forms of animals. . . .

In Lord Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder, I recall that one of those haunting, enthralling black-and-white pictures shows a pathless forest, and the hind parts of some huge, bear-like animal just visible as the creature passes behind a tree. I don’t have access to my copy of the book right now — anyone out there with a copy, can you confirm this memory? I was intrigued by how the artist chose to depict only part of the animal — and not the head.

In my own first, unpublished novel The Threshold of Twilight, I included a great Well called Twilintarn, which was a point where worlds intersected. Some tremendous, powerful Presence moved over the water there — the Keeper of Twilintarn — so terrible that to see it directly was death, as some unfortunate villains found out. From the glimpses we get of the Keeper, it seems to be a four-footed animal, though of colossal proportions.

In that same book, there is a wild Stag running through the fantasy world: a noble animal which is the embodiment of our own world, this one in which we live. Yes: in that world, our world runs around as a wild Stag. If the Huntsman with his black arrows kills the Stag, our world will perish. And already as the story begins, the Stag is wounded, its steps faltering.

How about Melville’s Moby-Dick? Isn’t the white whale really more than a whale? Doesn’t it represent something bigger?

Lurking in the shadows behind the Old Testament are Leviathan and Behemoth. Both halves of the world have their dragons, some good, some bad. Looming large in my childhood was King Kong: an animal of gigantic size, ruling his lost island of wonder. It’s not a stretch to say that Kong is a symbol of what is wild, free, beautiful, and should not be touched by humankind.

And then there’s Aslan, a lion and the Lord. There are humans and humanoids in Narnia; C.S. Lewis might easily have given his Christ figure a human shape, but he did not.

Back to that picture from The Book of Wonder, of the great beast moving among the trees, and only its hindquarters visible. . . . Since childhood, I’ve been intrigued by the passage in Exodus 33, in which Moses has asked to see God’s glory. God reminds Moses that no one may see God’s face and live, but He offers this alternative:

Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”

I quoted here from the New International Version. I checked four or five different translations of the passage. A couple say God’s “back”; one said “from behind”; and two used the phrase I remember hearing/reading as a child: God’s “back parts.” As a wide-eyed child thinking of this encounter, I always imagined that “back parts” sounded more like part of a quadruped than a human figure. (Yet God has a “hand,” too, that He puts over Moses’s eyes.) It’s pointless to read too much into “back parts,” which is only a translation. [Hey, you guys who have studied Hebrew -- I know there are at least two of you! -- This would be an excellent time to help us out!]

But what is clear is that Moses had a “Glory Day” experience here! We can’t see the face of God . . . or that of the Keeper of Twilintarn. Jii’s bear comes to him in the pitch blackness. We can’t see the wind, but we see its shadow in the grain, and we feel its power. We can’t clearly see what crawls south, but we know it’s something like a dragon, anyway! We behold God’s glory, and we press on toward glory. And we write, attempting to throw the sheet over the ghost.

Grrooinnkkk! Hey, it’s Midsummer’s Eve this week! There may be Good Folk dancing in your garden! When the Eve falls precisely is a matter of which you prefer and when the weather is best: I’d place it on Saturday night or Sunday night if you prefer the solstice, or Wednesday night if you want to go with the eve of the birth of St. John the Baptist.

Grrooiinnkk again: Are you ready for this? My agent has given me the green light to make this announcement. Through the outstanding work of my amazingly incredible agent, we have found a publisher for The Star Shard as a book! Though some details are still being worked out, and more revision is coming, Houghton Mifflin has graciously agreed to give the book a home.

So it’s truly a happy Midsummer’s Eve, and Soli Deo gloria!

That title will make sense by the time we’ve come to the end of this entry. I’m going to quote first here from a wonderful comment that came into the blog today from Shieldmaiden. (You should definitely go back to the two previous entries, “Trees” and “Dark Doorways,” to read the latest reader comments! It seems there are often a few that come in just before I post a new entry, and I don’t want anyone to miss these extraordinary contributions from readers. In every way this is our blog, not just mine. Be sure to revisit the comments to “Trees” as well as “Dark Doorways”!) So, anyway, quoting from Shieldmaiden:

“Speaking of dark or magic doorways I don’t think it gets any more magical than the picture I saw on one of the blog posts last summer. The one of an old gate leaning against the trunks of maples and partially swallowed by their trunks. I couldn’t help but imagine that on a certain midsummer night when the moonlight fell just right, and several other elements lined up, that the gate would swing open and when you went through it you would step into an enchanted forest of another world.”

Eeeee! Shieldmaiden, I hope you’ll let me use that in a story someday! That picture is the new header for the blog, but since I change headers from time to time, I’ll include it here, too:

This old gate has been here for as long as I can remember. It's just behind our house in Taylorville, facing south toward the Big Woods.

Now I’m going to quote again from The Green and Ancient Light, that unpublished, homemade book of vignettes and recollections from my childhood, printed in September of 1990:

“Beneath the living blanket of green leafy vines was a barn. Down among the roots of the high weeds going to seed were bricks and a concrete slab. At the heart of the hedgerow was a rusting fence, hardly recognizable as such. Only a nail and a chain remained, dangling against the peeling bark, of some iron thing the maple tree had swallowed years ago.

“This relentless march of the sprouting, encircling, all-consuming Earth is essential in understanding my childhood. Nature guarded its secrets well, its rough-edged relics of days gone by; they were tucked away in shady, whispering hollow places where only the folk of the hedgerows could readily find them, the cat and the rabbit, the dog with his nose to the dewy ground, the sleepy opossum, the raccoon with his humanlike hands. These folk climbed over and around the treasures in the gloomy hedgeheart — the forgotten gate leaned against the young maples, its boards bleached and bone-hard, its metal fastenings eaten with rust; the roll of fencing behind the tin shed, half-sunk in the earth, down between the treetrunks, a tunnel for foxes and a rusty trampoline for little  boys; the mysterious odds and ends of glass and tarpaper, the dimly-remembered toys of earliest childhood, sheltering now beneath the dusky hillocks of the grass; the several corroded things in the delightful hollows of the man-made cliff behind the cellar.

“All these things and a thousand more called out to two little boys, called out in voices soft and mellow as ripened rust, orange in the hot light, dark amber in the sunset; the grasses called out, their blades in the wind, their roots probing into matters. The world of passage and change called out, the world of transformation and chemical reaction, of unbecoming and becoming: ‘Come and see, boys; come and find. Discover in these green depths the things that once were, the things you lost five summers ago, the things your grandfathers’ compatriots built forty years ago; see what is now, how undauntedly nature takes your ball and runs with it, how it takes all your ideas and improves them, and goes on; and, boys, carry with you from this secret world these purposefully-formed seeds of things that may be.’”

I honestly think that a huge part of my writing is a giving back of the gifts I absorbed from the green world around me in my childhood. A Cricket editor’s comment that I particularly cherish was: “Your memory for detail is phenomenal: you sit in Japan and write lovingly about small-town life in Illinois.”

Anyway, while we’re speaking of the magic of trees and doorways, certainly this tendency of nature to advance and absorb and reclaim the objects of human construction is a worthy subtopic — it has always been a large part of the enchantment for me.

Again, I remember illustrations from a book of fairy stories I had when I was very young (and still have — I know right where it is, though it’s deeply buried in storage). It was a tattered old book that a library was throwing away. My mom the librarian would rescue such castoffs for me, and sometimes they became the greatest treasures of my own library. It didn’t even have a cover. But I remember a beautiful two-page panoramic color painting of a meadow; and half-hidden here and there among the tussocks of long grass were sleepy rabbits in their burrows, rusted swords, crocks of golden coins, and probably a fairy or two — the last time I saw it was several years ago.

But that picture expresses a wonder that I suspect is common to many of us. I remember my childhood fascination with objects overgrown, things half-buried, items long-forgotten and vine-clad and sinking into the ground. I don’t know why the phenomenon was so enthralling to me.

This bicycle beside a wooded path on Niigata University's campus has been welcomed and given a place.

In the north wall of our barn, there were some closed hatchways or windows covered over by Virginia creeper vines. Piles of stone were soon overrun by weeds. Farm implements parked and abandoned sank into the embrace of nature.

As a college student, I was captivated by these lines from Philip Levine’s “They Feed They Lion”:

“Earth is eating trees, fence posts,

Gutted cars, earth is calling her little ones,

‘Come home, come home!’”

And here are three more poems that I think speak to this same theme, each in its own way:

“The Presence,” by Maxine Kumin:

Something went crabwise

across the snow this morning.

Something went hard and slow

over our hayfield.

It could have been a raccoon

lugging a knapsack,

it could have been a porcupine

carrying a tennis racket,

it could have been something

supple as a red fox

dragging the squawk and spatter

of a crippled woodcock.

Ten knuckles underground

those bones are seeds now

pure as baby teeth

lined up in the burrow.

I cross on snowshoes

cunningly woven from

the skin and sinews of

something else that went before.

The next one I remember singing in a choral arrangement in an all-state chorus festival when I was in junior high or high school — performed by a huge choir made up of kids from all over the state. The poem itself was written and published during World War II by Thomas Hornsby Ferril, and it’s called “No Mark”:

Corn grew where the corn was spilled

In the wreck where Casey Jones was killed,

Scrub-oak grows and sassafras

Around the shady stone you pass

To show where Stonewall Jackson fell

That Saturday at Chancellorsville,

And soapweed bayonets are steeled

Across the Custer battlefield;

But where you die the sky is black

A little while with cracking flak,

Then ocean closes very still

Above your skull that held our will.

O swing away, white gull, white gull;

Evening star, be beautiful.

That is an awesome poem! Do you see how it’s precisely to the point of this discussion? Finally, this next one comes to us courtesy of this blog’s own Catherine, who tracked down the words for me. It’s the old Scottish poem “Twa Corbies,” or “Two Ravens”:

As I was walking all alane

I heard twa corbies makin’ mane [making a moan]

And one ontae the other did say

Where will we gang and dine the day,

Where will we gang and dine the day?

In ahind yon oul fail dyke

I wot there lies a new slain knight

Naebody kens that he lies there

But his hawk and hound and his lady fair,

His hawk and hound and his lady fair.

His hawk is tae the hunting gane,

His hound to bring a wild fowl hane [home],

His wife has taken another mate,

So we can make our dinner sweet,

We can make our dinner sweet.

And you can sit on his white breast bone,

And I’ll pick out his bonny blue e’en,

And with a lock of his yellow hair

We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare,

We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

And many’s a one for him makes mane;

Naebody kens where he has gane;

Through his white bones when they grow bare

The wind shall blow forever mare,

The wind shall blow forever mare.

Three diverse poems, but I submit they’re all really talking about the same things. Do you agree? And yes, I have a poem of my own to toss into the pot. This is my own version of the same theme — a poem I think I’ve alluded to on this blog but have never quoted in full. So here it is: “Glory Day,” by Frederic S. Durbin:

We found the old cat one hot Glory Day

In the steamy weeds, swelled to twice his size;

Green glory thunder echoed in his eyes

As we laid him out where the smell of hay

And green maple shadows would make the flies

Forget him; and watching the heat waves rise

From the wind-mirroring beans we covered him with clay.

There was lightning low in the sky away

Off, and a distant rumbling down the road;

The Virginia Creeper whispered to the wagon

It covered like time-snails’ tracks, the old load

Of bricks for building; something like a dragon

Crawled south in the blur of wheat’s golden sway

When we buried a tomcat on Glory Day.

As one of my two favorite professors would say, when he finished reading a poem aloud to the class, “How do you like them apples?” I’d love to hear your analyses of the poem — of what precisely the “something like a dragon” is. Any takers? (You won’t be wrong, I expect.) [The poem's a sonnet, by the way!]

So, well, well, this theme of nature’s reclamation of objects is large in my mind this week because it’s such a key element of the book I’m writing now. (Since it’s passed 25,000 words, I’m just going to start calling it a “book” instead of a “story.” I think it will likely hit the minimum novel requirement of 50,000 before all is said and done.)

Here's my AlphaSmart Neo on my favorite bench on the Lavender Path. I've had some success lately with writing outdoors using this dear gem of a machine.

That book is still going well, by grace! On Thursday, I had the most productive day on this project so far, with 2,858 words written! On Friday I did 1,909, which is still ahead of a NaNoWriMo quota count. Today, Saturday, I was fixing earlier things, so didn’t make any forward progress. I spent a long stretch revising one seven-line poem that plays a crucial part. So it goes, in fits and spurts. . . .

Here’s one more poem of mine [still on the subject -- no disbursements to the Pun Fund], written [I think] during my college years, though possibly right after I came to Japan. I’m not really advocating paganism; it’s more just a statement that humankind’s impact on the created natural world is temporal and transient:

“Urban Requiem”

In the rainy end of days the satyrs

Came and rolled on spools the broken wires,

Rekindled the old infernal fires,

And scooped clean soil over oily matters.

Heh, heh, heh! Yeah, I was going through a Lord Dunsany period. I think he had some similar ideas, didn’t he?

As I’m wrapping up here: I just received my copy of the May/June Cricket, and I was thrilled and delighted to see a letter and photograph from The Die-Hard Star-Shard Fan Club! Here are my heartfelt thanks to those readers and their parents! This issue of Cricket is one I’ll treasure. I think I’ll make a good color photocopy of the letters page and keep it in a picture frame! There are several letters that mention “The Star Shard,” and also in the back, the winners of the Urrmsh song poetry contest are printed — so even though the story finished in the April issue, we really need this May/June issue to complete “The Star Shard” Cricket collection!

I’m still listening to Enya. I have two of her CDs now: The Celts and Paint the Sky with Stars: The Best of Enya. Really wonderful. Also, I saw the new Star Trek for the second time tonight.

I’ll let some visual images close this posting out:

Bicycles at Niigata University: Hmm, where did I park it? Oh, yeah! -- Mine's the silvery one!

Cupid, the supermarket where I buy most of my groceries. As my other favorite college prof made us say at the beginning of every class: "Mythology is alive; mythology is ubiquitous."

United Cinemas, the theater complex that's about a five-minute walk from my place.

Talk about dark doorways into worlds of enchantment! This is the portal I walk through to see movies: it leads to infinite worlds!

Finally, this is along the Lavender Path. This is a truck bed, parked so that it's sticking over a weed-grown drainage ditch. The truck seems not to have been moved in a very long time. Wouldn't you love to set up a writing house in that truck bed?! Well, I would, anyway. . . .

August Derleth (ed.) – The Sleeping And The Dead ((Four Square, 1964)

The Sleeping And The Dead

M. R. James – A View from a Hill
August Derleth – Glory Hand
Edith Wharton – The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
Hazel Heald – Out of the Eons
Ray Bradbury – The Jar
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – The Bully of Chapelizod
P. Schuyler Miller – Over the River
Frank Belknap Long – The Ocean Leech
Edward Lucas White – Amina
H. Russell Wakefield – Farewell Performance
Lord Dunsany – The Postman of Otford
Henry Kuttner – Masquerade
Algernon Blackwood – The Doll
William F. Harvey – The Tool
H. P. Lovecraft – The Dreams in the Witch-House

Thanks to James Doig for providing the (very beautiful) cover scan

Astazi am primit de la editura Nemira un pachetel consistent de romane si anume:

Frederik Pohl – Poarta

Frederik Pohl – Dincolo de orizontul albastru

Stephen King – Povestea lui Lisey

Ian M. Banks – Spectrul lui Phlebas

Stephen King – Duma Key ( care arata intr-un mare stil, si e groasa de zici ca e un dictionar

Multumesc reprezentantilor editurii pentru amabilitate si sponsorizare.

Iar din surse externe, adica de pe bookdepository, din partea unor prieteni darnici, am primit :

Lord Dunsany – Time and the Gods

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, al 18-lea Baron de Dunsany (24 Iulie, 1878 – 25 Octombrie, 1957)  a publicat nu mai putin de 80 de lucrari ca de altfel si sute de povestiri mai ales in zona fantasy.

Desi este mai putin citit in zilele noastre el a avut un impact pronuntat asupra inceputurilor fantasy-ului. Despre aceast culegere de texte intr-o recenzie pe SF site se spune ca :

the best stories in this book are excellent, written in lovely prose that is indeed ornate, but to good effect, often rounded off with an ironic barb, stuffed with lush images, and suffused with the odour of “regret,” which Michael Swanwick has called central to “Hard Fantasy.”

In acest volum au fost reunite primele sase colectii de povestiri ale autorului  : The Gods of Pegana, Time and the Gods, The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories, A Dreamer’s Tales, The Book of Wonder, and The Last Book of Wonder. Din motive necunoscute,The Gods of Pegana, primul volum al lui Dunsany (1905), este prezentata in final.

De amintit ca insusi Arthur C. Clarke a spus despre Dunsany, pe un backcover de la o carte a acestuia, ca a fost  “One of the greatest writers of this century” …

Nick Gevers & Jay Lake – Other Earths

The well-known authors in this wide-ranging alternate history anthology strike out in welcome new directions, often focusing on obscure events or people. The musician Ralph Vaughan Williams appears as an aging ambulance driver amid an extended Great War in Alistair Reynolds’s The Receivers, while an astronomical phenomenon leads the conquering Inca to become the world’s dominant power in Stephen Baxter’s The Unblinking Eye. Those taking on more recognizable themes—like a magical race’s diaspora in Theodora Goss’s Csilla’s Story, or an America that never suffered a civil war in This Peaceable Land; or, the Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe by Robert Charles Wilson—reveal their twists’ horror and grit without being gratuitous. The well-realized narratives and gripping details make each tale a good introduction for any reader new to alternate history.

Prima povestire nu m-a dat chiar pe spate si am descoperit ca pe blogurile externe deja au aparut recenzii ale antologiei. Se spune ca textul lui Lucius Shepard, care e si cel mai lung din volum, ar fi cel mai reusit. Vom vedea.

By way of follow-up to my post on Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder here, I have included  below two stories taken from that work.  Both I consider to be fine pieces which effectively demonstrate Dunsany’s style.  The second is perhaps my personal favourite from this collection. 

The Hoard of the Gibbelins

The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again.

Their tower stands on the other side of that river known to Homer—ho rhoos okeanoio, as he called it—which surrounds the world. And where the river is narrow and fordable the tower was built by the Gibbelins’ gluttonous sires, for they liked to see burglars rowing easily to their steps. Some nourishment that common soil has not the huge trees drained there with their colossal roots from both banks of the river.

There the Gibbelins lived and discreditably fed.

Alderic, Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault, hereditary Guardian of the King’s Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered among makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gibbelins’ hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night by a valourous man, that its motive was sheer avarice! Yet upon avarice only the Gibbelins relied to keep their larders full, and once in every hundred years sent spies into the cities of men to see how avarice did, and always the spies returned again to the tower saying that all was well.

It may be thought that, as the years went on and men came by fearful ends on that tower’s wall, fewer and fewer would come to the Gibbelins’ table: but the Gibbelins found otherwise.

Not in the folly and frivolity of his youth did Alderic come to the tower, but he studied carefully for several years the manner in which burglars met their doom when they went in search of the treasure that he considered his. In every case they had entered by the door.

He consulted those who gave advice on this quest; he noted every detail and cheerfully paid their fees, and determined to do nothing that they advised, for what were their clients now? No more than examples of the savoury art, and mere half- forgotten memories of a meal; and many, perhaps, no longer even that.

These were the requisites for the quest that these men used to advise: a horse, a boat, mail armour, and at least three men-at-arms. Some said, “Blow the horn at the tower door”; others said, “Do not touch it.”

Alderic thus decided: he would take no horse down to the river’s edge, he would not row along it in a boat, and he would go alone and by way of the Forest Unpassable.

How pass, you may say, the unpassable? This was his plan: there was a dragon he knew of who if peasants’ prayers are heeded deserved to die, not alone because of the number of maidens he cruelly slew, but because he was bad for the crops; he ravaged the very land and was the bane of a dukedom.

Now Alderic determined to go up against him. So he took horse and spear and pricked till he met the dragon, and the dragon came out against him breathing bitter smoke. And to him Alderic shouted, “Hath foul dragon ever slain true knight?” And well the dragon knew that this had never been, and he hung his head and was silent, for he was glutted with blood. “Then,” said the knight, “if thou would’st ever taste maiden’s blood again thou shalt be my trusty steed, and if not, by this spear there shall befall thee all that the troubadours tell of the dooms of thy breed.”

And the dragon did not open his ravening mouth, nor rush upon the knight, breathing out fire; for well he knew the fate of those that did these things, but he consented to the terms imposed, and swore to the knight to become his trusty steed.

It was on a saddle upon this dragon’s back that Alderic afterwards sailed above the unpassable forest, even above the tops of those measureless trees, children of wonder. But first he pondered that subtle plan of his which was more profound than merely to avoid all that had been done before; and he commanded a blacksmith, and the blacksmith made him a pickaxe.

Now there was great rejoicing at the rumour of Alderic’s quest, for all folk knew that he was a cautious man, and they deemed that he would succeed and enrich the world, and they rubbed their hands in the cities at the thought of largesse; and there was joy amoung all men in Alderic’s country, except perchance among the lenders of money, who feared they would soon be paid. And there was rejoicing also because men hoped that when the Gibbelins were robbed of their hoard, they would shatter their high-built bridge and break the golden chains that bound them to the world, and drift back, they and their tower, to the moon, from which they had come and to which they rightly belonged. There was little love for the Gibbelins, though all men envied their hoard.

So they all cheered, that day when he mounted his dragon, as though he was already a conqueror, and what pleased them more than the good that they hoped he would do to the world was that he scattered gold as he rode away; for he would not need it, he said, if he found the Gibbelins’ hoard, and he would not need it more if he smoked on the Gibbelins’ table.

When they heard that he had rejected the advice of those that gave it, some said that the knight was mad, and others said he was greater than those what gave the advice, but none appreciated the worth of his plan.

He reasoned thus: for centuries men had been well advised and had gone by the cleverest way, while the Gibbelins came to expect them to come by boat and to look for them at the door whenever their larder was empty, even as a man looketh for a snipe in a marsh; but how, said Alderic, if a snipe should sit in the top of a tree, and would men find him there? Assuredly never! So Alderic decided to swim the river and not to go by the door, but to pick his way into the tower through the stone. Moreover, it was in his mind to work below the level of the ocean, the river (as Homer knew) that girdles the world, so that as soon as he made a hole in the wall the water should pour in, confounding the Gibbelins, and flooding the cellars, rumoured to be twenty feet in depth, and therein he would dive for emeralds as a diver dives for pearls.

And on the day that I tell of he galloped away from his home scattering largesse of gold, as I have said, and passed through many kingdoms, the dragon snapping at maidens as he went, but being unable to eat them because of the bit in his mouth, and earning no gentler reward than a spurthrust where he was softest. And so they came to the swart arboreal precipice of the unpassable forest. The dragon rose at it with a rattle of wings. Many a farmer near the edge of the worlds saw him up there where yet the twilight lingered, a faint, black, wavering line; and mistaking him for a row of geese going inland from the ocean, went into their houses cheerily rubbing their hands and saying that winter was coming, and that we should soon have snow. Soon even there the twilight faded away, and when they descended at the edge of the world it was night and the moon was shining. Ocean, the ancient river, narrow and shallow there, flowed by and made no murmur. Whether the Gibbelins banqueted or whether they watched by the door, they also made no murmur. And Alderic dismounted and took his armour off, and saying one prayer to his lady, swam with his pickaxe. He did not part from his sword, for fear that he meet with a Gibbelin. Landed the other side, he began to work at once, and all went well with him. Nothing put out its head from any window, and all were lighted so that nothing within could see him in the dark. The blows of his pickaxe were dulled in the deep walls. All night he worked, no sound came to molest him, and at dawn the last rock swerved and tumbled inwards, and the river poured in after. Then Alderic took a stone, and went to the bottom step, and hurled the stone at the door; he heard the echoes roll into the tower, then he ran back and dived through the hole in the wall.

He was in the emerald-cellar. There was no light in the lofty vault above him, but, diving through twenty feet of water, he felt the floor all rough with emeralds, and open coffers full of them. By a faint ray of the moon he saw that the water was green with them, and easily filling a satchel, he rose again to the surface; and there were the Gibbelins waist-deep in the water, with torches in their hands! And, without saying a word, or even smiling, they neatly hanged him on the outer wall—and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending.

Chu-Bu and Sheemish

It was the custom on Tuesdays in the temple of Chu-bu for the priests to enter at evening and chant, “There is none but Chu-bu.”

And all the people rejoiced and cried out, “There is none but Chu-bu.” And honey was offered to Chu-bu, and maize and fat. Thus was he magnified.

Chu-bu was an idol of some antiquity, as may be seen from the colour of the wood. He had been carved out of mahogany, and after he was carved he had been polished. Then they had set him up on the diorite pedestal with the brazier in front of it for burning spices and the flat gold plates for fat. Thus they worshipped Chu-bu.

He must have been there for over a hundred years when one day the priests came in with another idol into the temple of Chu-bu and set it up on a pedestal near Chu-bu’s and sang, “There is also Sheemish.”

And all the people rejoiced and cried out, “There is also Sheemish.”

Sheemish was palpably a modern idol, and although the wood was stained with a dark-red dye, you could see that he had only just been carved. And honey was offered to Sheemish as well as Chu-bu, and also maize and fat.

The fury of Chu-bu knew no time-limit: he was furious all that night, and next day he was furious still. The situation called for immediate miracles. To devastate the city with a pestilence and kill all his priests was scarcely within his power, therefore he wisely concentrated such divine powers as he had in commanding a little earthquake. “Thus,” thought Chu-bu, “will I reassert myself as the only god, and men shall spit upon Sheemish.”

Chu-bu willed it and willed it and still no earthquake came, when suddenly he was aware that the hated Sheemish was daring to attempt a miracle too. He ceased to busy himself about the earthquake and listened, or shall I say felt, for what Sheemish was thinking; for gods are aware of what passes in the mind by a sense that is other than any of our five. Sheemish was trying to make an earthquake too.

The new god’s motive was probably to assert himself. I doubt if Chu-bu understood or cared for his motive; it was sufficient for an idol already aflame with jealosy that his detestable rival was on the verge of a miracle. All the power of Chu-bu veered round at once and set dead against an earthquake, even a little one. It was thus in the temple of Chu-bu for some time, and then no earthquake came.

To be a god and to fail to achieve a miracle is a despairing sensation; it is as though among men one should determine upon a hearty sneeze and as though no sneeze should come; it is as though one should try to swim in heavy boots or remember a name that is utterly forgotten: all these pains were Sheemish’s.

And upon Tuesday the priests came in, and the people, and they did worship Chu-bu and offered fat to him, saying, “O Chu- bu who made everything,” and then the priests sang, “There is also Sheemish”; and Chu-bu was put to shame and spake not for three days.

Now there were holy birds in the temple of Chu-bu, and when the third day was come and the night thereof, it was as it were revealed to the mind of Chu-bu, that there was dirt upon the head of Sheemish.

And Chu-bu spake unto Sheemish as speak the gods, moving no lips nor yet disturbing the silence, saying, “There is dirt upon thy head, O Sheemish.” All night long he muttered again and again, “there is dirt upon Sheemish’s head.” And when it was dawn and voices were heard far off, Chu-bu became exultant with Earth’s awakening things, and cried out till the sun was high, “Dirt, dirt, dirt, upon the head of Sheemish,” and at noon he said, “So Sheemish would be a god.” Thus was Sheemish confounded.

And with Tuesday one came and washed his head with rose- water, and he was worshipped again when they sang “There is also Sheemish.” And yet was Chu-bu content, for he said, “The head of Sheemish has been defiled,” and again, “His head was defiled, it is enough.” And one evening lo! there was dirt on the head of Chu-bu also, and the thing was perceived of Sheemish.

It is not with the gods as it is with men. We are angry one with another and turn from our anger again, but the wrath of the gods is enduring. Chu-bu remembered and Sheemish did not forget. They spake as we do not speak, in silence yet heard of each other, nor were their thoughts as our thoughts. We should not judge them merely by human standards. All night long they spake and all night said these words only: “Dirty Chu-bu,” “Dirty Sheemish.” “Dirty Chu-bu,” “Dirty Sheemish,” all night long. Their wrath had not tired at dawn, and neither had wearied of his accusation. And gradually Chu-bu came to realize that he was nothing more than the equal of Sheemish. All gods are jealous, but this equality with the upstart Sheemish, a thing of painted wood a hundred years newer than Chu-bu, and this worship given to Sheemish in Chu-bu’s own temple, were particularly bitter. Chu-bu was jealous even for a god; and when Tuesday came again, the third day of Sheemish’s worship, Chu-bu could bear it no longer. He felt that his anger must be revealed at all costs, and he returned with all the vehemence of his will to achieving a little earthquake. The worshippers had just gone from his temple when Chu-bu settled his will to attain this miracle. Now and then his meditations were disturbed by that now familiar dictum, “Dirty Chu-bu,” but Chu- bu willed ferociously, not even stopping to say what he longed to say and had already said nine hundred times, and presently even these interruptions ceased.

They ceased because Sheemish had returned to a project that he had never definitely abandoned, the desire to assert himself and exalt himself over Chu-bu by performing a miracle, and the district being volcanic he had chosen a little earthquake as the miracle most easily accomplished by a small god.

Now an earthquake that is commanded by two gods has double the chance of fulfilment than when it is willed by one, and an incalculably greater chance than when two gods are pulling different ways; as, to take the case of older and greater gods, when the sun and the moon pull in the same direction we have the biggest tides.

Chu-bu knew nothing of the theory of tides, and was too much occupied with his miracle to notice what Sheemish was doing. And suddenly the miracle was an accomplished thing.

It was a very local earthquake, for there are other gods than Chu-bu or even Sheemish, and it was only a little one as the gods had willed, but it loosened some monoliths in a colonnade that supported one side of the temple and the whole of one wall fell in, and the low huts of the people of that city were shaken a little and some of their doors were jammed so that they would not open; it was enough, and for a moment it seemed that it was all; neither Chu-bu nor Sheemish commanded there should be more, but they had set in motion an old law older than Chu-bu, the law of gravity that that colonnade had held back for a hundred years, and the temple of Chu-bu quivered and then stood still, swayed once and was overthrown, on the heads of Chu-bu and Sheemish.

No one rebuilt it, for nobody dared to near such terrible gods. Some said that Chu-bu wrought the miracle, but some said Sheemish, and thereof schism was born. The weakly amiable, alarmed by the bitterness of rival sects, sought compromise and said that both had wrought it, but no one guessed the truth that the thing was done in rivalry.

And a saying arose, and both sects held this belief in common, that whoso toucheth Chu-bu shall die or whoso looketh upon Sheemish.

That is how Chu-bu came into my possession when I travelled once beyond the hills of Ting. I found him in the fallen temple of Chu-bu with his hands and toes sticking up out of the rubbish, lying upon his back, and in that attitude just as I found him I keep him to this day on my mantlepiece, as he is less liable to be upset that way. Sheemish was broken, so I left him where he was.

And there is something so helpless about Chu-bu with his fat hands stuck up in the air that sometimes I am moved out of compassion to bow down to him and pray, saying, “O Chu-bu, thou that made everything, help thy servant.”

Chu-bu cannot do much, though once I am sure that at a game of bridge he sent me the ace of trumps after I had not held a card worth having for the whole of the evening. And chance alone could have done as much as that for me. But I do not tell this to Chu-bu.

The Book of Wonder is a 1912 short story collection by Lord Dunsany, a writer and playwright now most famous for his fantasy stories, predominantly in the form of short stories and with an atmosphere and style so different to what is now considered fantasy fiction as to put it almost in another genre.

The Book of Wonder contains 14 short tales, each one strong in elements of the fantastic, the mythic, the romantic and often too the tragic. Dunsany was a major influence on fantasy and`”weird fiction” in the first half of the twentieth century (particularly on HP Lovecraft, a writer ironically at his best when furthest from the style of the man who most inspired him), and later on artists as disparate as Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Luis Borges. Today, my impression is that Dunsany is a writer more referenced than read, which having myself now read him I think is rather a loss.

Fantasy fiction is I think today probably the most moribund genre in literature, a genre in fact which is if anything peculiarly devoid of the fantastic, marked with multi-volume epics spanning hundreds of pages in which meticulously detailed worlds are explored in tedious depth by characters most notable for their morality and outlook being remarkably similar to that of contemporary Americans. A few current writers have tried to reinvigorate the form, some with a degree of success (China Mieville), some heroically but I think unsuccessfully (George RR Martin, who in trying to reinvent the genre has I think instead become lost within it) and some with results I can’t yet speak to as I’ve not read the relevant work (Richard Morgan, though I have high hopes). Generally, however, contemporary fantasy is an immensely commercial genre in which highly formulaic works are produced for a fanbase most notable for its apparently unquenchable appetite for repeatedly being served the same highly conservative fare.

It was not always so. Dunsany comes from an age in which the fantasy work had, in my view, as much right to be taken seriously as any other genre, and an age in which fantasy works of genuine talent and value were being written. That age ended, in my view, around the 1960s/1970s for reasons beyond the scope of this blog entry, though it does strike me there is some irony in discussing Dunsany and in doing so hearkening back to some lost golden age the like of which has passed from the world.

For Dunsany, the essence of fantasy is romance and wonder. The first story of this collection, the Bride of the Man-Horse, draws on classical myth to tell the tale of a centaur by the name of Shepperalk who ventures into the world for reasons that are unclear but seem intrinsic to his nature. He rides through a range of places the names of which follow no geography or known history but which rather are chosen to evoke mystery and a sense of the unknown. He is in a sense a spirit of freedom and romance, travelling amongst the mundane:

Bells pealed in frantic towers, wise men consulted parchments, astrologers sought of the portent from the stars, the aged made subtle prophecies. “Is he not swift?” said the young. “How glad he is,” said the children.

While travelling through the world of men, he encounters a being of immense beauty and unusual parentage:

The lions came not to woo her because they feared her strength, and the gods dared not love her because they knew she must die.

He sees her and takes her for his own, or to be hers:

He galloped with half-shut eyes up the temple-steps, and, only seeing dimly through his lashes, seized Sombelenë by the hair, undazzled as yet by her beauty, and so haled her away; and, leaping with her over
the floorless chasm where the waters of the lake fall unremembered away into a hole in the world, took her we know not where, to be her slave for all centuries that are allowed to his race.

Three blasts he gave as he went upon that silver horn that is the world-old treasure of the centaurs. These were his wedding bells.

And there, in what is far from the strongest tale in this collection, we have many (though not all, of which more shortly) of the classic Dunsanian elements. There is barely a plot here, a centaur goes for a ride, meets a sort-of-woman and goes off with her. There is little by way of logical worldbuilding, there is a hole in the world which is there because the image evokes wonder, not because we know where it goes or Dunsany has given any thought to such a matter. The point of the tale is, quite simply, wonder. The centaur goes out, magic rides among us, the marvellous and the strange exist and we can but gaze at them as they pass and say to ourselves how glad they are.

As noted above, The Bride of the Man-Horse lacks one of Dunsany’s key characteristics as a writer which most endears him to me. That trait is a sly wit, a darkly comic bent which often infuses his tales and which delights in peculiar dooms and (perhaps) undeserved fates. In Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men the famed thief Slith and his two criminal companions set out to steal a golden box said to contain the most wonderful poems ever contemplated by man. The story opens as follows:

When the nomads came to El Lola they had no more songs, and the question of stealing the golden box arose in all its magnitude. On the one hand, many had sought the golden box, the receptacle (as the Aethiopians know) of poems of fabulous value; and their doom is still the common talk of Arabia. On the other hand, it was lonely to sit around the camp-fire by night with no new songs.

The tale takes us through the journey of the three thieves, the strange hazards they avoid and then to their ultimate plan for recovering the golden box and the poems it contains:

This was their simple plan: to slip into the corridor in the upper cliff; to run softly down it (of course with naked feet) under the warning to travellers that is graven upon stone, which interpreters take to be “It Is Better Not”; not to touch the berries that are there for a purpose, on the right side going down; and so to come to the guardian on his pedestal who had slept for a thousand years and should be sleeping still; and go in through the open window. One man was to wait outside by the crack in the World until the others came out with the golden box, and, should they cry for help, he was to threaten at once to unfasten the iron clamp that kept the crack together. When the box was secured they were to travel all night and all the following day, until the cloud-banks that wrapped the slopes of Mluna were well between them and the Owner of the Box.

Here again we have the essence of much of Dunsany’s style, implied detail (“the berries that are there for a purpose”) and evocation without elaboration – critical elements of description left vague and unspecified in nature (what form does the guardian take after all?). In short, much is left for the reader to imagine, and that I believe is the point. Dunsany’s tales are intended to engage the reader’s own imagination and to inspire the reader to flights of fancy. Unlike current fantasy writers, Dunsany does not detail his world, elements recur (Slith is referenced in other tales) but no real attempt is made at consistency. His language is chosen for tone and flavour, not for logic. Why, after all, would the fantastic be logical? If it is logical, sensible, ordered, is it fantastic at all?

It is no spoiler to say that Slith and his companions meet unusual dooms, in Slith’s case so peculiar that his is mentioned again in later tales. This is not a story of a heroic band fighting evil as would be found in sub-Tolkien fantasy, rather it is a fairy tale of a band of thieves, the treasure they sought to steal, the things they met and the fate they encountered. It is morally ambiguous, did Slith and his companions deserve their fates? Not especially. Is it just that the finest poems of mankind are locked away where none can read them? Clearly not. Dunsany’s is not a world of morality, it is not a world in which right triumphs, rather it is a world of romance and of the extraordinary, which may be dire as well as marvellous. Which is, in fact, marvellous in the oldest sense, in that we marvel at it even though we may not perhaps entirely approve of that at which we marvel.

In a number of places Dunsany makes comment on our own world, individuals cross from it into his worlds of romance, and clearly he sees ours as a rather forbidding and censorious place. Dunsany argues that dreams have merit, that imagination is not idle, that fancies should not be crushed forever in favour of the pragmatic. It is a view I sympathise with, life is more than mere utility, art has its own value and is its own justification.

Dunsany’s work is to a modern reader quite strange, this is ultimately a book of fairy stories aimed at adult readers, it is though also a work of superbly written fantasy which betrays a knowledge of classicism and myth which is worn lightly, deployed with humour but which does I think create a genuine sense of the fantastic. Dunsany is a writer of the impossible, fantasy in the sense of that which cannot be but which perhaps is in some ways brighter than that which can. He is a dreamer, and an advocate for the value of dreams. Immediately after this post, I intend to separately post two tales by Dunsany both of which are now out of copyright and which together give better than I can a sense of his wonderful mix of the romantic, the sinister and the very funny. Having now discovered him, I intend to read more by him, and it is obvious to me why he was so important to writers such as HP Lovecraft and Jack Vance, among many others.

I link here to a fascinating article in the New York Times which I found while writing this piece, which discusses in greater depth Lord Dunsany’s life and works. The Project Gutenberg edition of the Book of Wonder can be found here.

Ett nytt år, nya böcker, nya trevligheter (åtminstone inom detta område)… Alastor Press förnekar nämligen (troligtvis) ingens förhoppningar. Nej, Alastor har ingen grusgång fram till härligheten.

Det senaste nyhetsbrevet innehåller följande ytterst intressanta information (redigerat och nedkortat  av undertecknad, förhoppningsvis utan innehållsenlig förändring):

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Vår senaste bok är Fragment för att bemästra döden av den spansktalande prosaförfattaren och poeten Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72). Boken är häftad och 164 sidor lång. Ni betalar bara 140 kr (inklusive moms och frakt) för denna fantastiska och mörka bok, och som vanligt har ni en månad på er att betala. Det är självfallet utmärkt att beställa våra andra titlar samtidigt, utan extra fraktkostnad.

Det sägs att Alejandra Pizarniks död var lika välregisserad som en klassisk teater – i hennes egen makabra stil naturligtvis; och det sägs att hennes vänner fann den döda kroppen i arbetsrummet på Calle Montevideo i Buenos Aires, 25 september, 1972, omgiven av uppsprättade dockor med sminkade ansikten. Och på svarta tavlan ska hon ha kritat sina sista ord till livet, till språket och till Isidore. Bördan av trettiosex år och giftet av femtio tabletter Seconal skulle slutligen få henne att somna, efter år av kronisk sömnlöshet.

Idag anses hon vara en av de absolut största spansktalande, kvinnliga poeterna. Och den här utgåvan är det första fylliga svenska urvalet av Pizarniks poesi och prosa och utgör ett tvärsnitt av hennes gärning. Boken innehåller dessutom ett initierat efterord av översättaren Maria Nääs.

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Under återstoden av året har vi att se fram emot: H P Lovecrafts Vid vansinnets berg (späckad med extramaterial såsom utdrag ur brev, essäer, noter och anteckningar av HPL själv),

Aubrey Beardsleys Litterära kvarlevor (rikligt illustrerad med hans egna teckningar och med ett efterord av Jonas Ellerström), noveller i urval av såväl Lord Dunsany som Ambrose Bierce

samt de sedan länge utlovade Rimbauds Samlade brev och andra dokument

och Huysmans En Route i svensk översättning för första gången.

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Och efter mycket om och men har vi fått fason på vår hemsida. Besök den gärna och skriv ris eller ros i vår gästbok.

Tack för allt stöd genom åren!

Bästa Alastor Press

It is well-known that Lord Dunsany had a significant influence on later writers of the fantastic, such as Borges, Lovecraft, and Tolkien.  Here is a little bit from his The Gods of Pegana concerning Skarl the Drummer.

When MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI had made the gods and Skarl, Skarl made a drum, and began to beat upon it that he might drum for ever. Then because he was weary after the making of the gods, and because of the drumming of Skarl, did MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI grow drowsy and fall asleep.

And there fell a hush upon the gods when they saw that MANA rested, and there was silence on Pegana save for the drumming of Skarl. Skarl sitteth upon the mist before the feet of MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, above the gods of Pegana, and there he beateth his drum. Some say that the Worlds and the Suns are but the echoes of the drumming of Skarl, and others say that they be dreams that arise in the mind of MANA because of the drumming of Skarl, as one may dream whose rest is troubled by sound of song, but none knoweth, for who hath heard the voice of MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, or who hath seen his drummer?

Whether the season be winter or whether it be summer, whether it be morning among the worlds or whether it be night, Skarl still beateth his drum, for the purposes of the gods are not yet fulfilled. Sometimes the arm of Skarl grows weary; but still he beateth his drum, that the gods may do the work of the gods, and the worlds go on, for if he cease for an instant then MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI will start awake, and there will be worlds nor gods no more.

But, when at the last the arm of Skarl shall cease to beat his drum, silence shall startle Pegana like thunder in a cave, and MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI shall cease to rest.

Then shall Skarl put his drum upon his back and walk forth into the void beyond the worlds, because it is THE END, and the work of Skarl is over.

There may arise some other god whom Skarl may serve, or it may be that he shall perish; but to Skarl it shall matter not, for he shall have done the work of Skarl.

Carlos Trillo
(Buenos Aires , 5 maggio 1943)

Sceneggiatore latinamericano che ha attraversato la storia del fumetto, sconfinando anche nella TV e nel cinema. La sua attività comincia 1963, grazie alla collaborazione  con le riviste Patoruzú (dal 1964 al 1968) e Tía Vicenta. Nel frattempo collabora anche a trasmissioni radiofoniche e televisive. Nel 1974 diventa coordinatore creativo della rivista Satiricón.
Ma è 1975  che la sua penna diventa autoriale: Un tal Daneri è sicuramente una serie tra le più importanti, disegnata da Alberto Breccia e pubblicata dalla rivista Mengano di cui diventa capo redattore in seguito.
El Loco Chávez, con i disegni di Horacio Altuna, è una storica striscia che verrà pubblicata dal 1975 al 1987 dal quotidiano Clarín; la fortuna degli episodi si trasforma in una serie televisiva nel 1978.

El buon Dios, realizzata con Enrique Breccia è una serie avventurosa di successo, ma si dedica insieme ad Alberto Breccia anche agli adattamenti dei classici a fumetti. Numerose sono le riduzioni da racconti e romanzi di Edgar Allan Poe, Horacio Quiroga, Lord Dunsany e dalle fiabe dei fratelli Grimm nati da questo fortunato connubio.
Con Enrique Breccia dà il via nel 1977 alle serie Alvar Mayor (pubblicata in Italia da Lanciostory) e El Peregrino en las estrellas, nonché Los viajes de Marco Mono. Il rapporto con l’Italia è sempre fruttuoso e per Linus crea Linus. Ha collaborato anche con l’editore italiano Sergio Bonelli, per la collana periodica Un uomo, un’avventura.
Alla fine degli anni ’70 e inizi anni ’80 la sua generosa produzione crea Las puertitas del Señor Lopez, con i disegni di Altuna. Da quest’opera sarà tratto un film diretto da Alberto Fischerman che vincerà vari premi.
Altre creazioni di questa coppia sono Charlie Moon, Merdichesky, Slot machine.

La sua vena critica e l’attenzione sociale e artistica per il medium del fumetto si sono tradotti in numerose rubriche di storia e critica della nona arte, in particolare con Guillermo Saccomanno ha scritto “Historia de la historieta argentina” di recente tradotto in italiano dalla Proglo edizioni.

L’attenzione del cinema per la sua produzione è trasversale ai decenni. Difatti da El contorsionista, realizzato con Mandrafina, è tratto il soggetto del corto del regista allora agli esordi Juan Campanella.
Ha inoltre collaborato con lo spagnolo Jordi Bernet, con cui ha realizzato Custer, a tutti gli effetti la prima critica del Reality Show prima del reality, tanto che alcuni ritengono che The Truman Show abbia molti debiti con il fumetto. Un’altra striscia longeva,  El negro blanco è invece opera per il disegno di Ernesto García Seijas, sempre per il Clarín dal 1987 al 1996; non si può inoltre dimenticare Cybersix per Carlos Meglia dal 1991 al 1998, serializzato in albi mensili in Italia dalla Eura.

Diventa rapidamente popolare anche la serie di tavole di Clara de noche (Chiara di notte), scritta in collaborazione con Eduardo Maicas e disegnata da Jordi Bernet: dal 1991 viene pubblicata dal settimanale umoristico spagnolo El Jueves e dal quotidiano argentino Pagina 12, è diffusa in Italia dalla Eura in rivista e in albi ed è tradotta in molte lingue europee.
Con il più giovane Eduardo Risso ha inoltre prodotto Chicanos e Borderline.
Dal 28 aprile 2002 scrive la nuova serie quotidiana Cazados per il quotidiano Clarín di Buenos Aires, disegnata da O’kif.

La sua notevole produzione non ha tolto semplicità e la modestia che solo i grandi sanno avere: come ha dichiarato in una intervista “I fumettisti sono gente timida, siamo gente timida. Ne conosco moltissimi forti, decisi quando c’è da criticare il sistema, feroci umoristi, senza mai fare sconti, ma che, dal vivo sono schivi, timidi che “sfuggono appena siamo in tre”.