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WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared on Sci Fiction, July 11, 2001. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Year's Best Fantasy 2 (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is included in the collections In for a Penny (2003) and The Shadow on the Doorstep (2009).

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 Penny goes from strength to strength, taking us deep into the heart of a quirky, deeply engaging fictional world that no one but Blaylock could have created.

Other high points include "Home Before Dark," which chronicles one man's first few hours in the afterlife. Its thematic companion, "Small Houses," recounts an aging widower's last few hours on earth. Both stories constitute deeply felt, lovingly detailed farewells to the things and places of this world.

In "The other Side," a minor precognitive episode leads the hero to an obsessive fascination with the hidden mysteries of the universe. In "His Own Back Yard," a story worthy of the great Jack Finney, a middle-aged man finds himself stranded in the haunted territory of his childhood. The blackly funny "War of the Worlds" uses a bowling ball and the imminent end of Life As We Know It to illuminate the fault lines in a modern marriage. Finally, in the wonderfully imagined title story, the single-minded pursuit of treasure - of something for nothing - leads Blaylock's protagonist to a harrowing confrontation with his own worst self.

Table of Contents

• Introduction - essay
• The Other Side - (2000) - novelette
• The War of the Worlds - (2000) - novelette
• His Own Back Yard - (2001) - novelette
• Home Before Dark - (2000) - shortstory
• In for a Penny or The Man Who Believed in Himself - (2002) - novelette
• Small Houses - (2001) - shortstory
• The Trismegistus Club - novelette

The twelve-year solstice has come. And with it, a sinister carnival brings a new sense of terror and wonder to a small coastal town. An enormous shoe is washed up on the shore... a tiny man disguises himself as a mouse... a crow provides eyes for a blind innkeeper... and three curious adventures discover the gateway to the Land of Dreams - where you don't always get what you want, you get what you deserve...

...Metamorphosis: three stories, each one involving a man who discovers that he has come to dwell, for an hour or for a lifetime, in a house and in a mind not quite his own. Each one opens doors onto rooms of illusion, radiance, regret, and dark enchantment. Welcome to the stories of three young writers, stories written in collaboration with James P. Blaylock. Welcome to the borderland of illusion and reality.

Three tales, written in collaboration by James P. Blaylock with students in a class by Tim Powers, with an introduction and illustrations by Tim, an afterword by Blaylock, and some necessary meddling by William Ashbless.

Contents:

• Metamorphosis - interior artwork by Tim Powers
• 7 - From the Catacombs - essay by Tim Powers
• 11 - Stone Eggs - (2008) - shortstory by Adriana Campoy and James P. Blaylock
• 27 - P-38 - shortfiction by Brittany Cox and James P. Blaylock
• 39 - Houses - shortfiction by James P. Blaylock and Alex Haniford
• 55 - Haunted Places; An Afterword - essay by James P. Blaylock
• 61 - A Note From William Ashbless - essay by James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers [as by William Ashbless]

The first in Subterranean Press' plans to bring to light some unduly neglected works by noted poet William Ashbless, this new chapbook contains "Slouching Toward Mauritius," a piratical short story written more than 25 years ago but never published, along with a lengthy pirate poem, "Moon-Eye Agonistes." Ashbless' notorious compatriots Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock have contributed an introduction and afterword, respectively, to put the pieces in their proper historical perspective.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (2001) - essay by Tim Powers
• Introduction - (2001) - essay by James P. Blaylock
• On Pirates - (2001) - interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
• Slouching Toward Mauritius - (2001) - shortfiction by James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers [as by William Ashbless ]
• Moon-Eye Agonistes - (2001) - poem by James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers [as by William Ashbless]

Wold Fantasy Award winning and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the athology Imaginary Lands (1985), edited by Robin McKinley. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (1986) and Modern Classics of Fantasy (1997), both edited by Gardner Dozois, Nebula Awards 21 (1986), edited by George Zebrowski, Dragons! (1993), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, and Wings of Fire (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Marianne S. Jablon. It is inlcued in the collection Thirteen Phantasms and Other Stories (2000).

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1991. The story is included in the Tim Powers collections Night Moves and Other Stories (2001) Strange Itineraries (2005), Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017), and the James P. Blaylock collection Thirteen Phantasms and Other Stories (2000).

When Calvin Bryson decides to visit his aunt and uncle, he learns that their small town is harboring some strange secrets-including a modern- day incarnation of the legendary Knights Templar.

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 beneath a suburban house; and two adventurous boys who buy the spectacles and climb through the window into a land of goblins, ghosts, and rope ladders that reach to the moon...

Who exactly is Mr. Deener, the fat man who makes magic out of bits of coloured glass, has a passion for glazed doughnuts, and whose seeming twin brother sleeps fitfully in an attic room? And who are the little men that ride out of the forest on windblown sycamore leaves in order to whisper into Mr. Deener's ear? Is Mr. Deener, like a fallen Humpty Dumpty, broken apart? John and Danny need to know. To find their way home they'll have to put Mr. Deener back together again and solve the mystery of the sleeping land - a task that leads them to the pool of reflections in the deep woods and ultimately to a house built of light and magic and memory that sits at the edge of the heart's ocean.

World Fantasy Award winning and Sturgeon Award nominated short story.

The classic tale of nostalgia and time travel.

The story originally appeared on Omni Online, October 1996. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois and Digital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction & Fantasy (2010), edited by Ellen Datlow. It is included in the collection Thirteen Phantasms and Other Stories (2000).

The first short story collection from Philip K. Dick Award-winning author James Blaylock features sixteen thought-provoking forays into the fantastic-from a tale of alien influence on an ordinary neighborhood to the story of one man's self-destructive obsession with a dragon.

Contents:

• We Traverse Afar - (1993) - shortstory by Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock
• Paper Dragons - (1985) - novelette
• The Better Boy - (1991) - novelette by Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock
• Myron Chester and the Toads - (1987) - shortstory
• The Shadow on the Doorstep - [Cthulhu Mythos] - (1986) - shortstory
• Nets of Silver and Gold - (1984) - shortstory
• Unidentified Objects - (1989) - shortstory
• Two Views of a Cave Painting - [Langdon St. Ives] - (1987) - shortstory
• Bugs - (1991) - novelette
• The Old Curiosity Shop - (1998) - novelette
• Doughnuts - (1994) - shortstory
• Thirteen Phantasms - (1996) - shortstory
• Red Planet - (1977) - shortstory
• The Ape-Box Affair - [Langdon St. Ives] - (1978) - novelette
• The Pink of Fading Neon - (1980) - shortstory
• The Idol's Eye - [Langdon St. Ives] - (1984) - shortstory
• Introduction: Five Hundred Dollars (Thirteen Phantasms and Other Stories) - (2000) - essay

Trading with the elves used to be so simple. Every year Master Cheeser Jonathan Bing would send his very best cheeses downriver to traders who would eventually return with Elfin wonders for the people of Twombly Town. But no more First the trading post at Willowood Station was mysteriously destroyed. Then a magical elfin airship began making forays overhead; Jonathan knew something was definitely amiss. So he set off downriver to deliver the cheeses himself, accompanied by the amazing Professor Wurzle, the irrepressible Dooly, and his faithful dog Ahab. It would have been a pleasant trip, if not for the weeping skeleton, mad goblins, magic coins, an evil dwarf, a cloak of invisibility - and a watch that stopped time. However, the return trip would not be so simple...

Life as a man of leisure was becoming a bit dull for Jonathan Bing, Master Cheeser, so he welcomed Professor Wurzle's invitation to visit the empty castle of Selznak, the Evil Dwarf. There they chanced upon a treasure map. Soon Jonathan, his wonderpooch Ahab, the Professor ad Miles the magician set off by boat for the location of the treasure - the unknown city called Landsend. But between them and their goal lay the Case of the Missing Squire, the Attack of the Headless Oarsmen, a mysterious witch, some evil goblins - and the Secret of the Purloined Globe.

Theophile Escargot, cast out of Twombly Town for the crime of stealing his own pie, bade a midnight farewell to his unfeeling neighbours and set out on a journey to fabled Balumnia. There he would clash with the master of an elfin airship and a conniving, marble-stealing dwarf; battle to save Leta, a beautiful maid possessed by a malevolent witch; discover magical powers that could make him a hero; and unearth secrets of the legendary land itself Return to the magical world of The Elfin Ship and The Disappearing Dwarf in this fabulous book.

Science Fiction. Southern California -- sunny days, blue skies, neighbors on flying bicycles ... ghostly submarines ... mermen off the Catalina coast ... and a vast underground sea stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Inland Empire where Chinese junks ply an illicit trade and enormous creatures from ages past still survive. It is a place of wonder ... and dark conspiracies. A place rife with adventure - if one knows where to look for it. Two such seekers are the teenagers Jim Hastings and his friend, Giles Peach. Giles was born with a wonderful set of gills along his neck and insatiable appetite for reading. Drawing inspiration from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Giles is determined to build a Digging Leviathan. Will he reach the center of the earth? or destroy it in the process?

A skeletal hand clutching an iron key lies hidden within a mermaid's wooden sarcophagus; a hand-drawn map is stolen from beneath the floorboards of an old museum; an eccentric sleeping inventor dreams of a locked passage to the centre of the hollow earth, and by dreaming of the passage, brings it into being...

Pursued by kidnappers thinking of riches and murder, Katherine Perkins and her two cousins, junior members of The Guild of St. George, must descend into the depths of the earth in order to return the Sleeper to his ancestral home on the shores of Lake Windermere. But to awaken him would mean the end of the dream, the closing of the passage, and the three intrepid explorers marooned in a savage land forgotten by time itself...

ZEUGLODON, set in the world envisioned in Blaylock's THE DIGGING LEVIATHAN, is a landscape of color, mystery, and adventure, in which reality and fantasy are shifting currents, and nothing is quite what it seems to be.

Homonculus is a fascinating trip to a London that never existed... but perhaps should have.

Darkly atmospheric, Homonculus weaves together the stories of Narbondo -- a mad hunchback who works tirelessly to bring the dead back to life, of the members of the Trismegistus Club -- a surly group of scientists and philosophers who meet at Captain Powers' Pipe Shop, and of the homonculus -- a tiny man whose powers can drive men to murder.

Determined to avert the doom of his beloved wife, scientist and detective Langdon St. Ives sees his only hope for doing so in Lord Kelvin's time machine, but the diabolical Dr. Ignacio Narbondo has other plans for the invention.

A flaming meteor over the Yorkshire Dales, a long-lost map drawn by the lunatic Bill Cuttle Kraken, and the discovery of a secret subterranean shipyard beneath the River Thames lead Professor Langdon St. Ives and his intrepid friend Jack Owlesby into the treacherous environs of Morecambe Bay, with its dangerous tides and vast quicksand pits. They descend beneath the sands of the Bay itself, into a dark, unknown ocean littered with human bones and the remnants of human dreams. In this tale of murder, infamy, and Victorian intrigue, the tides of destiny shift relentlessly and rapidly as the stakes grow ever higher and the pursuit more deadly....

Subterranean Press is proud to announce the longest Langdon St. Ives adventure in two decades, featuring a full-color wraparound dust jacket and twenty black-and-white interior illustrations by J. K. Potter.

An outbreak of violent madness at the Explorers Club, the coincidental murders of a recluse scientist in North Kent and a lighthouse keeper on the chalk cliffs below Brighton, and the mysterious disappearance of Alice St. Ives, lead Langdon St. Ives, Jack Owlesby, and their resolute friend Tubby Frobisher into the very heart of danger, where they discover the great secret of the chalk cliffs at Beachy Head and a looming threat to the collective sanity of mankind.

It is the summer of 1883 and Professor Langdon St. Ives, brilliant but eccentric scientist and explorer, is at home in Aylesford with his family. A few miles to the north a steam launch has been taken by pirates above Egypt Bay, the crew murdered and pitched overboard. In Aylesford itself a grave is opened and possibly robbed of the skull. The suspected grave robber, the infamous Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, is an old nemesis of Langdon St. Ives. When Dr. Narbondo returns to kidnap his four-year-old son Eddie and then vanishes into the night, St. Ives and his factotum Hasbro race into London in pursuit...

The collapse of the Victoria Embankment uncovers a passage to an unknown realm beneath the city. Langdon St. Ives sets out to explore it, not knowing that a brilliant and wealthy psychopathic murderer is working to keep the underworld's secrets hidden for reasons of his own.

St. Ives and his stalwart friends investigate a string of ghastly crimes: the gruesome death of a witch, the kidnapping of a blind, psychic girl, and the grim horrors of a secret hospital where experiments in medical electricity and the development of human, vampiric fungi, serve the strange, murderous ends of perhaps St. Ives's most dangerous nemesis yet.

The body of a girl washes up on a mud bank along the edge of the River Medway amid a litter of poisoned fish and sea birds, casting an accusing shadow upon the deadly secrets of the Majestic Paper Mill and its wealthy owners. Simple answers to the mystery begin to suggest insidious secrets, and very quickly Langdon St. Ives and his wife Alice are drawn into a web of conspiracies involving murder, a suspicious suicide, and ritual sacrifice at a lonely and ancient cluster of standing stones. Abruptly St. Ives's life is complicated beyond the edge of human reason, and he finds himself battling to save Alice's life and the ruination of his friends, each step forward leading him further into the entanglement, a dark labyrinth from which there is no apparent exit.

For more than thirty years, James P. Blaylock has enthralled and delighted readers with a series of stories, novels and novellas featuring Langdon St. Ives, adventurer, man of science, Victorian gentleman. The best of these, such as Beneath London, Lord Kelvin's Machine, and The Aylesford Skull are among the most stylish, consistently witty entertainments of recent years. The Gobblin' Society, the latest episode in St. Ives's colorful career, belongs very much in that company.

The story begins with an inheritance. Following a protracted legal battle, Alice St. Ives, Langdon's wife, has come into full possession of Seaward, the house left to her by her late Uncle Godfrey, a man with a number of bizarre proclivities. Heartened by this good fortune, Alice, Langdon and their surrogate son Finn prepare to take possession of the house. From this point forward, events spin out of control, taking on a madcap logic of their own that is exhilarating and--in typical Blaylock fashion--often quite funny.

What follows is, in a sense, a tale of two houses. The first, of course, is Seaward, a "rambling, eccentric old house" with it its history, its secrets, its priceless accumulation of volumes of arcane lore. The other is a neighboring house known, for good reasons, as "Gobblin' Manor," home base of The Gobblin' Society, a "culinary establishment" with its own peculiar--and very dark--traditions. In the course of an event filled few days, St. Ives and his cohorts will encounter smuggling, mesmerism, kidnapping, cannibalism and murder. It is, in other words, a typical--and typically eccentric--Langdon St. Ives adventure.

Like its predecessors, this latest extravaganza is fast-paced, unpredictable, and a thorough delight to read. Few novelists evoke the essence of Victorian England as successfully as Blaylock. Fewer still bring such wit, style, and propulsive narrative talents to the task. In The Gobblin' Society, Blaylock has given vibrant new life to one of his signature creations. The result is a gift both for Blaylock's longtime fans, and for newcomers lucky enough to come along for this astonishing--and thoroughly enjoyable--ride.

Jules Pennyman is on a mission - a quest for the thirty pieces of silver of Judas Iscariot.

Howard Barton travels to Mendocino looking for a sketch by the Japanese artis Hoku-sai, but others are also interested in the drawing, and Howard finds himself in the middle of a private war between secret, underground societies.

Doughnuts, family tensions, relatives who arrive in a Winnebago, Christmas decorations, business worries, Uncle Henry's womanizing, and pyramid schemes wrap Walt Stebbins in layers of detail and distraction. Walt runs a small catalogue business out of his garage, and he has no notion of a demonic presence in his town until a package is mistakenly delivered to him. The contents are not the inexpensive Chinese toys and novelties he deals in. The nasty-looking pickled bluebird of happiness ("Best thing come to you. Speak any wish.") piques Walt's interest, and he keeps it when he rewraps the box and passes it on to the addressee: the one person in the world Walt loathes, his former friend Robert Argyle. But Walt's keeping back the bluebird of happiness is the best thing that could have happened to Argyle--and the worst thing that could happen to Walt. What price happiness? If you have to ask ...

Attempting to come to terms with a failed marriage and longing for his son, Peter Travers's struggle to build a new life is haunted by mysterious visions of a woman and child as the spirits of the past come alive and a dark and terrible secret refuses to die.

Fifteen years ago, Dave Quinn swam out into the winter ocean to save two drowning girls--identical twin sisters. He was only able to save one. Now, years later, he meets Anne, a struggling artist from Canada. He has no idea that she is the child he saved so long ago. And he has no idea that Elinor, the long-dead sister he couldn't save, has come with her.

After the sudden death of his wife, Phil Ainsworth senses an eerie presence in the house. His niece, left in his care, is a special child who can sense powerful emotions from the past--and see the uncanny powers closing around them.