Search Worlds Without End

An omnibus edition that includes all the stories from Carter's collections Fireworks, The Bloody Chamber, Black Venus, and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders.

One of our most imaginative and accomplished writers, Angela Carter left behind a dazzling array of work: essays, citicism, and fiction. But it is in her short stories that her extraordinary talents--as a fabulist, feminist, social critic, and weaver of tales--are most penetratingly evident. This volume presents Carter's considerable legacy of short fiction gathered from published books, and includes early and previously unpublished stories. From reflections on jazz and Japan, through vigorous refashionings of classic folklore and fairy tales, to stunning snapshots of modern life in all its tawdry glory, we are able to chart the evolution of Carter's marvelous, magical vision.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Burning Your Boats) - (1995) - essay by Salman Rushdie
• EARLY WORK, 1962-6
• The Man Who Loved a Double Bass - (1962)
• A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home - (1965)
• A Victorian Fable (With Glossary) - (1966)
• FIREWORKS: NINE PROFANE PIECES, 1974
• A Souvenir of Japan - (1974)
• The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter - (1974)
• The Loves of Lady Purple - (1974)
• The Smile of Winter - (1974)
• Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest - (1974)
• Flesh and the Mirror - (1974)
• Master - (1974)
• Reflections - (1974)
• Elegy for a Freelance - (1974)
• THE BLOODY CHAMBER AND OTHER STORIES, 1979
• The Bloody Chamber - (1979)
• The Courtship of Mr. Lyon - (1979)
• The Tiger's Bride - (1979)
• Puss-in-Boots - (1979)
• The Erl-King - (1977)
• The Snow Child - (1979)
• The Lady of the House of Love - (1975)
• The Werewolf - (1977)
• The Company of Wolves - (1977)
• Wolf Alice - (1978)
• BLACK VENUS, 1985
• Black Venus - (1980)
• The Kiss - (1977)
• Our Lady of the Massacre - (1979)
• The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe - (1982)
• Overture and Incidental Music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" - (1982)
• Peter and the Wolf - (1982)
• The Kitchen Child - (1979)
• The Fall River Axe Murders - (1981)
• AMERICAN GHOSTS AND OLD WORLD WONDERS, 1993
• Lizzie's Tiger - (1991)
• John Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore" - (1988)
• Gun for the Devil - (1993)
• The Merchant of Shadows - (1989)
• The Ghost Ships - (1993)
• In Pantoland - (1991)
• Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost - (1987)
• Alice in Prague or The Curious Room - (1990)
• Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene - (1992)
• UNCOLLECTED STORIES, 1970-81
• The Scarlet House - (1977)
• The Snow Pavilion - (1995)
• The Quilt Maker - (1981)
• Afterword (Fireworks) - (1974)

Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians, who raid and pillage in order to survive. Marianne is strictly forbidden to leave her civilized world but, fascinated by these savage outsiders, decides to escape. There, beyond the wire fences, she will discover a decaying paradise, encounter the tattooed Barbarian boy Jewel and go beyond the darkest limits of her imagination.

Playful, sensuous, violent and gripping, "Heroes and Villains" is an ambiguous and deliriously rich blend of post-apocalyptic fiction, gothic fantasy, literary allusion and twisted romance.

Haunted by Fevvers, child of a brothel, a journalist stumbles into a journey which takes him from London to Siberia via St Petersburg into an earthy, rich, turn-of-the-19th-century world which reeks of human and animal variety.

From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires, werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

Contains:

• The Bloody Chamber
• The Company of Wolves
• The Courtship of Mr. Lyon
• The Erlking
• The Lady of the House of Love
• The Snow Cild
• The Tiger's Bride
• The Werewolf
• Wolf Alice
• Puss-in-Boots

The transformation of Desiderio's city into a mysterious kingdom is instantaneous: Hallucination flows with magical speed in every brain; avenues and plazas are suddenly as fertile as fairy-book forests. And the evil comes, too, as imaginary massacres fill the streets with blood, the dead return to question the living, and profound anxiety drives hundreds to suicide.

Behind it all stands Doctor Hoffman, whose gigantic generators crack the immutable surfaces of time and space and plunge civilization into a world without the chains – or structures – of reason. Only Desiderio, immune to mirages and fantasy, can defeat him. But Desiderio's battle will take him to the very brink of undeniable, irresistible desire.

From the master of the literary supernatural and author of The Bloody Chamber, a startling tale of the redemptive power of physical and emotional love

One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her childhood, she is sent to London to live with relatives she has never met: Aunt Margaret, beautiful and speechless, and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn, who kisses Melanie in the ruins of the pleasure gardens. And brooding Uncle Philip loves only the life-sized wooden puppets he creates in his toyshop. This classic gothic novel established Angela Carter as one of our most imaginative writers and augurs the themes of her later creative work.

This story follows Evelyn, a young Englishman, along a journey through mythology and sexuality. It is a story of how he learns to be a woman, first in the brutal hands of Zero, the ragtime Nietzsche, then through the ancient Tristessa, the beautiful ghost of Hollywood past.

Ingram is a coward and weakling--at least according to his father, the king, and the royal court. He cannot use a sword, he faints at the sight of blood, and even his brilliant abilities as a strategist are not enough to overcome his failings. When his father loses a bet to the notorious Lord Mallory over the matter of a dragon slaying, he pays his debt by ordering Ingram to marry him.

Then his father reveals that he is putting Ingram to a greater purpose, giving Ingram one last chance to prove he is not worthless. All it requires is betraying his new husband.

When Charles E. Hoskins wishes for champagne and it suddenly materializes, he finds that his powers of conjure extend to all intoxicants. In the many predicaments this provokes, Charles is committed into the hands of a psychiatrist, escapes, decides to open up a bar but runs afoul of the union and later of Treasury agents, is summoned by Washington and is wanted as a good will gesture by the British Ambassador, is taken by the Russians who are about to deport him....

Table of Contents:

• A Sort of Introduction, Called Here, and Back Again - (1969) - essay
• Masters of the Metropolis - (1956) - shortstory by Randall Garrett and Lin Carter
• Owlstone - (1969) - shortstory
• Keru - (1969) - shortstory
• The Hand of Nergal - (1967) - novelette by Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter
• Harvey Hodges, Veebelfetzer - (1969) - novelette
• Uncollected Works - (1965) - shortstory
• The Mantichore - (1969) - shortstory
• A Few Last Words - (1969) - essay

Ajax Calkins was not only the richest young man on Earth, but also the most eccentric. An incurabic romantic, his dream was to find some little world in space of which he could be king--a beloved and benevolent monarch, as in the days of old. It seemed that his dream had come true when, in response to an ad, a man who called himself Anton Smallways came to Ajax on behalf of some asteroid miners, saying that they would like to have a little kingdom of there own and inviting Ajax to be their sovereign.

Calkins' only friend at this time was one of the strange spider-beings of Mars, a creature which called itself the Third Least Wuj. The Waj had disgraced itself by Martian spider standards, and the little creature's only hope was to atone by performing some sort of exemplary service; overwhelmingly grateful to the Earthman for giving it an opportunity, it gladly accepted Ajax's offer of the Prime Ministership of Ajaxa.

All seemed well until Ajax and the Wuj discovered that Anton Smallways and his fellow so-called miners were not human beings, after all. They were amoeba creatures from Saturn, disguised as men, and the planetoid Ajaxia was not a planetoid, either: it was a vast spaceship constructed by the vanished race of an exploded planet which once had its orbit between Mars and Saturn. The fragments of this planet made up what we call the asteroids.

He knew his name, Kyon. He wore the barb of a gardener -- but that was all he knew. The city of Urbs was a maze of wonders and terrors. Kyon had to do something, to go somewhere, but no one would tell him. And it was important!

Lin Carter's short tales of lost worlds -- Hyperborea, Mu, Lemuria, Atlantis, and more!

Table of Contents:

• The Introduction: Lost Worlds of Time - essay
• The Scroll of Morloc - (1975) - short story with Clark Ashton Smith
• The Stairs in the Crypt - (1976) - short story with Clark Ashton Smith
• The Thing in the Pit - short story
• Thieves of Zangabal - (1969) - novella
• Keeper of the Emerald Flame - (1970) - novella
• Riders Beyond the Sunrise - (1967) - short story with Robert E. Howard
• The Twelve Wizards of Ong - (1976) - short story
• The Seal of Zaon Sathla - (1970) - short story
• The Afterword: Lost Worlds to Come - essay

Dread Cthulhu...

Source of untold horrors, dark whisperings in the walls, dead sounds of monstrous steps in the night, the rush of gigantic wings and secrets hushed before they can be spoken. Here are its beginnings...

The Cthulhu Mythos is the system of imaginary entities, books, and locations initially invented by Lovecraft and shared with other writers. Carter takes particular interest in noting the stories where particular aspects of Mythos lore first appeared, and tracing their reappearances in later tales.

The book takes pains to establish whether each Lovecraft story "belongs to the Cthulhu Mythos" or not. His requirement for including a story on the list of Mythos stories is that it must "present us with a significant item of information about the background lore of the Mythos, thus contributing important information to a common body of lore."

It was rarer and more beautiful and more precious than any piece of mineral, and its dark glory outshone the lights of the heavens. The Gods had wrought it in the Country of the Immortals, and no other thing like it had ever been upon the earth.

No emperor could hold the Throne without the Black Star. And now it was missing.

The evil Green-Robed One who had usurped the Throne would use his darkest powers to reclaim it--and the young warrior fleeing across the embattled land with his beautiful lady to save this treasure of all the world would know the torments of the damned...

Man Against Time

John Lux was an electronic scientist, a level-headed industrialist, an ordinary twentieth century man -- at least he thought he was an ordinary man... until he discovered he could teleport himself... until he discovered that forces 200,000 years beyond his time were trying to destroy him... until he discovered that civilization of the future was being pampered into extinction in a kindergarten world and he was the only man in all eternity who could save it. But until John Lux discovered how to use his dormant neuro-radionic powers, he was a helpless pawn in a time war -- and both he and the planet were doomed.

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1965. The story can also be found in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and the collection Beyond the Gates of Dream (1969).

Tiptree Award winning short story originally published in Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Widely acknowledged as one of the most important English writers of the last century, Angela Carter's work stands out for its bawdiness and linguistic zest, its hospitality to the fantastical and the absurd, and its extraordinary inventiveness and range.

Her life was as vigorously modern and unconventional as anything in her fiction. This is the story of how Angela Carter invented herself - as a new kind of woman and a new kind of writer - and how she came to write such seductive and distinctive masterworks as The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus, and Wise Children. Because its subject so powerfully embodied the spirit of the times, the book also provides a fresh perspective on Britain's social and cultural history in the second half of the twentieth century. It examines such topics as the 1960s counterculture, the social and imaginative conditions of the nuclear age, and the advent of second wave feminism.

Author Edmund Gordon has followed in Angela Carter's footsteps - travelling to the places she lived in Britain, Japan, and the USA - to uncover a life rich in adventure and incident. With unrestricted access to her manuscripts, letters, and journals, and informed by interviews with Carter's friends and family, Gordon offers an unrivalled portrait of one of the twentieth century's most dazzlingly original writers.

This sharply written narrative will be the definitive biography for years to come.

The dead pass through the living like threshing machines.
The plagues are now at the top of the food chain.
The End Times.
The Death of Earth.

The Angel keeps him imprisoned inside the house so the Arch Angels won't find him and kill him. For he is an abomination, he is Nephilim. Or so he's told. He is forbidden to set foot outside. Beaten, mutilated and lied to, he rebels and opens the door...

He is the very first survivor to make it out after the event known as Pacifica decimates the west coast. Who is he and why does he only have one eye and the bruises of the abused.

Adam Grigori, is a two-time Noble Peace Prize winner and expert on diseases. He is always the first to enter the gruesome aftermath of world-wide devastation and to help cure the sick. And when the world's active volcanoes begin erupting, Adam runs into the thick of it. He's always avoided harm, as if he had an angel on his shoulder. But this time, in Italy, he runs head first into Hell. And what he brings back could mean the end of mankind.

The phantoms of each man, woman, and child who ever perished from disease; every pack, herd, and pride, every school, every flock and murder, once dead, now sought to unravel from the clay; and to embrace their living kind as an accursed kiss dissolved in a pestilent wind. The oceans and seas burned with the red tides. Flora rustled and were purged to nothing by swarms of locusts, ants, weevils, beetles, worms, and moths both living and dead--finally only dead.

Containment is a novel of world-wide devastation and the race to save mankind. Bram Stoker Award winner Charlee Jacob delivers a beautifully gruesome picture of an apocalyptic nightmare. A pure masterpiece of modern horror fiction.

Clinging to hope, the inhabitants of a small war-ravaged Cambodian village find salvation in the form of an American GI, a vessel for the great god Shiva, who offers them peace, but in order to enter paradise, they must first pass through a horrifying and hellish world.

A sultry female voice slipped from a television ad. "Hey, mister... is there a beast inside you?"

A second voice said beneath this, "Compulsion--are you obsessed, do you feel compelled to act out your fiercest fantasies?"

A sexy third voice dripped honey. "Do you get the night sweats?"

The first voice returned. "Tell us about it. Dark, primitive longings. Let us feed your beast."

X-IS-THE-DARK
Compulsions: What The Night Is Made Of

The ads mysteriously appeared all over town--radio, TV, billboards... Call the number and tell all your depraved desires to the listener. No matter how vile, how disturbing and utterly Hellish your thoughts, X-IS-THE-DARK won't only listen, but will encourage you to go deeper and maybe even push you over the edge to act upon those heinous urges.

necrOmania seXualis:

Is it just an urban legend about a horror writer who'd tapped into Hell for inspiration and was herself butchered? Pirsya Profana was a modern myth, a feminist version of Lovecraft's mad Arab, Alhazred. Now the infamous magazine that documented her trail of horrors is appearing on the shelves of a Podunk convenience store. And when it shows up, it brings only pain and devastation.

The appearance of necrOmania seXualis and X-IS-THE-DARK at the same time is no mere coincidence. Could the ominous black building that burns to the touch, and appeared in town with seemingly no way to get in, be the cause?

Eddie is a police officer pulled into the darkest corners of his town now haunted by horrifying shadows, various cults who accept extreme body modification as part of their initiation. Will he and his D-movie queen girlfriend find out just what is behind all the death and human destruction plaguing their town or will they be sucked further into the black hole of murder, sex and the Season of the Witch.

From the crumbling ruins of a Cambodian jungle temple to the arid canyons of west Texas, exotic demons of the ancient past collide with more modern devils.

As crippled residents in a small Cambodian village try to rebuild their lives in a shattered country, their god returns to them, providing hope and a dream of survival. But their god has returned as a former American GI, and their hope for peace is a drug that opens the door to untold horrors.

Their beautiful nirvana waits only at the end of a road traveled by nightmares. It is a world peopled by the bizarre and the unearthly, in which damnation and redemption can come in the most terrifying forms.

There is an old myth that says if one dreams of falling and goes all the way to the sudden end, this one will never wake up.

For writer Charlee Jacob that form of dream death never came. She'd strike rocks and get up again. However, in other nightmares she's died almost every conceivable (and inconceivable) way, including being murdered. A child of relentless bullying, family violence, and stonings in the street... wife of starvation, psychological degredation, and abandonment, she put her fury and pain into writing. Her horrific fiction is extreme, often as lyrical as it is monstrous. Having written for nearly twenty years, illness completely disabled her.

Later, a different diagnosis and maximum doses of her medications, she's written her first book in eight years. 'The Myth Of Falling' is a collection of frequently gruesome fiction, cruelty, sexual deviance, and essays of living with horror. She's fallen, hit bottom, and got up again.

It's a terrible thing loneliness is.

Tawne Delaney: A woman filled with the hatred of herself and what she's not... Never touched by a man, never loved, until one night in the woods... Tawne watches as a woman's body is crammed into a drain pipe... A crooked and broken beast beckons to Tawne and passes on his gift to her. Is it the ultimate power or the cruelest joke?

Arcan Tyler: A man tormented by the memories of an insane mother and haunted by the ghosts of a dozen women not yet dead... Struggling with the rage of three beasts, controlled, for now...

Once friends and co-workers, Tawne and Arcan now unite as lovers... Along with each other's body, they share each other's secrets: Arcan, his beasts; Tawne, her power... Is it the love of dreams or the sheer terror of a nightmare come to life?

Whoever said undeath was "The Nightmare Beautiful" was a lying son-of-a-bitch.

Abandoned, Rejected, Exploited...

They live in the shadows, away from the light, hiding from judgmental eyes. Complicated names describe them, but to most of the world they're just freaks. Although society sees little to no use for them, someone does...

The Goddess of Darkness...

She is beauty without light. A woman of inky shadow and a hunger to bring an end to the light. For centuries she has been amassing an army of darkness to go to war against those who worship at the golden feet of Dawn.

The War Begins...

For the vestals, Jett and Nival, there is only one existence...to serve the Goddess. They do as she instructs and when they do, light is extinguished and the denizens of the light will embrace the darkness the hard way.

A trail of bizarre murders leads Detective Sam Pressure into an underground world where those unlucky enough to be born different pay the price with their distorted bodies--bodies not too different from Sam's.

Can Sam find his way back to the light? Does he even want to?

Just what happens when you stick your head between legs of The Owl Girl?

And what is their role in the war between darkness and light? Will the Goddess of Darkness finally prevail over the fire-headed Goddess of Light?

And just what will become of the world should only one survive?

Sturgeon Award nominated novella.

In the novella Gypsy, a few visionary scientists, chosen and nurtured by an eccentric billionaire undertake humankind's most expansive adventure--a generations-long voyage to a distant planet.

The story originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November-December 2015. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 1 (2016), edited by Neil Clarke, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016, edited by Paula Guran, and The Final Frontier (2018), edited by Neil Clarke. It is included in the colledtion Gypsy Plus (2015).

Franz Kafka: by day, a mild-mannered insurance executive; by night a seminal Twentieth Century fabulist. Author of The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis, Amerika.

Franz Kafka: Czech refugee, American screenwriter, painter of sad-eyed waifs, reclusive superhero with an identity problem. Associate of Frank Capra, Orson Welles, Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, Gary Cooper, Rod Serling, and Roberto Begnini.

Franz Kafka: victim of an audacious, witty, hermetic, affectionate and shameless literary appropriation and reimagination by Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz.

These five stories project Kafka into a modern America he never lived to see, but might have invented--a world of material wealth and spiritual vapidity, filled with the detritus of postwar culture: old comic books, Hollywood movies, and tacky paintings of crying children.

Table of Contents:

• Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor - (1993) - shortstory by Carter Scholz
• The Notebooks of Bob K. - (1999) - shortfiction by Jonathan Lethem
• Receding Horizon - (1995) - shortstory by Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz
• The Amount to Carry - (1998) - novelette by Carter Scholz
• K for Fake - (1999) - shortfiction by Jonathan Lethem

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2016, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, Issue 139, April 2018. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

While exploring an ancient site used by Neanderthal Man, a young anthropologist stumbles upon a mysterious metal cube made of an unknown alloy, an artifact that can yield a clue to the secrets of time travel.

Somewhere in California, in the 1990s, a nuclear weapons lab develops advanced technologies for its post-Cold War mission. Advanced as in not working yet. Mission as in continued funding. A scandal-plagued missile defense program presses forward, dragging physicist Philip Quine deep into the machinations of those who would use the lab for their own gain.

The Soviet Union has collapsed. But new enemies are sought, and new reasons found to continue the work that has legitimized the power of the Lab, its mangers, and the politicians who fund them. Quine is thrust into the center of programs born at the intersection of paranoia, greed, and ambition, and torn by incommensurable demands. Deadlines slip and cost overruns mount. He is drawn into a maelstrom of policy meetings, classified documents, petty betrayals, interrupted conservations, missed meanings, unanswered voicemail, stolen data, and pornographic files. Amid all the noise and static of the late twentieth century made manifest in weapons and anti-weapons, human beings have set in motion a malign a d inhuman reality, which now is beyond their control.

More than critique of corrupt science and a permanent wartime economy, Radiance is a novel of lost ideals, broken aspirations, and human costs. In this vivid satire, relationship are just a question of who's using whom. Failure is just another word for opportunity. "Spin" is a property not of atomic particles but if the news cycle. Nature is a blur beyond the windshield, where lives are spent on the road, on the phone, on the make, in fierce competition for financial, political, and intellectual resources.

In this collection of twelve stories, Carter Scholz reveals his truly remarkable range and prodigious narrative gifts. Traveling from the surface of the moon to the New Jersey suburbs, they explore the places in the human mind where science and fiction merge. Here are stories that disturb the universe, probe the worlds we call home, and measure the degrees of our alienation. Mind-expanding, entertaining, and often richly disquieting, the stories in The Amount to Carry are bravura performances of the imagination.

Table of Contents:

• The Eve of the Last Apollo - (1976) - novelette
• A Catastrophe Machine - (1984) - novelette
• Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor - (1993) - shortstory
• The Menagerie of Babel - (1984) - novelette
• A Draft of Canto CI - (1986) - shortstory
• Altamira - (1981) - shortstory
• Travels - (1980) - shortstory
• At the Shore - (1984) - shortstory
• The Nine Billion Names of God - (1984) - shortstory
• Invisible Ink - shortstory
• Mengele's Jew - (1996) - shortstory
• The Amount to Carry - (1998) - novelette

Hugo and Nebula Award novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Universe 7 (1977), edited by Terry Carr.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures (2017), edited by Ed Finn, Joey Eschrich and Juliet Ulman. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Nothing escapes me, not even light.

Mother, monstrosity, woman, Cosmovore.

In this narrative collection of poems, the voice of the void reels and keens over meditations on consumption, the body, and the world. From the edges of the Milky Way to the confines of an eggshell, nowhere is safe from her hunger. In the tinny echoes of a much-hated musical triangle, explore the questions she faces about womanhood, motherhood, society, and a goat as she tries to reconcile those around her with her own identity.

Contents:

• Cosmovore - interior artwork by Tahlia Day
• 2 - Cosmovore, Homo neanderthalensis, and You - (2013) - poem
• 4 - Cosmovore Meets Her Antithesis - (2012) - poem
• 6 - Cosmovore in Limbo with You - poem
• 8 - Cosmovore Loses the Fired Pearl - poem
• 9 - Cosmovore Surrounded by Husks - (2013) - poem
• 11 - Crepuscular Sabotage with Citronella - poem
• 18 - Cosmovore Suspects Being Cuckolded - poem
• 20 - Cosmovore Finds Pluto Less Palatable Than Imagined - (2013) - poem
• 22 - Cosmovore Returns to Earth - (2015) - poem
• 24 - Cosmovore Renovates the Kitchen - (2015) - poem
• 26 - Cosmovore Cleans the Attic - (2015) - poem
• 28 - Post-Arson, Cosmovore Visits the Clearance Bin at a Record Store - poem
• 34 - A Poorly Kept Fish-Tank Fascinates Cosmovore, but Not Him - poem
• 36 - Cosmovore Pines for More Than a Reuben - poem
• 38 - Cosmovore Gets Stung - (2012) - poem
• 40 - Cosmovore Has Night Demons - poem
• 42 - Notes on a Marriage and the Ubiquity of Apples - (2017) - poem
• 48 - Cosmovore Searches the Animal Shelter - poem
• 50 - Regrets Involving the Balut - (2017) - poem
• 52 - Consequences of Baking While Feral - poem
• 54 - The Memory of Certain Flavors Renders Scars in My Eternal Mouth - poem
• 55 - Cosmovore Contemplates Astrology - poem
• 62 - Cosmovore at Coney Island - (2014) - poem
• 64 - The Maturity of Offal As Mapped by Cosmovore - (2015) - poem
• 66 - Cosmovore Goes to the Doctor - (2013) - poem
• 68 - Cosmovore Is Haunted by Eating the Ortolan - (2012) - poem
• 71 - Cosmovore Gains the Vantage Point from Fourth Dimension - poem
• 73 - Cosmovore and Redhaired Infant at the Corner of Death and Infinity - poem

Invader on My Back

Invader on My Back is set on this world but in a period of time far ahead of the present. A world which has fallen to chaos with the criminal elements controlling the cities and vast police forces ruling the unknown wilderness beyond.

Only one man, unknowingly, holds the key to the state in which society finds itself--a man called craig.

Craig, however, is an outcast, a pariah, feared by organised crime and despised by the police who, despite themselves, are compelled to use him.

This fast moving story tells of his fight, not only against forces unknown, but also of his attempts to reinstate himself into a society which as rejected him.

Destination: Saturn

When identical planet-kings meet, one must be a Saturnian!

Kar Kaballa

Science fights magic on Earth's twin.

Kar Kaballa was the new king of the Gogs and rumor was that he would lead his barbaric cannibalistic band of Northern nomads down on a mad crusade against the civilized nations of the world. Cultured people found this improbably--but they were soon to learn better.

Their weapons were good, about as good as you could get in a Victorian army, which was what the period was. But there was a traveler in town with a weapon he said was better, an odd chap with a thing called a Gatling Gun from a country nobody ever heard of called the United States of America.

The question was...could this outlander, this Major Churchward, sell his unearthly import to the Empire soon enough--or would Kar Kaballa become the new Tamerlane of a bloody-dawned Twentieth Century?

Tower of the Medusa

The most dangerous thing in the universe--for the taking!

"You are the most notorious and celebrated jewel thief in the Near Stars. It was Kirin of Tellus who stole the Nine Diamonds of Pharvis from the dragon-guarded citadel beside the Flaming Sea. It was you who carried off the tiara of the Queen of Zodah, a trifle composed of eleven thousand matched fire-rubies, worth an emperor's ransom...I want you to steal something for me. I am a doctor of the Minor Thaumaturgies and I am come from Trevelon.

"The jewel we are after is called The MEdusa. It is concealed within a structure called the Iron Tower, which lies amidst the barren wastes of the uplands of Pelizon, guarded by a maze of traps and deadfalls. We have, over the centuries, and at frightful labor, obtained very precise and complete blueprints of the Tower...There will be no danger. No danger at all..."

The softly modulated voice of the starship interrupted the conversation.

"I have been under attack for the past 12.03 seconds," the ship observed calmly.

The Man Without a Planet

Who holds this nebula can sway the galactic imperium.

Time to Live

To conquer death, learn to live again.

The Off-Worlders

The man from Beyond the Limit.

The Star Magicians

Who will stop the planetary marauders?

A stunning debut SF novel of virtual reality, virtual memory, virtual love--and real genocide. When Maya Andreyevna, a "camera"--a reporter with virtual-reality-broadcasting equipment implanted in her brain--witnesses the coverup of a massacre, she soon uncovers secrets that should have been hidden from the world... and memories that AI-controlled thought police have forced her to hide from herself.

DREAD IN THE BEAST used to be a novella about the goddess of waste and the king of wasters. Now it is a novel, stuffed full of the gruesome and horrible. Taken from the mythologies and histories of humankind, it follows the trail of the Mother Spririt of the worst that the world is capable of producing. From the catacombs of ancient Rome where a blasphemous sect twisted the message of the early Christians--to modern America with its obsession with violence, deities and saints and the reincarnations of beasts battle over sublime and profane, where the very reasons for existence for us all may lie in the unthinkable.

A glowing anthology of gems from the ancient writers, including excerpts from:

The Volsunga Saga
Beowulf
The Mabinogion
The Shah-Namah
The Kalevala
and many, many more.

The companion volume to "The Young Magicians." Edited and with introduction and notes by Lin Carter

Contents:

• 1 - Introduction: Over the Hills and Far Away - essay by Lin Carter
• 10 - The Ogre - (1961) - short story by unknown
• 30 - The High History of the Sword Gram - [Volsungs] - (1870) - short story by unknown
• 54 - Manawyddan Son of the Boundless - (1930) - short story by Kenneth Morris
• 64 - Puck's Song - (1905) - poem by Rudyard Kipling
• 67 - Barrow-Wight - juvenile - (1890) - short story by Sabine Baring-Gould [as by S. Baring-Gould]
• 73 - Fingal at the Siege of Carric-Thura - poem by James Macpherson
• 83 - The Sword of Avalon (excerpt from Le Morte d'Arthur) - short fiction by Sir Thomas Malory
• 98 - Tom O'Bedlam's Song - poem by Anonymous
• 102 - The Last Giant of the Elder Age - (1886) - short story by unknown (variant of Ilya of Murom the Peasant Hero, and Hero Svyatogor)
• 112 - The Lost Words of Power - poem by unknown
• 125 - Wonderful Things Beyond Cathay - (1895) - short story by unknown
• 135 - Prospero Evokes the Air Spirits (excerpt from The Tempest) - poem by William Shakespeare
• 138 - The Lords of Faerie (excerpt from The Faerie Queen) - (1953) - short fiction by Edmund Spenser
• 144 - Tales of the Wisdom of the Ancients - (1959) - short story by unknown
• 160 - The Magical Palace of Darkness (excerpt from Palmerin of England) - [Amadis de Gaula] - (1807) - short story by Francisco de Moraes
• 178 - Rustum Against the City of Demons - short story by Firdausi
• 197 - Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came - (1855) - poem by Robert Browning
• 203 - The Princess of Babylon (abridged) - (1885) - novella by Voltaire
• 275 - The Horns of Elfland - (1909) - poem by Alfred Tennyson [as by Alfred Lord Tennyson]

Contents:

• 1 - Diana's Foresters - essay by Lin Carter
• 8 - Rapunzel - (1858) - poem by William Morris
• 22 - The Sword of Welleran - (1908) - short story by Lord Dunsany
• 39 - In Valhalla (excerpt) - (1926) - short fiction by E. R. Eddison
• 45 - The Way of Ecben - [Biography of the Life of Manuel - 4.2] - (1929) - novelette by James Branch Cabell (variant of The Way of Ecben: A Comedietta Involving a Gentleman 1928)
• 86 - The Quest of Iranon - [Dream Cycle] - (1935) - short story by H. P. Lovecraft
• 96 - The Cats of Ulthar - [Dream Cycle] - (1920) - short story by H. P. Lovecraft
• 101 - The Maze of Maal Dweb - [Maal Dweb] - (1933) - short story by Clark Ashton Smith
• 121 - The Whelming of Oom - short story by Lin Carter
• 126 - Through the Dragon Glass - (1917) - short story by A. Merritt
• 144 - The Valley of the Worm - [James Allison] - (1934) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• 170 - Heldendämmerung - (1964) - poem by L. Sprague de Camp
• 172 - Cursed Be the City - [Prince Raynor] - (1939) - novelette by Henry Kuttner
• 202 - Ka the Appalling - [Pusadian] - (1958) - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp
• 203 - Turjan of Miir - [Dying Earth] - (1950) - short story by Jack Vance
• 249 - Narnian Suite - (1953) - poem by C. S. Lewis
• 254 - Once Upon a Time - (1965) - poem by J. R. R. Tolkien
• 257 - The Dragon's Visit - (1937) - poem by J. R. R. Tolkien
• 263 - Azlon (from Khymyrium, a work in progress) - [Khymyrium] - short fiction by Lin Carter
• 276 - A Basic Reading List of Modern Heroic Fantasy - essay by Lin Carter

Contents:

• ix - Here There Be Dragons: An Introduction - essay by Lin Carter
• 3 - Introduction to the First Tale: How Nefer-Ka-Ptah Found The Book of Thoth - essay by Lin Carter
• 6 - How Nefer-Ka-Ptah Found the Book of Thoth - short story by Brian Brown
• 15 - Introduction to the Second Tale: The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld - essay by Lin Carter
• 20 - The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld - poem by Lin Carter
• 29 - Introduction to the Third Tale: Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou - essay by Lin Carter
• 33 - Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou - novelette by Antoine Galland (trans. of Histoire de prince Ahmed et de la fée Pari-Banou 1717) [as by Galland]
• 63 - Introduction to the Fourth Tale: The Talisman of Oromanes - essay by Lin Carter
• 65 - The Talisman of Oromanes: The Merchant Abudah's Adventure with the Ivory Box - novelette by Sir Charles Morell [as by uncredited]
• 111 - Introduction to the Fifth Tale: Wars of the Giants of Albion - essay by Lin Carter
• 114 - Wars of the Giants of Albion - short story by Wayland Smith
• 129 - Introduction to the Sixth Tale: Forty Singing Seamen - essay by Lin Carter
• 130 - Forty Singing Seamen - (1906) - poem by Alfred Noyes
• 137 - Introduction to the Seventh Tale: The Shadowy Lord of Mommur - essay by Lin Carter
• 141 - The Shadowy Lord of Mommur - novelette by Robert Steele
• 169 - Introduction to the Eighth Tale: Olivier's Brag - essay by Lin Carter
• 170 - Olivier's Brag - (1909) - short story by Anatole France (trans. of Le gab d'Olivier 1908)
• 181 - Introduction to the Ninth Tale: The White Bull - essay by Lin Carter
• 183 - The White Bull - (unknown) - novelette by Voltaire (trans. of Le taureau blanc 1774)
• 217 - Introduction to the Tenth Tale: The Yellow Dwarf - essay by Lin Carter
• 219 - The Yellow Dwarf - (1889) - novelette by Comtesse d'Aulnoy (trans. of Le nain jaune 1698) [as by Madame d'Aulnoy]
• 243 - Introduction to the Eleventh and Twelfth Tales: Arcalaus the Enchanter and The Isle of Wonders - essay by Lin Carter
• 247 - Arcalaus the Enchanter - short story by Vasco de Lobeira [as by uncredited]
• 262 - The Isle of Wonders - short story by Vasco de Lobeira [as by uncredited]
• 273 - Introduction to the Thirteenth Tale: The Palace of Illusions - essay by Lin Carter
• 276 - The Palace of Illusions - [Orlando Furioso] - (1516) - short story by Ludovico Ariosto
• 299 - A Concluding Word (Golden Cities, Far) - essay by Lin Carter

Contents:

• xi - Makers of Worlds - (1971) - essay by Lin Carter
• 3 - Zulkaïs and Kalilah - [Vathek] - (1909) - novelette by William Beckford (trans. of Histoire de la Princesse Zulkaïs et du Prince Kalilah 1912)
• 58 - Silence: A Fable - [Tales of the Folio Club] - (1903) - short story by Edgar Allan Poe (variant of Siope--A Fable 1838)
• 64 - The Romance of Photogen and Nycteris - (1879) - novelette by George MacDonald (variant of The History of Photogen and Nycteris: A Day and Night Mährchen)
• 113 - The Sphinx - (1894) - poem by Oscar Wilde
• 128 - The Fall of Babbulkund - (1907) - short story by Lord Dunsany
• 145 - The Green Meadow - (1918) - short story by Winifred V. Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft [as by Elizabeth Berkeley and H. P. Lovecraft]
• 154 - The Feast in the House of the Worm - (1970) - short story by Gary Myers (variant of The House of the Worm)
• 166 - Zingazar - (1971) - short story by Lin Carter
• 183 - A Wine of Wizardry - (1907) - poem by George Sterling
• 193 - The Garden of Fear - [James Allison] - (1934) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• 213 - Jirel Meets Magic - [Jirel of Joiry] - (1935) - novelette by C. L. Moore
• 254 - Duar the Accursed - (1937) - novelette by Clifford Ball
• 279 - The Hashish-Eater - (1947) - poem by Clark Ashton Smith (variant of The Hashish-Eater: or, The Apocalypse of Evil 1922)
• 300 - The Party at Lady Cusp-Canine's - (1969) - short story by Mervyn Peake
• 313 - The Sword of Power (Excerpt from Khymyrium) - [Khymyrium] - (1971) - short fiction by Lin Carter

Table of Contents:

• About The Spawn of Cthulhu and H. P. Lovecraft - essay by Lin Carter
• The Whisperer in Darkness - (1931) - novella by H. P. Lovecraft
• An Inhabitant of Carcosa - (1886) - short story by Ambrose Bierce
• The Yellow Sign - (1895) - novelette by Robert W. Chambers
• Cordelia's Song: From the King in Yellow - (1938) - poem by Vincent Starrett
• The Return of Hastur - (1939) - novelette by August Derleth
• Litany to Hastur - (1965) - poem by Lin Carter
• The Children of the Night - (1931) - short story by Robert E. Howard
• K'n-yan - (1971) - poem by Walter C. DeBill, Jr.
• The Tale of Satampra Zeiros - (1931) - short story by Clark Ashton Smith
• The Hounds of Tindalos - (1929) - short story by Frank Belknap Long
• The Curse of Yig - (1970) - short story by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop
• The Mine on Yuggoth - (1964) - short story by Ramsey Campbell

Contents:

• v - About The Firebird and Edmund Cooper: Phoenix Times Two - essay by Lin Carter
• ix - About From the World's End and Roger Lancelyn Green - essay by Lin Carter
• xi - About Double Phoenix - essay by Lin Carter
• 5 - The Firebird - novella by Edmund Cooper
• 93 - From the World's End - (1948) - novella by Roger Lancelyn Green

Contents:

• ix - Lost Worlds - essay by Lin Carter
• 7 - The Vision of Yin - [Kai Lung] - (1900) - short fiction by Ernest Bramah (variant of The Vision of Yin, the Son of Yat Huang)
• 26 - The Dragon of Chang Tao - [Kai Lung] - (1922) - novelette by Ernest Bramah (variant of The Story of Chang Tao, Melodious Vision and the Dragon)
• 62 - The Poet of Panopolis - (1888) - short story by Richard Garnett
• 78 - The City of Philosophers - (1888) - short story by Richard Garnett
• 104 - The Bird with the Golden Beak - (1931) - short story by Donald Corley
• 125 - The Song of the Tombelaine - (1927) - novelette by Donald Corley
• 154 - The Miniature - (1927) - short fiction by Eden Phillpotts

Contents:

• vii - Four Worlds of Wonder - essay by Lin Carter
• 5 - Wall of Serpents - [Incomplete Enchanter - 4] - novella by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (variant of The Wall of Serpents 1953)
• 93 - The Kingdom of the Dwarfs - novella by Anatole France (trans. of Abeille 1883)
• 169 - The Maker of Moons - (1896) - novella by Robert W. Chambers
• 231 - The Hollow Land - (1856) - novelette by William Morris
• 277 - Afterword (Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy I) - essay by Lin Carter

Contents:

• vii - Four Worlds of Wonder (Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy: Volume II) - essay by Lin Carter
• 1 - George Macdonald - The Woman in the Mirror (1858) - (1973) - essay by Lin Carter
• 3 - The Woman in the Mirror - (1858) - novelette by George MacDonald
• 25 - Robert W. Chambers - The Repairer of Reputations (1895) - (1973) - essay by Lin Carter
• 28 - The Repairer of Reputations - [King in Yellow (Chambers)] - (1895) - novelette by Robert W. Chambers
• 64 - Ernest Bramah - The Transmutation of Ling (1900) - (1973) - essay by Lin Carter
• 66 - The Transmutation of Ling - [Kai Lung] - (1900) - novella by Ernest Bramah
• 147 - Eden Phillpotts - The Lavender Dragon (1923) - (1973) - essay by Lin Carter
• 148 - The Lavender Dragon - (1923) - novel by Eden Phillpotts

IMAGINARY WORLDS is a book about fantasy, about the men who write it, and how it is written. It is a joyful excursion by a man who himself loves fantasy, into the origins and the magicks of such writers as Dunsany, Eddison, Cabell: it examines the rise of fantasy in the American pulp magazines and delights in the sturdy health of 'sword and sorcery': it looks with pleasure on the works of some modern masters and knowledgeably explores the techniques of world-making.

It is, in short, a happy exploration of worlds, and men, and writers, and writings, by an author whose enthusiasm for his subject is boundless -- and is thus a joyful guide for fantasy lovers everywhere.

The Flame of Iridar

From out of the gloom in the dungeon where Chandar, Prince of Orin, awaited a tortured death, Sarkong the Enchanter shimmered into reality. His emerald eyes gleamed with an inhuman lustre as, with a soundless command, and without a touch, he mysteriously released the chains which bound Chandar. The prize Sarond the offered Chandar was freedom, the price..the timeless struggle between tow oposing forces... a man who used the secret powers of the universe for his own schemes... a man who vowed to stop him by his own strength and wits.

Peril of the Starmen

Five inhabited planets has been shattered to nothingness by the Oligarchs of Brionmar. the sixth was to be Earth...

The people of Earth welcomed the smiling and friendly starmen of Brionmar with gracious approval. The starmen asked only one favor-- "Let us make a geological survey of your planet's surface."

Who would suspect the true purpose of the survey--Who would stop the countdown to the destruction of Warth which began the monent the starmen landed?

WHAT MYSTERIOUS POWER EMANATED FROM THE BEJEWELED CROWN OF STARS THAT RULERS OF THREE PLANETS FRANTICALLY SOUGHT ITS POSSESSION?

THE PORTALS OF THE UNKNOWN HAD OPENED WIDE, THEN HAD CLOSED, LEAVING A HORROR OF MONSTROUS PROPORTIONS.

The figure's eyes seemed lidless and sheathed with a thin film like a snake. But they were so penetratingly malignant that they pierced deep into the man's brain, mercilessly exploring all that was there -- laying his thought bare like a visual scalpel that mad ehim scream every time it was moved.

It was not human.

Mind Control

Someone--something had infected the minds of a group of unrelated people with an identical terror. A girl unnaturally kept from the world by a psychotic mother. A man imprisoned for many years... A socialite who enjoyed life's pleasures.

Something had invaded their minds. Something evil...

If There Is No Money...

...What is there to steal?

If the inhabitants have no endocrine gland systems how can there be crimes of passion?

And if there was no crime whatsoever on Albazar I, why was Hautley Quicksilver, licensed criminal extraordinary, called there?

He had no answer until he arrived at the planet... or where it should have been. For Albazar I disappeared before his eyes.

Jandar the alien enslaved on Callisto, moon of Jupiter, a world of black and crimson jungles where the hand of every man is lifted in eternal enmity against every other... a savage, hostile world on which he is first held prisoner by the fearsome insect-men, only to be freed for a more binding slavery in the deadly clutches of the insidious Sky Pirates... and in the incalculable aura of the beautiful princess Darloona who elicits love almost beyond the limits of his mortal soul...

Jandar the alien tortured by his love for the magnificent Princess Darloona in the savage and primitive world of Thanator, devises an incredible plan to infiltrate the ranks of the barbaric and merciless Black Legion who hold both the city of Shondakor and the Princess - in their relentless power.

It is a plan of inconceivable daring, fraught with dangers unthinkable by the human mind... and when the gates of the city lock behind him, Jandar realizes that death might be their only way out...

Jandar the alien saveged by the fears of his mortal soul for the safety of the beautiful princess Darloona, resorts to a desperate plan to free her from the clutches of the insidious Sky Pirates of Callisto. But fate and treachery alter his course, flinging him to the fearsome red Perushtarians... abandoning him in the loathsome slave-pens of Narouk... leaving him helpless and alone to fight for his destiny in a barbaric arena of death...

The fourth fantasy in the saga of Jandar of Callisto, a human stranded on an impossible world, facing a thousand deadly foes!

Jandar leading an armada of four airships in search of the Mind Wizards of Callisto. Purveyors of cruelty and far off control.

JANDAR THE ALIEN LOST

...in the mysterious and treacherous domain of the insidious Mind Wizards. Searching for him is a fearless armada of his loyal friends, and a stranger who knows him better than anyone on Callisto. The stranger, Lankar, is none other than Lin Carter, accidentally transported through the Gate Between the Worlds to the land of the Thanatorians.

Aware of Jandar's plight, Lankar joins the search beyond the world's edge and suddenly finds himself battling for his own existence against the most nightmarish creatures on the planet - the gruesome flesh robots of Kuur and the fiendish Mind Wizards of Callisto themselves...

Hurled from Earth through the depths of space by a force beyond human comprehension, Jonathan Dark is forced to pit his strength and wits against the terrors of savage jungles and plains on the Jovian moon, Callisto. As JANDAR, he must fight cunning wizards and grotesque beasts of prey, to survive on this savage planet and someday find a way home.

In the merciless clutches of Zhu Kor, last of the legendary Mind Wizards of Callisto, the beautiful raven-haired jungle maiden is spirited away upon a hideous winged ghastozar. Captives of a vicious tribe that worships the evil Zhu Kor as a god, while their jungle stronghold is attacked by a rival tribe, Ylana and Tomar battle savages and predatory monsters alike ... until the Galleon of the Clouds finds them in the very jaws of doom ....

Lin Carter, the Modern Edqar Rice Burroughs, creates a stirring tale of swords-and-sorcery adventure that will thrill you with pulse-pounding action to the very last page!

Far from his adopted home, the Golden City of Shondakor, Koja, self-exiled insectoid of the Yathoon Horde, has blundered into the savage land he had renounced, accompanied only by little Taran, ward of Prince Jandar.

Daniel Carter used to be a homicide detective, but his last case-the hunt for a serial killer-went wrong in strange ways and soured the job for him. Now he's a private investigator trying to live a quiet life. Strangeness, however, has not finished with him. First he inherits a bookstore in Providence from someone he's never heard of, along with an indignant bookseller who doesn't want a new boss. She's Emily Lovecraft, the last known descendant of H.P. Lovecraft, the writer from Providence who told tales of the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods, creatures and entities beyond the understanding of man. Then people start dying in impossible ways, and while Carter doesn't want to be involved, he's beginning to suspect that someone else wants him to be. As he reluctantly investigates, he discovers that Lovecraft's tales were more than just fiction, and he must accept another unexpected, and far more unwanted inheritance.

After the End of the World by Jonathan L. Howard brings the H.P. Lovecraft mythos into the twenty-first century.

The Unfolded World is a bitter and unfriendly place for Daniel Carter and Emily Lovecraft. In this world, the Cold War never happened because the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1941. In this world the Nazi Großdeutschland is the premier superpower, and is not merely tolerated but indulged because, in this world, the Holocaust happened behind the ruins of the Iron Curtain and consumed only Bolsheviks, Communists, and others the West was glad to see gone. In this world, there are monsters, and not all of them are human.

But even in the Unfolded World, there are still bills to pay and jobs to do. Carter finds himself working for the German secret security service to uncover the truth behind a major scientific joint project that is going suspiciously well. The trail takes Lovecraft and him to a distant, abandoned island, and a conspiracy that threatens everything. To fight it, Lovecraft must walk a perilously narrow path between forbidden knowledge and soul-destroying insanity.

Fortunately, she also has a shotgun.

Zarouk, aging warrior and grandfather to young Kadji, implored the boy to dethrone Prince Yakthodah, vile impostor-heir to the throne of the Dragon Emperor. On Haral, his faithful, black Feridoon pony, and with beautiful, redhaired Thyra at his side, Kadji rode East to vanquish his foe -- knowing full well that if he failed to decapitate Yakthodah, he would be branded coward... and worse!

The titular wonder-working wizard, fat, green and full of himself, makes an unlikely hero, but nonetheless has a humorous romp of quest he must undertake. He is accompanied on his journey by the 15-year-old Wild Girl Ooo, his newly purchased chela, who assists him as servant, apprentice and concubine. Strange beasts and stranger people are encountered along the way. The true identity of the wizard, a mystery in itself, is revealed in a surprise ending. The narrative is spiced with authorial asides and footnotes.

Kellory -- the last of the Black Wolves, sole descendant of the Lost Kings of Illyriod. His fighting arm maimed, his homeland stolen, his tribe slaughtered by the merciless Thungoda Horde, Kellory lives for one thing: revenge. Exciting sword & sorcery adventure!

As thief, pirate, mercenary, adventurer, chief of barbarous tribes and general in the armies of kings, Conan had ventured far and known adventure and marvel. But the adventure that started here, in the royal hall of justice in Tarantia was to be the strangest and most fantastic of all.

A vengeful Conan journeys from the dark forests of Gunderland to the ends of the earth in pursuit of Thoth-Amon and the evil wizards of the Black King who killed his son.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by L. Sprague de Camp
• The Witch of the Mists - (1972) - novelette
• Black Sphinx of Nebthu - (1973) - novelette
• Red Moon of Zembabwei - (1974) - novelette
• Shadows in the Skull - (1975) - novelette

Imagine a world of gods and demons, where men are warriors, women are beautiful, life is a fantastic adventure, and the fate of kingdoms balances on the bloody blade of a fabulous hero: Conan of the iron thews, the blue-eyed barbarian giant who towers above the savage Hyborian world.

Table of Contents:

• The Conan Saga - essay by L. Sprague de Camp
• Legions of the Dead - short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
• The People of the Summit - short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Björn Nyberg
• Shadows in the Dark - short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
• The Star of Khorala - short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Björn Nyberg
• The Gem in the Tower - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
• The Ivory Goddess - short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
• Moon of Blood - short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
• Hyborian Names - essay by L. Sprague de Camp

Aquilonia, once the proudest land in all of Hyboria, has fallen under the tyrannical reign of a mad king. As his brutal insanity sweeps the land, only one man dares stand against him: Conan the barbarian.

Conan becomes the leader of an army of rebels, brave warriors who thought their battles would be fought with spear and sword, axe and dagger. In this they were mistaken, for their greatest foe is not the army of Aquilonia, but the vile sorcerer Thulandra Thuu.

Dark clouds loom ahead for the people of Aquilonia, and only Conan can save them.

Conan the Barbarian is a novelization of the feature film of the same name.

OUT OF A DARK AGE COMES THE GREATEST WARRIOR OF ALL TIME...

In a land of darkling twilight, a world of ancient wizards and dazzling treasures of raging monsters and valiant warriors, the fate of kingdoms balances on his blade alone...

As a child he saw his parents slaughtered by the Snake Cult. In slavery he grew to mighty manhood, trained as a master swordsman and gladiator. As he slaved in chains he planned for freedom and murderous revenge. His day would come. For he was destined to become the warrior who would rule all...

Thief. Warrior. Gladiator. King.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by L. Sprague de Camp
• Letter to P. Schuyler Miller, March 10, 1936 ("Dear Mr. Miller: / I feel indeed honored...") - (1953) - essay by Robert E. Howard
• The Hyborian Age, Part 1 - (1936) - short fiction by Robert E. Howard
• The Thing in the Crypt - short story by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp
• The Tower of the Elephant - (1933) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• The Hall of the Dead - (1967) - novelette by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp
• The God in the Bowl - (1952) - short story by Robert E. Howard
• Rogues in the House - (1934) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• The Hand of Nergal - novelette by Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter
• The City of Skulls - short story by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by L. Sprague de Camp
• The Curse of the Monolith - (1968) - short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
• The Bloodstained God - (1955) - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Howard
• The Frost Giant's Daughter - (1953) - short story by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp
• The Lair of the Ice Worm - short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
• Queen of the Black Coast - (1934) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• The Vale of Lost Women - (1967) - short story by Robert E. Howard
• The Castle of Terror - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
• The Snout in the Dark - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter

Conan the Wanderer is a 1968 collection of four fantasy short stories written by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter featuring Howard's seminal sword and sorcery hero Conan the Barbarian.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by L. Sprague de Camp
• Black Tears - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
• Shadows in Zamboula - (1935) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• The Devil in Iron - (1934) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• The Flame Knife - (1955) - novella by L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Howard

The hunt for a beautiful princess and a king's treasure bring Conan to the edge of the world, where he must battle the hell-fed powers of the sorcerer Thoth-Ammon.

Contents:

• The Xothic Legend Cycle: The Complete Mythos Fiction of Lin Carter - interior artwork by Dave Carson
• vii - Xothic Romance: Terrors Out of Time - essay by Robert M. Price
• 1 - The Red Offering - shortfiction
• 6 - The Dweller in the Tomb - (1971) - shortstory
• 17 - The Thing in the Pit - (1980) - shortstory
• 27 - Out of the Ages - (1975) - novelette
• 49 - The Horror in the Gallery - shortfiction
• 95 - The Winfield Heritance - (1981) - novelette
• 116 - Perchance to Dream - [Anton Zarnak] - (1988) - shortstory
• 127 - Strange Manuscript Found in the Vermont Woods - (1988) - shortstory
• 146 - Editor's Note (Dreams from R'lyeh: A Sonnet Cycle) - [Dreams from R'lyeh] - (1975) - shortfiction
• 149 - Arkham - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 2] - (1964) - poem
• 149 - Remembrances - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 1] - (1964) - poem
• 150 - The Festival - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 3] - (1964) - poem
• 150 - The Old Wood - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 4] - (1964) - poem
• 151 - The Locked Attic - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 5] - (1964) - poem
• 151 - The Shunned Church - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 6] - (1964) - poem
• 152 - The Last Ritual - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 7] - (1964) - poem
• 152 - The Library - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 8] - (1965) - poem
• 153 - Black Thirst - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 9] - (1971) - poem
• 153 - The Elder Age - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 10] - (1968) - poem
• 154 - Lost R'lyeh - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 11] - (1966) - poem
• 154 - Unknown Kadath - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 12] - (1966) - poem
• 155 - Abdul Alhazred - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 13] - (1966) - poem
• 155 - Hyperborea - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 14] - (1968) - poem
• 156 - The Book of Eibon - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 15] - (1968) - poem
• 156 - Tsathoggua - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 16] - (1965) - poem
• 157 - Black Zimbabwe - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 17] - (1975) - poem
• 157 - The Return - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 18] - (1966) - poem
• 158 - Black Lotus - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 20] - (1965) - poem
• 158 - The Sabbat - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 19] - (1961) - poem
• 159 - Carcosa - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 22] - (1961) - poem
• 159 - The Unspeakable - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 21] - (1965) - poem
• 160 - The Candidate - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 23] - (1965) - poem
• 160 - The Dream-Daemon - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 24] - (1961) - poem
• 161 - Dark Yuggoth - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 25] - (1961) - poem
• 161 - The Silver Key - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 26] - (1966) - poem
• 162 - Spawn of the Black Goat - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 28] - (1968) - poem
• 162 - The Peaks Beyond Throk - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 27] - (1968) - poem
• 163 - Beyond - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 29] - (1968) - poem
• 163 - The Accursed - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 30] - (1968) - poem
• 164 - The Million Favored Ones - [Dreams from R'lyeh - 31] - (1968) - poem
• 165 - Something in the Moonlight - (1980) - novelette
• 179 - The Fishers from Outside - (1988) - shortstory
• 194 - Behind the Mask - (1987) - shortstory
• 209 - The Strange Doom of Enos Harker - shortfiction with Robert M. Price
• 219 - The Soul of the Devil-Bought - [Anton Zarnak] - shortfiction by Robert M. Price
• 234 - The Bell in the Tower - (1989) - shortstory by H. P. Lovecraft and Lin Carter

Necromancer is such an ugly word, but it's a title Eric Carter is stuck with.

He sees ghosts, talks to the dead. He's turned it into a lucrative career putting troublesome spirits to rest, sometimes taking on even more dangerous things. For a fee, of course.

When he left L.A. fifteen years ago he thought he'd never go back. Too many bad memories. Too many people trying to kill him.

But now his sister's been brutally murdered and Carter wants to find out why.

Was it the gangster looking to settle a score? The ghost of a mage he killed the night he left town? Maybe it's the patron saint of violent death herself, Santa Muerte, who's taken an unusually keen interest in him.

Carter's going to find out who did it and he's going to make them pay.

As long as they don't kill him first.

Sister murdered, best friend dead, married to the patron saint of death, Santa Muerte. Necromancer Eric Carter's return to Los Angeles hasn't gone well, and it's about to get even worse.

His link to the Aztec death goddess is changing his powers, changing him, and he's not sure how far it will go. He's starting to question his own sanity, wonder if he's losing his mind. No mean feat for a guy who talks to the dead on a regular basis.

While searching for a way to break Santa Muerte's hold over him, Carter finds himself the target of a psychopath who can steal anyone's form, powers, and memories. Identity theft is one thing, but this guy does it by killing his victims and wearing their skins like a suit. He can be anyone. He can be anywhere.

Now Carter has to change the game -- go from hunted to hunter. All he has for help is a Skid Row bruja and a ghost who's either his dead friend Alex or the manifestation of Carter's own guilt-fueled psychotic break.

Everything is trying to kill him. Nothing is as it seems. If all his plans go perfectly, he might survive the week.

He's hoping that's a good thing.

Necromancer Eric Carter's problems keep getting bigger. Bad enough he's the unwilling husband to the patron saint of death, Santa Muerte, but now her ex, the Aztec King of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, has come back -- and it turns out that Carter and he are swapping places. As Mictlantecuhtli breaks loose of his prison of jade, Carter is slowly turning to stone.

To make matters worse, both gods are trying to get Carter to assassinate the other. But only one of them can be telling him the truth and he can't trust either one. Carter's solution? Kill them both.

If he wants to get out of this situation with his soul intact, he'll have to go to Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead, and take down a couple of death gods while facing down the worst trials the place has to offer him: his own sins.

Los Angeles is burning.

During one of the hottest summers the city has ever seen, someone is murdering mages with fires that burn when they shouldn't, that don't stop when they should. Necromancer Eric Carter is being framed for the killings and hunted by his own people.

To Carter, everything points to the god Quetzalcoatl coming after him, after he defied the mad wind god in the Aztec land of the dead. But too many things aren't adding up, and Carter knows there's more going on.

If he doesn't figure out what it is and put a stop to it fast, Quetzalcoatl won't just kill him, he'll burn the whole damn city down with him.

The Los Angeles Firestorm killed over a hundred thousand people, set in revenge against necromancer Eric Carter for defying the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Carter feels every drop of that blood on his hands. But now there's a new problem.

Too many ghosts in one spot and the barrier separating them from the living cracks. And when they cross it, they feed off all the life they can get hold of. People die. L.A. suddenly has a lot more ghosts.

But it's not just one or two ghosts breaking through: it's dozens. Another mage is pulling them through the cracks and turning them into deadly weapons. Eric follows a trail that takes him through the world of the Chinese Triads, old associates, old crimes. And a past that he thought he was done with.

Carter needs to find out how to get things under control, because if more ghosts break through, there's going to be even more blood on his hands.

The Necromancer is dead. Long live the Necromancer.

After being attacked by a demon in the one place he thought he was safe, Eric Carter has been killed, his soul sent to take its place as a stand-in for the Aztec god of death Mictlantecuhtli. But somebody on Earth isn't done with him, yet. Somebody with the power to bring him back from the dead. He doesn't know who, and worse he doesn't know why.

Between an angry death goddess, family secrets steeped in blood, a Djinn who's biding his time, and a killer mage who can create copy after copy of himself, Eric's new life looks to be just as violent as his last one. But if he doesn't get to the bottom of why he's back, it's going to be a hell of a lot shorter.

Family is murder.

When Eric Carter helps a friend with a deadly ritual that could determine the fate of the most powerful mage family in Los Angeles he steps into the middle of centuries-long feuds with people who make the Borgias look like the Brady Bunch.

Eric's just fine with the murder, soul eaters, and death magic. He's just having trouble adjusting to being brought back from the grave.

If he's not careful, somebody's going to put him right back

If there's one thing Eric Carter can count on, it's his past coming back to bite him in the ass.

Gabriela Cortez, La Bruja, has had her soul trapped... somewhere, and the only one who knows how to get it back is the Oracle of Las Vegas, a powerful artifact that Carter helped create almost thirty years before. It doesn't just predict the future--it makes things happen, influencing events to reach the goal it wants.

Only somebody's gone and stolen it, attempting to turn it into an artifact that doesn't just change the future, but also the past.

Eric needs to find it and steal it back before this comes to pass. If he doesn't, Gabriela's soul is lost. And quite possibly the future as well.

Eric Carter has a lot on his plate.

He's hunting the Oracle of Las Vegas, a literal talking head that manipulates the future to make its prophecies come true. But it has a new trick. It can change the past, too.

Now Jazz Age Los Angeles is invading the present. Long gone buildings suddenly restored, decommissioned Red Car trains appearing on paved over tracks, miles of the city changing back to orange groves.

Throw in a hundred-year-old doomsday cult, time magic, and a terrifyingly powerful spell to raise the dead and it makes for a busy week. Carter knows the Oracle is behind it all but he can't figure out how. Or why.

But he better figure it out soon or he, the city, and everyone he knows might be wiped from existence.

Contents:

• ix - Of Swordsmen and Sorcerers - essay by Lin Carter
• 1 - The Sadness of the Executioner - [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] - shortstory by Fritz Leiber
• 15 - Morreion - [Dying Earth] - novella by Jack Vance
• 69 - The Merman's Children - [The Merman's Children] - novella by Poul Anderson
• 129 - The Higher Heresies of Oolimar - [Amalrik the Mangod] - novella by Lin Carter

Contents:

• ix - Flashing Swords and Black Magicians - essay by Lin Carter
• 3 - The Rug and the Bull - [Pusadian] - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp
• 45 - The Jade Man's Eyes - [The Elric Saga] - novelette by Michael Moorcock
• 99 - Toads of Grimmerdale - [Witch World Secrets] - novella by Andre Norton (variant of The Toads of Grimmerdale)
• 157 - Ghoul's Garden - [Brak] - novelette by John Jakes

Contents:

• 11 - Warriors and Wizards: The Introduction - essay by Lin Carter
• 17 - L. Sprague de Camp - essay by Lin Carter
• 19 - Two Yards of Dragon - [Incorporated Knight] - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp
• 61 - Fritz Leiber - essay by Lin Carter
• 63 - The Frost Monstreme - [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] - novelette by Fritz Leiber
• 111 - Andre Norton - essay by Lin Carter
• 113 - Spider Silk - novelette by Andre Norton
• 175 - Lin Carter - essay by Lin Carter
• 177 - The Curious Custom of the Turjan Seraad - [Amalrik the Mangod] - novelette by Lin Carter
• 217 - Avram Davidson - essay by Lin Carter
• 219 - Caravan to Illiel - novella by Avram Davidson

Contents:

• Of Warriors and Wizards - essay by Lin Carter
• Jack Vance - (1976) - essay by Lin Carter
• The Bagful of Dreams - novelette by Jack Vance
• Poul Anderson - essay by Lin Carter
• The Tupilak - novelette by Poul Anderson
• John Jakes - essay by Lin Carter
• Storm in a Bottle - novella by John Jakes
• Katherine Kurtz - essay by Lin Carter
• Swords Against the Marluk - novelette by Katherine Kurtz
• Michael Moorcock - (1976) - essay by Lin Carter
• The Lands Beyond the World - novella by Michael Moorcock

Contents:

• vii - Where Magic Reigns - essay by Lin Carter
• 1 - Tower of Ice - [Dilvish] - novella by Roger Zelazny
• 56 - A Thief in Korianth - novelette by C. J. Cherryh
• 94 - Parting Gifts - novelette by Diane Duane
• 131 - A Dealing with Demons - [The Ebenezum Trilogy] - novelette by Craig Shaw Gardner
• 159 - The Dry Season - novelette by Tanith Lee

The novel concerns Lieutenant Commander Frank Jacklin who is blown up in a thorium bomb explosion while on the battleship Alaska. He awakens in the body of Winnie Tompkins who had perpetrated the explosion. As Tompkins, he learns of a plot by German agents to poison Franklin D. Roosevelt and he tries to warn the authorities. He continues to become involved in intrigue until another accident restores Tompkins to his body, leaving Jacklin in the body of a dog.

AN UNLIKELY BAND OF SUPERHEROES -

A woman who loved in vain, a magician who loved only wisdom, and a warrior to whom love was a genetic impossibility - fought the Doom that filled the skies of their strange world.

And it came to pass that Zolobion the Magician and Ganelon Silvermane set forth from the land of the great Stone Face and took the first steps of their gigantic journey across the world, a journey so long and fearful and so filled with wonders that no man since time began until that hour had undertaken a like adventure.

But their mission was a logical impossibility. Hence what purpose in undertaking it?

Only that the Moon was falling.

"I see Gondwane as it shall be in the untold ages of dim futurity, near the time when the Earth shall be man's habitation no more, and the great night shall enfold all, and naught but the cold stars shall reign. The first sign of the end ye shall see in the heavens, for Lo! the moon is falling, falling. And there shall come a man into the lands, a man not like other men, but sent from Galendil."

The name of the man is Ganelon Silverman and this is the first of the classic science fantasy adventure series by Lin Carter!

By The Master of Sword & Sorcery....

Gondwane.... In the last days of Earth, the continents drifted together again after aeons' separation, and that was Gondwane.

Gondwane.... When all the kingdoms of all the peoples of Earth had come and gone and new ones arose, it was on Gondwane they created their ephemeral glories.

On Gondwane, amid the turmoil of the last wars and the last quests and the last efforts of scientists and alchemists, there arose one final her, the mighty Ganelon Silvermane.

Ganelon Silvermane, the genetically designed superhero of the Earth's fabulous final age, has rapidly become the most popular of all Lin Carter's creations. Brought to life prematurely, Ganelon's adventures in a world of crumbling empires, ravaging hordes, and marvelous relics of forgotten scientific empires are always edge-of-the-seat wonder novels - the best creation of the author of the Thongor, Green Star, and Callisto books, to mention but a few!

Now, in this third novel of Gondwane, Ganelon Silvermane encounters a city of illusion, the problem of scientific immortals, and the disastrous collision of a massive horde of the world's ultimate barbarians!

Ganelon Silvermane, the genetically designed superhero of the Earth's fabulous final age, has rapidly become the most popular of all Lin Carter's creations. Brought to life prematurely, Ganelon's adventures in a world of crumbling empires, ravaging hordes, and marvelous relics of forgotten scientific empires are always edge-of-the-seat wonder novels - the best creation of the author of the Thongor, Green Star, and Callisto books, to mention but a few!

Now, in this fourth novel of Gondwane, the world's last continent, Ganelon Silvermane has offered himself as hostage to the worst band of barbarians to roam the plains. As a captive of the Horde, Ganelon rises to greater heights of heroism than ever before... and begins to assume the full power of his mighty being!

Ganelon Silvermane, the genetically designed superhero of the Earth's fabulous final age, has rapidly become the most popular of all Lin Carter's creations. Brought to life prematurely, Ganelon's adventures in a world of crumbling empires, ravaging hordes, and marvelous relics of forgotten scientific empires are always edge-of-the-seat wonder novels-the best creation of the author of the Thongor, Green Star, and Callisto books, to mention but a few!

Now, in this fifth and final novel of Gondwane, the world's last continent, Ganelon Silvermane leaves the savage barbarian Horde which he has civilized, and sets off on his greatest adventure... to rescue his friend Kurdi, who has been kidnapped by force or forces unknown!

On Earth, life held for him only the fate of a recluse--handicapped, confined to daydreams and the lore of ancient wonders, but apparently destined never to share them--until he found the formula that let him cross space to the world of the Green Star. There, appearing in the body of a fabled hero, he is to experience all that his heroic fantasies had yearned for. A princess to be saved... an invader to be thwarted... and otherworldly monsters to be faced! A thrilling adventure in the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as only Lin Carter can tell it!

To him, Earth was a prison of the mind and body. Only on the world of the Green Star would he walk -- in the borrowed body of a primitive youth. A thrilling adventure in the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as only Lin Carter can tell it!

Miscast in the role of assassin, inhabiting the stolen body of a stalwart savage, the star-wanderer from Earth found himself in dangers beyond even his wildest imaginings.

His friends had fled, his princess with them, and awaiting him were the islands of the sky with their merciless masters, the prowlers of the dark tree bottoms with their horrible steeds, and the treachery of his comrades in captivity.

But this was what he had left his safe home on Earth for -- and his adventures BY THE LIGHT OF THE GREEN STAR, however knife-edge, were the very staff of life to him!

Roy Krenkel illustrates this third marvel adventure of Lin Carter's bestselling saga.

In the marvel-adventure sagas of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, and John Norman has there ever been a situation such as befell the Earthling who found his way to the world under the Green Star?

For while his real body lay crippled and silent under the sun of old Earth, his mind occupied the vigorous body of a young primitive on that alien planet of mighty trees, floating cities, and unmapped limits. And in that guise he had found incredible friends, a royal love, and inhuman and superhuman enemies.

But no matter what predicament he was in -- and as this book starts he is alone, abandoned on an uncharted sea -- his courage never flagged though the greatest of risks would confront him AS THE GREEN STAR RISES.

He was Karn, the savage of the sky-high trees. He was protector and defender of the princess Niamh, whose very city was lost in the mapless jungles of the world under the Green Star.

But he was also an Earthling, whose helpless body lay in suspended animation in a guarded mansion in New England. It was his alien mind that drove Karn through perils that no other would dare.

But dare he must -- for though that alien planet was replete with dangers and treachery, with lost castles of forgotten science and armies of mindless monsters, there was a cause to be won and a love to be rescued.

It's Lin Carter in the grand climax of his best marvel-adventure series in the tradition of Burroughs and Merritt.

A Princess of Mars (1912) introduces officer John Carter, transported magically from Earth to Mars and plunged immediately into intrigues embroiling the Martian races. In The Gods of Mars (1918) and The Warlord of Mars (1919), Burroughs elaborates his colorful vision of Mars as a home to fantastic fauna, airborne pirates, and battling tribes of nomadic, four-armed green Martian giants and city-dwelling red Martians.

Already a seasoned swordsman, Carter becomes an even fiercer warrior, unfettered by the planet’s lesser gravity. Thrust into one deadly battle after another as he seeks to woo the beautiful Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, John Carter of Mars magnificently meets his destiny as science fiction’s first larger-than-life hero.

Several of the stories were completed, rewritten or otherwise heavily edited by Lin Carter. Some later collections of Howard's King Kull stories remove these edits again.

Table of Contents:

• Prolog - (1967) - short fiction by Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter
• Exile of Atlantis - (1967) - short story by Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter
• The Shadow Kingdom - (1929) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• The Altar and the Scorpion - short story by Robert E. Howard
• Black Abyss - (1967) - short story by Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter
• Delcardes' Cat - (1967) - short story by Robert E. Howard
• The Skull of Silence - (1967) - short story by Robert E. Howard
• Riders Beyond the Sunrise - (1967) - short story by Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter
• By This Ax I Rule! - (1967) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• The Striking of the Gong - short story by Robert E. Howard
• Swords of the Purple Kingdom - (1967) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• Wizard and Warrior - (1967) - short story by Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter
• The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune - (1929) - short story by Robert E. Howard
• The King and the Oak - (1939) - poem by Robert E. Howard
• Epilog - (1967) - short fiction by Robert E. Howard

Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings is a study of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien written by Lin Carter. It was 1st published in paper by Ballantine in 3/69 & went thru numerous additional printings. It was among the earliest full-length critical works devoted to Tolkien's fantasies, the 1st to set his writings in their proper context in the history of fantasy. It was the earliest of three studies by Carter devoted to fantasy/horror writers & the history of fantasy, being followed by Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos ('72) & Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy ('73), establishing him as an authority on the genre, indirectly leading to his editorial guidance of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Gollancz published a cloth edition updated by Adam Roberts in 8/03.

The study serves as an introduction for those unfamiliar with Tolkien's work. An introduction briefly reviews the publishing phenomenon of The Lord of the Rings & its popularity in the wake of the 1st paper editions in the '60s, after which he devotes three chapters to a short biography of the author thru the late '60s, including an account of how it was written. Four chapters explaining Middle-earth & summarizing the stories of The Hobbit & the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings follow, for the benefit of readers who may not have actually read the works.

Carter next turns to the question of what the works are, a point of some confusion at the time. The then-current vogue for realistic fiction provided critics with few tools for evaluating an out-&-out fantasy on its own terms. Attempts to deconstruct it as a satire or allegory were rife. Carter firmly debunks these efforts, supporting his argument by drawing on Tolkien's own published ruminations on fantasy's functions & purposes. He then contextualizes the works by sketching the history of written fantasy from its earliest appearance in the epic poetry of the ancient world thru the heroic poetry of the Dark & the prose romances of the Middle Ages, down to the fairy tales, ghost stories & gothic novels of the early modern era & the rediscovery of the genre by writers of the 19-20th centuries prior to & contemporary with Tolkien. The origins of the modern genre are discovered in the writings of Wm Morris, Lord Dunsany & E.R. Eddison & followed thru the works of authors they influenced, including H.P. Lovecraft, Fletcher Pratt, L. Sprague de Camp & Mervyn Peake.

Carter next highlights some of Tolkien's particular debts to his predecessors, tracing the motifs & names he utilizes back to their beginnings in Norse mythology & highlighting other echoes in his work deriving from legend & history. Finally noted is Tolkien's influence on contemporary fantasy, which was just beginning to make itself felt, primarily in the juvenile fantasies of Carol Kendall, Alan Garner & Lloyd Alexander.

Since his debut in Terry Carr's legendary Ace Specials of the 1980s, Carter Scholz has occupied an enviable, if demanding, position on the cutting edge of modern speculative literature (vulgarly called SF).

Proudly debuting in this volume, Gypsy is his first major work since his 2002 nuclear thriller Radiance. An interstellar adventure grounded in the hard science of accurate physics and biology, Gypsy soars far beyond the heliosphere of conventional science fiction. Jettisoning the easy warp-drives of fantasy and space opera, Scholz chronicles with chilling realism the epic voyage of a team of far-seeing scientists, who crowdsource a secret starship and abandon the doomed Earth for the Alpha Centauri system, our nearest stellar neighbor and last desperate chance. Heartbreak and hope collide in this moving and visionary tale.

Plus... An epistolary story about a story, "The Nine Billion Names of God," uses a classic SF text to deconstruct literary deconstruction itself, with hilarious results. In the wickedly droll "Bad Pennies," a spy tasked with trashing a foreign economy testifies before a complacent Congress. Quietly furious, "The United States of Impunity" is an alarming look under the tent of today's political sideshow. Adults only.

And Featuring: "Gear. Food. Rocks." -- our Outspoken Interview, in which a postmodern Renaissance man charts the synergies and dissonances of a career that embraces both literary and musical composition, reveals the hidden link between winemaking and deep space astronomy, and tells you how to steal his car.

Table of Contents:

• Gypsy - (2015)
• The Nine Billion Names of God - (1984)
• The United States of Impunity - essay by Carter Scholz
• Bad Pennies - (2009)
• Gear. Food. Rocks. - interview of Carter Scholz by Terry Bisson

The Devil's Heart -- a legendary object of unsurpassed power and mystery. Worlds that believe in magic consider it Darkness's mightiest talisman; worlds of science consider it a lost artifact of some ancient and forgotten race. Some say the Heart enables its possessor to control people's minds and to amass wealth enough for a dozen lifetimes, while others thing it capable of raising the dead, perhaps even changing the flow of time itself. But to all, the location of this fabled object has remained a mystery -- until now.

An isolated archaeological outpost has suddenly stopped responding to repeated requests for information. Sent to discover why, the U.S.S. Enterprise crew finds a devastated outpost and a dying scientist, whose last worlds fall on disbelieving ears: the Devil's Heart has been found.

Now, as the quest for the Heart unfolds, Captain Jean-Luc Picard discovers the awful truth behind all the legends and age-old secrets: Whoever holds the Devil's Heart possesses power beyond imagining...

The Hamlin Massacre -- every Starfleet officer knows the tale. The tiny Federation outpost of Hamlin was destroyed, its entire adult population ruthlessly slaughtered, before the first defense shield could be raised. Even worse, the colony's children disappeared without a trace, abducted by the aliens who attacked with a ferocity and speed that outmatched their Starfleet pursuers.

Now, fifty years later, the Choraii ships have appeared again. But this time the Federation is ready; this time the Choraii must pay for what they need. The precious metals can only be bought with the Hamlin children still living with their captors.

This time, the Choraii must face Captain Jean-Luc Picard -- and the crew of the starship Enterprise...

The planet Kirlos -- an artificial world built by a mysterious long-dead race called the Ariantu. Kirlos is now home to many races from both the Federation and the K'vin Hegemony, who have enjoyed years of peaceful co-existence and profitable trade. The planet also holds a wealth of undiscovered archaeological treasures, which the Enterprise and its crew are dispatched to help uncover.

Sent to the surface to assist an archaeological team, Geordi, Data, and Worf soon find themselves cut off from the Enterprise -- and the prime suspects in a series of terrorist attacks. The three Enterprise crewmen are imprisoned, relations between the K'vin and the Federation begin to crumble, and Kirlos' ancient underground machinery awakens from a centuries long dormancy, primed to release the most powerful destructive force ever known.

A merchant ship's frantic S.O.S sends the U.S.S. Enterprise speeding to the rescue! But the starship's mission of mercy soon becomes a desperate struggle for survival against a nightmarish enemy Captain Kirk can neither identify nor understand, an enemy he must defeat without the aid of one of his most trusted officers.

For the Leonard McCoy Kirk knew is gone. In his place stands a stranger -- a man with no memory of his Starfleet career, his family, his friends... or the one thing James T. Kirk needs most of all: his dreams.

Sir Kesrick of Dragonrouge enters the strange world of Terra Magica in search of the stolen pommel stone of the sword Dastagard and has many adventures.

Come with us out of this dull, workaday world to Terra Magica, tha land beyond World's Edge, where knights ride out on wonder quests, where beautiful princesses wait for rescue from sea serpents, where sky-high giants seek human morsels for their cookpots, and where a king may seek a champion to set aside his realm's enchantment.

Here again is Kesrick, knight of Dragonrouge, in combat against villainy. At his side stand a Scythian princess and a lost nobleman of Tartary. Here be wizards of good and wizards of evil; here be mighty giants and witches of utter meanness. Here be high fantasy from thne golden pen of the Grand Master himself, Lin Carter!

Come with us out of this dull, workaday world to Terra Magica, the land beyond World's Edge, where knights ride out on wonder quests, where beautiful princesses wait for rescue from sea serpents, where sky-high giants seek human morsels for their cookpots, and where a king may seek a champion to set aside his realm's enchantment.

Here again is Kesrick, knight of Dragonrouge, in combat against villainy. At his side stand a Scythian princess and a lost nobleman of Tartary. Here be wizards of good and wizards of evil; here be mighty giants and witches of utter meanness. Here be high fantasy from the golden pen of the Grand Master himself, Lin Carter!

WELCOME TO TERRA MAGICA...

Terra Magica, the fabulous land next door to our own Terra Cognita, is where trolls and monsters, warriors and wizards vie over virtuous maidens and the wealth of kingdoms...

Callipygia the Amazon and her stalwart knight Mandricardo had had more than enough. All they really wanted was to avoid the perils, both swordlike and sorcerous, of the many fabled lands of Terra Magica and win their way home.

But a realm of roving monsters and wild enchantments is not so easily traveled, and when Callipygia and Mandricardo find themselves trapped on a spell-run flying island from which no one has ever escaped, it signals the start of a madcap romp of magic and menace that will lead them to far-distant lands and new dangers...

Pew Mogel and a monstrous giant threaten the peace and security of Barsoom.

John Carter is treacherously captured then transported to Jupiter by the war-like Morgors. Only his wits and sword arm may see him through.

Carter's a homicide cop in Titanshade, an oil boomtown where 8-tracks are state of the art, disco rules the radio, and all the best sorcerers wear designer labels. It's also a metropolis teetering on the edge of disaster. As its oil reserves run dry, the city's future hangs on a possible investment from the reclusive amphibians known as Squibs.

But now negotiations have been derailed by the horrific murder of a Squib diplomat. The pressure's never been higher to make a quick arrest, even as Carter's investigation leads him into conflict with the city's elite. Undermined by corrupt coworkers and falsified evidence, and with a suspect list that includes power-hungry politicians, oil magnates, and mad scientists, Carter must find the killer before the investigation turns into a witch-hunt and those closest to him pay the ultimate price on the filthy streets of Titanshade.

The city of Titanshade pulses with nervous energy. The discovery of new riches beneath its snowfields has given residents hope for prosperity, but it also means the arrival of federal troops, along with assurances that they are only there to "stabilize the situation".

Newcomers flood the streets, dreaming of finding their fortunes, while in the backrooms and beer halls of the city, a populist resistance gains support, its leaders' true motives hidden behind nativist slogans. And in an alley, a gruesome discovery: the mutilated body of a young woman, a recent immigrant so little-regarded that not even her lovers bothered to learn her name. But in death, she's found a champion.

Detective Carter single-mindedly pursues the killer as he navigates political pressures and resists becoming a pawn in the struggles tipping the city toward anarchy. But when more innocent lives are lost and time runs short, he's forced to decide if justice is worth sparking all-out war in the streets during the biggest celebration of the year: Titan's Day.

Forbidden magic, murder... and disco. Carter's day keeps getting worse.

With the return of spring, new life floods into Titanshade. The sun climbs higher and stays longer, the economy is ascendant, and ever more newcomers arrive to be part of the city's rebirth. Even pop culture has taken notice, with a high-profile concert only days away. When a band member's murder threatens to delay the show, the diva star performer demands that the famous Detective Carter work the case. But Carter has secrets of his own, and his investigation unearths more victims and dark secrets, triggering a spiral of deceit, paranoia, and nightmarish magical transformations.

As conspiracies are exposed, Carter is sucked even deeper into the machinations of the rich, the powerful, and the venerated. Soon the very foundations of the city threaten to collapse and Carter's own freedom is on the line as he navigates between old enemies and fragile new alliances while racing to learn the true cause of this horrific series of deaths.

Once it had been king city of a mighty empire and the center of the ancient faith; Gateway to the Gods, the old epics name it. Now it was dead, empty, deserted, only a dim ghost of its vanished splendor. Such was Ilionis, the Lost City of Mars. A somber ruin, cold and lonely. But Ilionis was not forgotten. The old city held a valuable treasure... a treasure that brought Earthmen Ivo Tengren and scientist Krensny on a strange and difficult journey to the city's gates. And now an even stranger journey was about to begin....

A Terran adventurer on the ultimate Martian odyssey to discover the ultimate secret of Mars and the universe.or else be destroyed by the dark forces that rules the valley where time stood still!

Mars: the skull of a planet picked clean by the wind of time.

North. Beyond the desert of Meroe, past the ancient cliffs of the dust-locked continents, past the dry wharts of a city that was old when Earth was new, the caravan crept into the unmapped wastland called Umbra. It was into this shadowed land that the lost nation of the People had ridden - and vanished - in a tme beyond memory. And it was here that the outworlder Ryker followed the golden-eyes of Valarda and found the Child-of-Stars.

Originally published in 1977, Lin Carter's sword-and-planet fantasy of Mars is grand adventure in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Fleeing from justice across the ancient dust-oceans of Mars, Brant had no way of knowing that he was running toward the most fantastic adventure any man had ever lived!

Table of Contents:

• The Year in Fantasy - essay by Lin Carter
• The Jewel of Arwen - (1973) - shortstory by Marion Zimmer Bradley
• The Sword Dyrnwyn - (1973) - shortstory by Lloyd Alexander
• The Temple of Abomination - (1974) - shortstory by Robert E. Howard
• The Double Tower - (1973) - shortstory by Clark Ashton Smith and Lin Carter
• Trapped in the Shadowland - (1973) - shortstory by Fritz Leiber
• Black Hawk of Valkarth - (1974) - shortstory by Lin Carter
• Jewel Quest - (1974) - shortstory by Hannes Bok
• The Emperor's Fan - (1973) - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp
• Falcon's Mate - (1974) - shortstory by Pat McIntosh
• The City of Madness - (1974) - novelette by Charles R. Saunders
• The Seventeen Virgins - (1974) - novelette by Jack Vance
• The Year's Best Fantasy Books - essay by Lin Carter

Table of Contents:

• The Year in Fantasy - essay by Lin Carter
• The Demoness - (1976) - shortstory by Tanith Lee
• The Night of the Unicorn - (1975) - shortstory by Thomas Burnett Swann
• Cry Wolf - (1975) - novelette by Pat McIntosh
• Under the Thumbs of the Gods - (1975) - shortstory by Fritz Leiber
• The Guardian of the Vault - (1976) - shortstory by Paul Spencer
• The Lamp from Atlantis - (1975) - shortstory by L. Sprague de Camp
• Xiurhn - (1975) - shortstory by Gary Myers
• The City in the Jewel - (1975) - novelette by Lin Carter
• In 'Ygiroth - (1975) - shortstory by Walter C. DeBill, Jr.
• The Scroll of Morloc - (1975) - shortstory by Clark Ashton Smith and Lin Carter
• Payment in Kind - (1975) - shortstory by C. A. Cador
• Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard - (1975) - novelette by Avram Davidson
• The Year's Best Fantasy Books - essay by Lin Carter

Table of Contents:

• The Year in Fantasy - essay by Lin Carter
• Eudoric's Unicorn - shortstory by L. Sprague de Camp
• Shadow of a Demon - (1976) - novelette by Gardner F. Fox
• Ring of Black Stone - (1976) - shortstory by Pat McIntosh
• The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr - (1976) - shortstory by George R. R. Martin
• Two Suns Setting - (1976) - novelette by Karl Edward Wagner
• The Stairs in the Crypt - (1976) - shortstory by Clark Ashton Smith and Lin Carter
• The Goblin Blade - novelette by Raul Garcia Capella
• The Dark King - shortstory by C. J. Cherryh
• Black Moonlight - (1976) - novelette by Lin Carter
• The Snout in the Alcove - shortstory by Gary Myers
• The Pool of the Moon - (1976) - shortstory by Charles R. Saunders
• The Year's Best Fantasy Books - essay by Lin Carter

Table of Contents:

• The Year in Fantasy - essay by Lin Carter
• The Tale of Hauk - (1977) - novelette by Poul Anderson
• A Farmer on the Clyde - shortstory by Grail Undwin (pseudonym of Lin Carter)
• Prince Alcouz and the Magician - (1977) - shortstory by Clark Ashton Smith
• Nekht Semerkeht - (1977) - novelette by Robert E. Howard and Andrew J. Offutt
• The Pillars of Hell - (1977) - shortstory by Lin Carter
• Lok the Depressor - shortstory by Philip Coakley
• "Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?" - (1977) - shortstory by Avram Davidson
• The Cloak of Dreams - shortstory by Pat McIntosh
• The Land of Sorrow - (1977) - novelette by Phyllis Eisenstein
• Odds Against the Gods - (1977) - novelette by Tanith Lee
• The Changer of Names - (1977) - novelette by Ramsey Campbell
• The Year's Best Fantasy Books - essay by Lin Carter

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Year in Fantasy - essay by Lin Carter
• The Troll - (1935) - shortstory by T. H. White
• In the Balance - (1978) - shortstory by Tanith Lee
• The Gem in the Tower - (1978) - novelette by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
• Above Ker-Is - (1978) - shortstory by Evangeline Walton
• Ms. Lipshutz and the Goblin - (1978) - shortstory by Marvin Kaye
• Rhian and Garanhir - (1979) - shortstory by Grail Undwin (pseudonym of Lin Carter)
• Lord of the Dead - (1978) - novelette by Robert E. Howard
• Child of Air - shortstory by Pat McIntosh
• A Malady of Magicks - (1978) - shortstory by Craig Shaw Gardner
• St. George - (1978) - shortstory by David Mallory
• Astral Stray - (1979) - novelette by Adrian Cole
• Demon and Demoiselle - (1978) - novelette by Janet Fox
• Appendix: The Year's Best Fantasy Books - essay by Lin Carter

Table of Contents:

• The Year in Fantasy - essay by Lin Carter
• Garden of Blood - (1979) - shortstory by Roger Zelazny
• The Character Assassin - (1979) - shortstory by Paul Cook
• The Things That Are Gods - (1979) - novelette by John Brunner
• Zurvan's Saint - shortstory by Grail Undwin (pseudonym of Lin Carter)
• Perfidious Amber - (1979) - shortstory by Tanith Lee
• The Mer She - (1978) - novelette by Fritz Leiber
• Demon of the Snows - shortstory by Lin Carter
• The Pavilion Where All Times Meet - (1979) - novelette by Jayge Carr
• Cryptically Yours... - (1977) - shortstory by Brian Lumley
• Red as Blood - (1979) - shortstory by Tanith Lee
• Sandmagic - (1979) - novelette by Orson Scott Card
• Appendix: The Year's Best Fantasy Books - essay by Lin Carter

Thongor of Valkarth -- mightiest warrior of the ancient continent of Lemuria, before the dawn of history -- launches into his saga with this rousing adventure of swordplay and sorcery. The ancient dragon kings have deemed the hour right to regain their dominance over Earth -- and only Thongor and his companions, aided by the science and magic of the wizard Sharajsha, stand between mankind and the night of doom!

Xothun had ruled in Omm for a thousand years -- master of strange powers, yet slave to his craving for human blood. The lost city lived only to serve -- and feed -- Xothun.... Then came the barbarian adventurer, Thongor of Valkarth, with a city to free, a princess to rescue, glory to win -- and his mightly sword to pit against Xothun's wizardry!

A new ruler has arisen on the ancient continent of Lemuria. It is Thongor the Barbarian, whose dauntless courage and mighty sword have made him overlord of a thriving young empire. Against him conspire in secret those dedicated to the Black Gods of Chaos. Suddenly Thongor's wife, the Princess Sumia, is abducted. Thongor speeds to her rescue -- but his enemies are cunning as well as ruthless. Embroiled deeper and deeper in a danger compounded of both sorcery and science, Thongor learns that he must carry his battle to the Gods themselves!

The fourth adventure of Thongor of Lemuria

Thongor the Barbarian, Sark of Sarks, Lord of the Five Cities, had driven from his lands the accursed and demon-worshipping Druids who had long sought power over the Nine Cities of the West. But in the years that followed, the ominous shadow of Zaar fell darkening from the remotest edge of the world. On the Black Altars of Chaos the Nine Wizards of Zaar vowed a terrible vengeance against the warrior king of Patanga.

They swore with a dreadful oath that the Doom of Thongor should be so unspeakable that its memory would haunt the minds of men for untold ages to come. But more than Thongor's fate was at stake. The Wizards of Zaar planned the conquest of the whole of Lemuria, and only Thongor and his mighty Valkarthan broadsword stood in their way.

The stranger throws back his cloak -- Mardanax! The Black Magician of Zaar has survived Thongor's destruction of the dread City of Magicians. And Mardanax is as evil as his word. With unholy power, he strikes Thongor dead, drugs Thongor's beautiful queen into mindless obedience, kidnaps his son. Thongor's empire has fallen to the forces of Chaos. Then, wandering in the Land of the Dead, Thongor finds a powerful sword of light!

Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus is also known as Thongor and the Pirates of Tarakus.

The Gray Death

It struck the proudest ship of Patanga's fleet, and left its picked crew dead or howling in their madness. And swift on the heels of this horror came news that a renegade wizard and a pirate king were moving against Patanga, armed with mastery of the invincible Gray Death! Patanga's warrior-king, Thongor the mighty, set out on a desperate mission to counter the deadly sorcery that doomed his realm -- and vanished from the sight of men!

The Saturn Game:

Imaginative roleplaying provides relief for some of the crew on the long, dull trip to Saturn. However their imaginary world becomes hazardously confused with the real one when a team begins the exploration of one of Saturn's moons.

Iceborn:

Pluto was the last place anyone expected to find life. That's why it's the last place they looked.

The legends of a fabled land of the lost have floated for centuries around the bazaars of North Africa and the sand-surrounded oases of the vast Sahara. They tell of treasure caravans that have never returned, of weird monsters forgotten by time, of savage peoples surviving out of antiquity.

Eric Carstairs had heard these tales but until he met Professor Potter, he did not really believe them. But the fabled paleontologist had the location of the entrance to the Underground World pinned down, and he wanted a man of courage to fly him there.

Carstairs and Potter took the chance -- and pierced the pit to Zanthodon, a world within the world, where cavemen and cave-beasts roamed side by side with dinosaurs of millions of years ago.

If you have an appetite for weird and curious marvels - a thirst for swashbuckling derring-do; if you enjoy a story that pits a lone adventurer against uncanny dangers - a tale of a princess in peril, and a hero to battle ruthless foes to rescue her - then come, join Eric Carstairs as he explores that weird world beneath the Earth's crust, where lurk monsters and marvels strangely surviving from lost ages - Zanthodon.

Beneath the vast and trackless Sahara there lies a cavern so immense the whole nations could be swallowed up within it. There reside in the eternal subterranean glow the last of the Cro-magnons and their rivals the Neanderthals, lost remnants of ancient surface empires, and hordes of beasts and beings from all the ages of prehistory.

Under the trackless sands of the Sahara lies Zanthodon. The vast subterranean realm is the final homeland of the one-time masters of the world's surface - great dinosaurs, mighty jungles, and living bands of primitive peoples from Neanderthals to Ancient Minoans and even Barbary Pirates!

A hidden world lies beneath the shifting sands of the Sahara -- the subterranean land of Zanthodon. A vast and varied terrain in which time stands still. Where dinosaurs, pirates, heroes, armies and princesses in peril collide in prehistoric surroundings.

Join Eric Carstairs and his primitive allies in the final epic encounter which is the climax of Lin Carter's Zanthodon series, as armies and enemies combine for glorious adventure and hairbreadth escape as only the Grand Master of Fantasy can tell it!

His fiendish foes would do anything to learn the identity of the man called Prince Zarkon, who foils their most diabolical schemes. But Zarkon remains a mystery to even his devoted Omega Crew as they follow him to the ends of the Earth battling the forces of darkness.

Now Prince Zarkon and his Omega Crew must meet their ultimate challenge. Never before has Zarkon faced an enemy as monstrous as the creature who calls himself Lucifer whose army of satanic slaves, whose mastery of the black arts, and whose nearly infinite arsenal of infernal weapons make him the greatest threat that mankind has ever known!

Dead men. One after another. Rich. Famous. Powerful. And all defenseless against the invisible occult force that struck them down and left no trace of its devilish origins.

The police were powerless. The governments of the world were struck with fear. And only Prince Zarkon and his Omega Crew could hope to stem the bloody flood of terror about to engulf mankind.

But even the great Zarkon and his miracle men might have met their match, as the defenders of Good move into a shattering showdown with an eerie empire of pure Evil...

Little did Zarkon dream that on a tiny south sea paradise loomed an evil force that would challenge even his mighty powers and the courage and skills of the Omega men.

Then with shattering suddenness Zarkon and his team were thrown into the path of the hideous flaming figure that rose from the mouth of a living volcano to bring scorching death and boiling terror to mankind!

There was only one way for Zarkon to combat this satanic spectre from inner space. He had to descend into the monster's lair, and in that fiery inferno deep in the bowels of the Earth, Zarkon and his followers plunged into their most hair-raising adventure!

"I hold supreme power of life and death... Surrender, Zarkon -- or die!"

Knickerbocker City was paralyzed with fear. Two banks had been disintegrated by fiendishly targeted earthquakes. And the latest message from Lucifer, arch-villain and criminal mastermind, who had escaped from prison with his nefarious henchmen, was clearly a challenge to the city's last hope of rescue, Prince Zarkon and his Omega Men. But what good are their atomic submarines, scanner probes, and fantastical, foe-flattening firearms if they can't locate the malignant genius behind the plot? It is a dark hour for Knickerbocker and all mankind.

Prince Zarkon is back! This thrilling new case from the top-secret files of the crime-fighting organization known as Omega begins in London with a strangely simple and bewildering crime. It's just a warehouse robbery, but the perpetrators are no ordinary criminals. They are the diabolical Blue Men.

Sinister, invulnerable to conventional weaponry, and entirely blue, these evildoers can walk unharmed through clouds of deadly gases. Even gunfire doesn't stop them -- bullets bounce off their bodies as though they'd struck the steel side of a battleship. Bold and brazen, the chilling culprits carry out their crimes again and again, making headlines around the world. London is panicked... and Scotland Yard is stumped.

Straight from Knickerbocker City comes Prince Zarkon and the Omega Men to the rescue. The lord of the unknown and nemesis of all villains, Zarkon soon discovers the malignant mastermind behind the mysterious Blue Men. It is the aptly-named Vulture, a brilliant but deranged, unscrupulous, and embittered scientist who is determined to leave the bloody stain of his extraordinary genius upon the world. As the band of Blue Men multiplies, until it terrifyingly outnumbers the Omega Team, it looks as if our superhero has finally met his match.

Filled with electrifying suspense, this is a Zarkon adventure beyond compare... and one of the strangest pursuits in the annals of criminology.