Well, what did I expect from a book whose main plot device is a dead bird floating in a jar of gin- aka, the Bluebird of Unhappiness?Said bird has the power to grant tempting wishes but always exacts a terrible price. This has all been done better in "The Monkey's Paw".The same B. of U. is also i...
The World Fantasy Award-winning author of Winter Tides presents the haunting story of a grieving widower, a little girl with an unusual gift, and an old house permeated by the past.
This was my first venture into James P. Blaylock's writing. I've been wanting to read some of his work, but usually only see it on Subterranean Press's site, which is prohibitively expensive. Anyway, I also love short stories, so this book was double good. Maybe even "double-plus good." This ...
This is the second book I've attempted by this author, and the second I've given up on finishing. I think I'm finished with attempting this author.Not that this book was actually *bad* mind you, it just never seemed to get GOING. I thought I was going to like it for the first few chapters, but ...
Contemporary supernatural horror from one of the best in that game. When surfer Dave Quinn saved a young girl from the sea, her twin sister eluded him and drowned. Now, 15 years later, Dave still lives in Huntington Beach, Calif., where he builds scenery for a theater warehouse owned by the rich ...
Between the ages of 13 and 15, James P. Blaylock was one of my favorite authors. This is the sequel to The Elfin Ship, and a better book in my opinion. I like Blaylock's ability to imbue his books with a great sense of wonder. In this book, Jonathan Bing, the cheese maker from Twombly Town, sets ...
Curator Howard Barton goes to Mendocino, California, to get a 19th-century woodcut sketch for his museum back home. But other, rather strange, people want the sketch for their own dubious purposes. Now Howard's caught in the middle of a secret war that somehow involves a piece of paper that is mu...
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...Audible has recently put several of James P. Blaylock’s novels in audio format, so I’m giving a few of them a try. The Elfin Ship, first published in 1982, is the first book in Blaylock’s BALUMNIA trilogy about a whi...
Although I'm a Blaylock fan, there are a few of his earliest books that I never got around to reading, and this was one of them. It certainly has the trademark Blaylock writing style, and I enjoyed that aspect of it - no one else uses words in such a quirky yet somehow natural-sounding way. The...
At first I tried to tell myself it was just me. I was reading under adverse conditions -- on a ferry, going to meet a friend I knew was upset, tired from work -- I probably just missed something. You know, that little explanation or aside that would make the action comprehensible. I went back and...
3.5 starsORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature."Does the night seem uncommonly full of dead men and severed heads to you?"Langdon St. Ives is a man of science and a member of the Royal Society. With the help of his dependable and discreet manservant, St. Ives prefers to spend his time secretly ...
On the whole I like what I've read by J. Blaylock. In this case I'd be more likely to characterize my feelings on this book as "not disliking it".This is the third of the books usually grouped together as Blaylock's Christian books. This one has what I think is a "hook" or "basic idea" that would...
3.5 stars. Originally posted at Fantasy Literature.http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...The Digging Leviathan is the first book in James P. Blaylock’s LANGDON ST. IVES/NARBONDO series. I’ve been reading these out of order, which doesn’t seem to matter. The books have some overlapping character...
This mesmerising collection from World Fantasy Award-winner James P. Blaylock offers seven brilliant excursions into one of the most idiosyncratic imaginations of our time. Highlighted by the acclaimed novella, The Trismegistus Club - a brilliant riff on the antiquarian ghost story - In for a Pen...
A YA adventure from World Fantasy Award winning author James P. Blaylock. A suddenly appearing curiosity shop owned by a small man who might, or might not, be the Man in the Moon; a pair of strange spectacles buried in a fishbowl full of marbles; an old window glazed with sea-green glass found be...
To Theophile Escargot, it did not seem right to be run out of Twombly Town for stealing his own pie. And so he began his journey to fabled Balumnia, where he would discover magical powers that could make him a hero--and unearth legendary secrets!
Ted happily waved back. He was always happiest when customers left. This one was maybe twenty years old and wore a white T-shirt with the face of Kerouac stenciled onto it. He had bought a Beat Poets Map, studded around the perimeter with ill-drawn faces of San Francisco writers and red X’s to ma...
She wondered whether the press of people on either side of her would buoy her up and carry her along if she fell, or whether she would be trampled underfoot and kicked into the Thames. She had heard that thousands of people crossed the bridge every hour, a human river flowing north to south and s...
The room was often lit with sunlight, and the wind blew through the open casements, chasing away the reek of physic and death and pain that filled the lower levels of the house. Beaumont had climbed out through the window and sat on the roof at present, smoking his pipe and watching a bank of clo...
Kraken had fixed the location of the sunken device by lining up a blasted tree above Silverdale with a chimney pipe atop a manor house beyond it and away to the northeast. Fred walked along a line defined by the tree and the chimney pipe until he was very near dead center on yet another pair of c...
The keeper’s face had a stupefied look on it, his doom writ plainly on Gilbert’s face. “Greetings from Captain Sawney!” the old man shouted, and swung the sword at the keeper’s neck, lunging forward to throw his vast weight into the blow. But the keeper wisely dropped to the stones, sitting down ...
Ives @page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; } FOURTEENPule Sets OutThe New Messiah rode along into Mayfair with his eyes clamped shut so tightly that little flickers of yellow lightning shot out across the back of his eyelids each time the brougham bounced over a dip in the ro...
George and the Dragon That’s how we came to find ourselves, the three of us and Hasbro along with Mr. Lemuel Wattsbury, motoring north toward Bowness-on-Windermere, the Wattsbury bailiwick. The Mermaid was sitting snugly in the trunk of the car and the trunk tied shut with a rope. Her exhibit bo...
It was a tumbledown Victorian that needed paint. Pieces of its gingerbread trim had cracked and fallen apart over the years, and here and there bits of it were broken off or hanging by rusted nails. Someone had started to patch the place up, sanding and repairing the wooden fretwork, but the work...
He and I both teach there. Blaylock is the head of the Creative Writing department—my boss—and our attitudes toward fiction writing are pretty similar: take your story seriously, make it intriguing and accessible and entertaining to readers, and work at getting it published. The ceiling of the ba...
Taber had told them. Calvin rolled the words around in his mind as they slipped downriver aboard the New Cyprus fireboat, a twenty-five-foot pontoon boat with a shallow draft, a long aluminum canopy, and water cannons fore and aft. There was a sliver of moon in the sky, the night clear and balmy....