Fiction, Fantasy

"Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, nobody knows what a wombat looks like and everyone knows what a dragon looks like."Not a novel, not a book of short stories, Adventures in Unhistory is a book of the fantastic-a compendium of magisterial examinations of Mermaids, Mandrakes, and Mammoths; Dragons, Werewolves, and Unicorns; the Phoenix and the Roc; about places such as Sicily, Siberia, and the Moon; about heroic, sinister, and legendary persons such as Sindbad, and Aleister Crowley, and Prester John; and-revealed at last-the Secret of Hyperborea.

Peregrine was the bastard son of the King of Sapodilla, the last pagan kingdom in the world to resist christianity. Accompanied by his page and the rather time-worn sorcerer, Appledore, the prince sallies forth into the Dark Ages to find his fortune. What he find sinstead is: dragons, whores, Huns, Roman Legions, emperors and a most fantastic collection of mysteries and adventures.

Professor Vlad Smith is on a terrifying quest, one that will take him from the halls of our most hallowed institutions to the most run-down of old houses in blighted neighborhoods. A mysterious committee, shredded yellowed newspapers, a daguerrotype of a Confederate soldier, a headless corpse and a corpseless head.... These are the clues which Smith must piece together to save his sanity and his daughter, and uncover the terrible secret of the Boss in the Wall. What a scary story, like a modern Dracula but completely original in its concept and chillingly realistic in its narration. Avram Davidson was one of the finest writers the fantasy field has had, endlessly inventive and uniquely vivid. Grania Davis has completed this work, which he left unfinished, in a way that does him proud. - Poul Anderson The Boss in the Wall is a last powerful and major work by a major and powerful author. - Gregory Benford It is hard to imagine the genre that could encompass him; it is even more difficult to imagine fantasy or science fiction without him. - The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Ace SF Special, 1969. Paperback original novel. Fantasy.

The book you hold in your hands is a ticket to the exotic shores of British Hidalgo, a tiny Central American land of jungles and coral reefs, wonderful people and strange customs, strong rum and sunny skies. Collected here for the first time, Avram Davidson's six Jack Limekiller stories create a rich and colorful world where the magical and inexplicable coexist with the outboard motor and the escalation of the American war in Vietnam. British Hidalgo is "a place that you can put your arms around," welcoming and friendly to the visitor, but uncanny beings dwell in the bush and roam along its coast. Afloat and ashore, Jack Limekiller, master of the working sailboat Saccharissa, encounters ghosts of the colonial past and monsters far older. The tropical paradise where Avram Davidson lived and wrote in the 1960s no longer exists in our world, but, as Lucius Shepard writes in his introduction, "That place and time resides here in this little book, complete with dialects, recipes, shanties, magic, duppies, pirates, drunkards, tapirs, manatees, pretty girls, a hero or two, and, of course, ghosts. Open its covers and a mist will boil forth, swirling, many-colored, to surround you -- a mist rife with a myriad distinct voices, bursts of idiosyncratic speech, fragments of all-but-forgotten lore, a strange druggy perfume compounded of the smells of shandygaff, jacaranda, brine, palm oil, gasoline fumes, creosote, orange groves..." Book jacket.

The Last Manuscript of a Master It began with an accident, as if Fate had a plan for Vergil Magus . . . After his trials in the Very Rich City of Averno but before his crowning achievement of a certain magic mirror, the great sorcerer and alchemist finds himself on a journey nothing short of epic. Sure he is slated for death in Rome, Vergil seeks safety in the far reaches of the Empire--and finds a world teeming with wonders and magical oddities. The "unhistoric" sea adventure is a deft mix of fantastic fact and fable, showcasing the author's keen attention to the often forgotten connections between them.