Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in the collection The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories (1993). It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Christmas Magic (1994), edited by David G. Hartwell.

This novelette originally appeared in Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, December 1995. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF (1996), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection The Ocean and All Its Devices (2006).

Browning's latest excursion into horror and humor finds his oddball characters passionately contending with chaos, self-help, alcoholism, recovery, and --of course--real monsters.

Philip Kenan does not appear to be the most reliable narrator. Obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, he keeps malign cosmic entities at bay by constantly revising his novel, The Despicable Quest. While Philip's preoccupied with the monsters lurking behind every cubicle at his dead-end job, his exasperated girlfriend flees — heading straight into the horror that lies at the heart of the corporate world.

William Browning Spencer's imaginative update on Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos offers a witty and wicked satire of office culture. This macabre masterpiece from one of America's foremost cult authors won the 1995 International Horror Critics Guild Award for Best Novel.

"If Woody Allen had ever written a Cthulhu Mythos novel, it might have come out like this." —The New York Review of Science Fiction

"An explosive story of menace, suspense, mystery, and love. Don't miss it." — Roger Zelazny

Author William Browning Spencer is "a brilliant writer of fantasy who's also a very considerable serious novelist." — Kirkus Reviews

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2002. The story can also be found in the anthology New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (2011), edited by Paula Guran. It is included in the collection The Ocean and All Its Devices (2006).

This short story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2000, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2013. It is included in the collection The Ocean and All Its Devices (2006).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny (1998), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #94 July 2014. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Dangerous Games (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann. The story is included in the collection The Ocean and All Its Devices (2006).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Fans of William Browning Spencer have been waiting more than ten years for this, his second collection of short stories. The Ocean and All Its Devices won't disappoint.

Spencer's first collection, The Return of Count Electric was acclaimed byreviewers in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Cemetery Dance, Publishers Weekly and other magazines and newspapers. Science fiction legend Roger Zelazny, once introduced to Spencer's work, became a lifelong devotee. He wrote: "William Browning Spencer is one of those rare short story writers who comes along once in a generation--like Saki, Collier, Sheckley--and manages to combine all of the virtues within that restricted format."

The Ocean and All Its Devices collects some of Spencer's finest published work. Three of these stories appeared in "year's best" anthologies. Another, "The Death of the Novel," was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award, while "The Essayist in the Wilderness" was on the final ballot for a World Fantasy Award.

In stories within:

• The proprietor of a seaside resort puzzles over the yearly off-season pilgrimage of a curiously solemn couple and their fey child. ("The Ocean and All Its Devices")
• A marriage made in a heaven of parallel worlds is tested by impossible luck, both good and bad. ("The Oddskeeper's Daughter")
• A virtual reality addictions counselor is on the run with his zoned-out client, pursued by the relentless architects of a seductive virtual game called Apes and Angels. ("The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness")
• A young girl, who speaks only in lines of poetry culled from world literature, is poised between two universes while a social worker struggles to save her--and, perhaps, doom a universe. ("Foster Child")
• A circus magician races against time as the world threatens to end, not with a bang or a whimper, but with the flick of a switch. ("The Lights of Armageddon")

Here, at last, are these stories and other uncollected gems, the rest of William Browning Spencer's short fiction.

Limited: 750 signed numbered hardcover copies

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by William Browning Spencer
• The Ocean and All Its Devices - (1994)
• The Oddskeeper's Daughter - (1995)
• The Death of the Novel - (1995)
• Downloading Midnight - (1995)
• Your Faithful Servant - (1993)
• The Foster Child - (2000)
• The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness - (1998)
• The Lights of Armageddon - (1994)
• The Essayist in the Wilderness - (2002)

Another decade has elapsed, and William Browning Spencer has produced another superlative collection of short stories that commingle horror and humor.

A number of these tales are cautionary ones. After reading "The Tenth Muse," you might not wish to interview a reclusive writer who wrote one wildly popular novel and has been silent for decades, even if your father was his closest friend.

You might not wish to become a writer at all. "The Indelible Dark" portrays one lost in a dystopian novel he is writing, coming to the slow and unsettling discovery that he carries his own darkness into the mundane world.

These monsters aren't metaphors. Alcoholism might be the monster in "Penguins of the Apocalypse," but the disease has its own familiar, a creature born in folklore, nothing as warm as that oversized rabbit that Jimmy Stewart talked to in "Harvey." And it's got your son.

"Stone and the Librarian" isn't a monster story. It is the story of an unhappy young man who is trying to find his place in a Robert E. Howard world of swords and sorcery but is constantly dragged back to the effete world of his pale and sickly classmates. They read a book by some famous guy, a book called The Catcher in the Rye, in which a kid named Holden keeps going on about how phony everything is. Stone's book report begins, "If I met Holden Caulfield in an alley, I would kill him with a rock."

In "The Unorthodox Dr. Draper," a psychologist has abandoned the strict rigor of his professional life for something more improvisational with a client who tells him, "I know when they follow me. I am like a mouse that knows the shadow of the owl because the mouse must be quick or she is dead."

If this is your first encounter with Mr. Spencer's stories, it is a good introduction. If you have read other books by him, The Unorthodox Dr. Draper and other stories is essential.

There are two versions of Harry Gainesborough's bestselling children's book Zod Wallop: the published version, written second, and the original version, stolen by Harry's zealous fan, Raymond Story, while Harry and Raymond were both patients in a mental hospital. The published version has a happy ending; the private version was Harry's confrontation with the death of his child. And the private version, emotionally true and infused with the power of a group hallucination, ending with the destruction of the world, is becoming real.

It's inevitable that Zod Wallop will be compared to The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll; both are about authors of Oz-like children's books whose literary creations leak over into our world. Both are dark in tone, and in both death and denial are key elements, but Spencer's poignant story owes as much to Philip K. Dick as to Carroll.

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Harry Gainesborough, ex-writer of children's books, just wants to be left alone. But the world--several worlds, actually--won't let him. Raymond Story, escaped from Harwood Psychiatric (and now married to Emily, a catatonic girl that Raymond declares is the Frozen Princess) has enlisted some of his fellow patients and is intent on saving the world--with Harry's help.

Nonsense, of course. But a Ralewing (a nasty sort of flying sting ray that Harry invented for his book) appears to have eaten the paint from the roof of Harry's car; the ruthless executive of a large pharmaceutical company bears an unsettling resemblance to Zod Wallop's evil Lord Draining, and a hotel in Florida could be about to host the end of the world...