Customer Reviews (1)

Another tale of fancy by the master
Only 300 copies of this book were made, they are not numbered but were each signed by the author. It is a brown hardback, with gold gilt lettering and did not include a dustjacket. Yet another whimsical tale by James Blaylock. There is no one like him. ... Read more

Product Description
The first short story collection from Philip K. Dick Award-winning author James Blaylock features sixteen thought-provoking forays into the fantastic-from a tale of alien influence on an ordinary neighborhood to the story of one man's self-destructive obsession with a dragon.Amazon.com Review
James P. Blaylock has been publishing singular, literate, evocative stories since 1977, but Thirteen Phantasms and Other Stories appears to be his first (and a complete) collection. Its 16 stories have little concern for genre; Blaylock slides from the fantastic to subtle horror to slipstream, sometimes in the same story. His introduction, with its mentions of an antique shop of mysterious orientalia and of aquaria stocked with obscure oddities, perfectly prefigures the concerns of his stories. The past is sometimes the setting, and it often haunts or drives the characters. But this is no simple nostalgia; Blaylock knows the past, irrecoverable yet inescapable, can be a burden and a trap. Mysteries, too, compel or lure many characters, with their strangeness and shadows and dangers. And some characters pursue--or are controlled by--peculiar obsessions.

Thirteen Phantasms does not present the stories in chronological order, but reading them chronologically reveals Blaylock's evolution into a great writer. His first sale, 1977's atmospheric ship-of-fools/bus-of-bozos fantasy "The Red Planet," is creepy, but too mysterious and underdeveloped to please many readers. A decade later, Blaylock would win the World Fantasy Award with the deserving and powerful "Paper Dragons"; set in a world in which matter has become mutable, it is one of the most unusual dragon stories ever written. The most recent story, 1998's "The Old Curiosity Shop," is a tremendous work in which a man who abandoned his wife discovers she has literally dwindled away from grief, and the objects she left behind, curios sold to a strange shop, are so invested with the weight of memories that a man might be crushed beneath a single item.

Most of the stories take place in contemporary California, but three of the exceptions ("The Ape-Box Affair," "Two Views of a Cave Painting," and "The Idol's Eye") are set in an alternate-history England in which H.G. Wells's science fiction must be fact; and they belong to that rarest of subgenres, comic steampunk. These entertaining adventures feature Langdon St. Ives, a Victorian scientist-adventurer after the manner of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger, and the hero of Blaylock's novels Homunculus (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award) and Lord Kelvin's Machine. --Cynthia Ward ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Fine overview of style
Blaylock is a genius.I prefer his novels (The Last Coin, Lord Kelvin's Machine, and (of course!) The Digging Leviathon) to his short fiction, but that's just me.I'm sure convincing arguments could be made the other way because his short fiction is brilliant.The Curiosity Shop is strange and wonderful, and the same can be said for most of the stories in this collection.My favorite authors are Philip K. Dick and James P. Blaylock.They spend about equal time at the top of the list.

The Short Review's review of 13 Phantasms
Reviewed by M. Bobowski

13 Phantasms and Other Stories is rich in quiet humor and it invites us in, makes us comfortable. The edges are soft, like the lines between fantasy and reality, and each story is a world unto itself.

In Paper Dragons a Chinese restaurant becomes the communications center for a traveling crypto-zoologist, getting on the wrong bus in Red Planet turns into the journey of a lifetime for Monty, and the sea seen through John Kendal's keyhole in Nets of Silver and Gold is not necessarily the same sea seen through his window. The real magic here lies not in fantastic events or unreal places, but in the ability to create people from only ink and paper. It is a feat on par with creating a dragon from copper wire and cotton stuffing, and Blaylock's characters in these stories, at least the men, are very human. ...........

[...]

An Important Collection From a Master of Fantasy Fiction
This book collects almost all of Blaylock's short fiction and includes an introduction by the author which is just as entertaining as any of his stories.The pieces included here were originally published in various magazines and anthologies and most of them have never been reprinted.Blaylock is one of the quirkiest and most original writers around and if you've never read anything by him this book is a good introduction.The stories in this collection were published over a period of 25 years, and you can see the progression of Blaylock's talent.The earlier pieces pale in comparison to the later ones, but they all bear the unmistakeable mark of Blaylock's genius for fantasy, and his belief that all the little details in our everyday lives can sometimes add up to more than the sum of their parts.Highlights include the World Fantasy Award winning stories "Paper Dragons" and "Thirteen Phantasms". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The Wonders of Summer Solstice
Step right up, Ladies and Gents, Girls and Boys. Here is the head of Medusa Gorgon. (For your own safety, keep your eyes on the mirror.) On that stage are the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades dancing for your enjoyment. Over here is Merlin in his crystal grotto. Perhaps he will perform some magic. Splashing in this tank of water is a baby Loch Ness monster. And hunkering in this canal is a Martian Troglodite. Yes, Folks, there are a _thousand_ things to see. A thousand things! But beware of sinister ringmasters dressed in black. And that ride, on those tracks... Will it take you through the Tunnel of Love... Or into the bowels of the Haunted Castle? For you don't always get what you want. Sometimes you get what you deserve.

Carnivals (or circuses) and fantasy. It seems to be a natural, almost surefire blend. There are certainly a number of stories and novels in which it has been attempted. But most of them don't do it very well. Somehow, the execution doesn't match the promise. James P. Blaylock's _Land of Dreams_ (1987) is a carnival fantasy. And no, it doesn't deliver all that it promises. But it comes close. Very close. It is one of the best books of its kind that I have read.

The setting is a small northern California coastal town in the late nineteenth century. It is the twelve year Solstace, and all of a sudden strange wonders occur, including (but not limited to): a giant pair of spectacles, an enormous waterlogged shoe, a tiny man wearing the mask of a mouse, a crow with a walking stick, strange fish in the sea, an elderly ghost, and a dark carnival train that can travel over collapsed bridges.

The heroes are three orphan children, two boys and a girl, who investigate many of these goings-on. What they find is that a great many people in both the carnival and in the town know a lot about at least some of the wonders. "Maybe they're not _going_ anyplace," says one of the heroes, "but they're _up_ to something" (78). They are involved in a number of projects. Some are benevolent, but many are malicious-- even evil.

Blaylock has a vivid imagination and a sense of the poetic that allows him toss off passages like this:

Twelve years ago, the taxidermist's son had gone mad after eating Solstice fish, and for days had spoken in the voices of long-dead townspeople. In the moonlight it had seemed as if the boy _looked_ like the corpses of the people whose voices he mimicked, and the taxidermist, whose business never amounted to much in the first place, had put away his glass eyes and stuffing and set himself up as a spiritualist in one of the carnival tents. (38)

At other times, Blaylock displays a Bradburyesque love of Halloween:

At the same moment that a cloud shadow cast the alley into darkness, he saw the tilted shape of a black scarecrow silhouetted against the whitewashed wall of a lean-to shed, the wind blowing the straw-stuffed arms of the thing back and forth as if they were hinged. He could hear it rustling. He stopped and stood still, waiting, thinking that he heard the sound of wings flapping, of things flying in the night. Suddenly he felt surrounded by pressing shadows, by sprites and hobgoblins and by the sliding, sentient wind. The alley bent so sharply ahead that he coudn't see beyond ten or fifteen feet, but he felt something crouching there in the mud and cast-out furniture. He turned and ran, the wind at his back. (69-70)

And Blaylock does pretty well with his plot. He ties up a lot of loose ends that you'd swear he never noticed. But in order to carry out the plot, to juggle as many wonders as he does, Blaylock frequently has to rely on flashbacks. And they aren't altogether convincing. Somebody says that twelve years ago such-and-such happened. Then, out of the blue, somebody else says that no, something totally different happened. And then somebody else says that the second story is true-- but it's not the whole story. Too much of the story has already happened. And too much of the story is related rather than dramatized.

On the balance, though, an excellent novel. A Blaylock novel with a few flaws is better than a lot of other novels by writers doing their best.

A MAGIC THAT STAYS
While Land of Dreams works admirably as a supernatural thriller (the Solstice heralds a series of weird events, including the return of a sinister carnival, with diabolical results for the people of a northern California coastal town) and as an adventure yarn (three orphans face great perils as they unravel the mystery of the Solstice, the carnival, and the fabled Land of Dreams), the novel ultimately--through Blaylock's visionary prose--transcends both of these genres.

This book shares a virtue with the greatest works of Fantasy: the ability to open our eyes to the magic at work within our everyday lives. Doughnuts, old shoes, rainswept afternoons, fiddler crabs ... in Land of Dreams such commonplace things are transformed into vehicles of wonder, into nothing less than keys that just might open doors to the Other Side (for readers uninterested in the Other Side, or those who haven't the faintest idea of what I mean by the Other Side, a warning: stay clear of rabbit holes and the books of James P. Blaylock).

And while conventional supernatural and adventure novels are content to take the reader from point A to point B (in which conflict unfolds), and then to point C (where said conflict is resolved and mystery explained), Land of Dreams celebrates the wonder of the journey itself rather than in the rushing toward denouement. His inimitable prose style and (what some might perceive as) eccentric sensibility create an atmosphere of enchantment totally unique to Blaylock.

Few contemporary Fantasy novels merit more than one reading--like a magician's trick revealed, a punchline delivered, there is little to draw the reader back for a return visit--but Land of Dreams possesses something quite rare: a magic that stays (to which I can attest, having read this novel several times over the years), Blaylock's artistry undiminished over successive reads (it's really that good).

A pretty good, it seems to me, book
The feel of Land of Dreams is very similar to the very earliest Blaylock novels, Elfin Ship and Disappearing Dwarf.That means great ideas, great (oddball) characters and, of course, Blaylock's incomparable sense of the fantastic and the absurd --but it also means some seriously clunky writing at times.(JPB might say, "The writing, it seemed to the reviewer, was, apparantly, somewhat awkward"). It's an enjoyable book, but I can't work up the same unbridled enthusiasm that I have for later Blaylock novels -- Paper Grail, Last Coin, All the Bells on Earth , Night Relics -- wherein his prose skills are sharp enough to deliver on the promise of his wild imagination.

Go to any lengths to find this glorious dream of a book!
Read any novel by James Blaylock and I predict that you will end up musing about his unique characters, worlds, and images off and on in a dreamlike way for a very long time after finishing the last pages. I may be slightly biased in favor of Land of Dreams particularly among his books, since it was the first I read.I picking it up largely by a chance selection from a pile of new science-fiction/fantasy paperbacks at a large chain bookstore, never having heard of him before. As I learned that night turning page after page after page,Blaylock's writing is not science fiction. For that matter, most of his novels have a flavor hardly hinted at by the word "fantasy". Land of Dreams is, like many of Blaylock's California novels, set in a coastal community where the boundary between mundane life and the brilliance of new mysteries keeps fraying. Appealing characters, scintillating language, hilarious dialogue and observation, and a sense of the weird and wonderful are what I have come to expect when I am lucky enough to read or re-read something by James Blaylock. Whiffs of Robert Louis Stevenson, P.G. Wodehouse, J.R.R. Tolkien, Baron Munchausen, and Lord knows how many other great story-tellers and writers can be sniffed in the cheery and fragrant clouds from Blaylock's story pipe, but his creations are his alone. I believe he will be remembered as a great fantasist and stylist. He is among the few great fabulists now writing who truly delights in laughter and puzzlement. .I hope others read him, and recommend him to others as strongly as I do.I hope to write more about his other works in the future....but for now...try to find Land of Dreams ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Some of the best from one of the best
Powers is best known for his "secret history" novels and, unlike most sf authors who started in the `70s, he actually hasn't written all that many short stories -- maybe a dozen, total. He says he takes him as long to outline a short story as it does a novel. But the seven he's published are (naturally) far above average. This small limited-edition volume includes all of them, two in collaboration with his close friend, James Blaylock (who also contributes an Introduction). Not all of them really work for me, but I like "Night Moves," "The Better Boy," and "Where They Are Hid" very much indeed. (The first two were finalists for the World Fantasy Award.) And there's a very welcome Bibliography at the end of the book, listing all of Powers's publications, in all languages.

A significant collection
Tim Powers is most well-known for his fantastic novels ranging from subjects as diverse as Blackbeard the pirate to ghosts haunting Los Angeles.Here, the marvelous and indispensable Subterranean Press collects all six of Powers' short works of fiction.

All of the pieces in this collection are exceptional.Powers is an accomplished fantasist.Two of the stories are collaborations with fellow purveyor of weird fiction, James Blaylock.....

My favorite stories in this collection are 'Where They Are Hid' and 'The Way Down the Hill'.'The Way Down the Hill' is a fascinating look at an enclave of immortal beings.This is a story we've seen before in science fiction.It concerns the ethics of being an immortal being and their relationship with humanity.What really interests me in the story is Powers' unique take on the manner of the enclave's immortality.I won't say more for fear of giving the story away.

'Where They are Hid' is a fabulous story.Powers tells us that Philip K. Dick enjoyed reading it before he passed away, which is particularly noteworthy since the story deals with all the normal Dickian tropes; reality, identity and hallucinations.I'm afraid the story is too complex to give a concise description of it here.Suffice it say that it blew my mind.

I recommend this slim collection to all Powers' fans.It's worth buying for the excellent stories and the extras.The introduction by James Blaylock relates a hilarious story about an encounter between Powers and 50 or 60 dwarfs.The collection also contains informative notes on each story (including a humorous Phil Dick anecdote) and a definitive Powers bibliography.Highly recommended.

The other side of Tim Powers
Fantastist Tim Powers writes very few short stories. He has published over 10 novels, yet only a half-dozen short stories, all now collected in this handsome edition by Subterranean Press. Anyone familiar with Powers knows his penchant for densely plotted, magical stories with a unique bent on history. He has written about poker and the Fisher King, vampires stalking Keats and Shelley, pirates and voodoo, and much more. In Night Moves and Others, Powers gives us a different side of his writing style, yet equally intense as his longer works. The title story is an excellent ghost tale, about a man who dreamed of an imaginary friend called Evelyn, and his parents who fled this ghost from town to town. Two stories are collaborations with another great writer, James Blaylock. Both are urban fantasies; one, a ghost story concerning a man and his dead wife is solemn. The other, entitled "The Better Boy" after a tomato variety, is amusing in the protagonist's desperate battle to save a tomato from garden worms. "The Way down the Hill" is the oldest story in this collection, but perhaps one of the best, about a clan of soul parasite who jump from body to body across many lifetimes. "Where they are Hid" is a marvelous tale, one that can be read several times, each time shedding new light on the events in the story. Although slim in size, this collection is must for any fan of Powers. It includes an introduction by Blaylock, as well as story notes by the author. ... Read more

Product Description
Those two madmen, Powers and Blaylock are back, with a recently unearthed and touched up short story thought lost to the ages. "Pilot Light" is vintage William Ashbless, complex to the point of incoherence, with a good eighteen footnotes added by the poet refuting and clarifying the changes made by Powers and Blaylock to his sacred words. Also included in this small form hardcover chapbook are an introduction by Powers and an afterword by Blaylock. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Ashbless: Poet for the 21st Century
In spite of sabotage by the postmodern pranksters Blaylock and Powers, this memoir shows the true greatness of William Ashbless.

Notes from napkins...
This is not a novel, or a short story - it's a pamphlet.It's a very short satirical piece that is made up of a jumble of interviews, short story outtakes, and excessive annotations, all involving the fictional author William Ashbless.If you are looking for Tim Powers' usual excellent fiction - this is not it.For those who are closely following the history and adventures of William Ashbless, and are intensely interested in this main hero of Anubis Gate, I wouldn't recommend this pamphlet even for you.I am somewhat offended by Powers and Blaylock sticking it to their fans - this work, as a hard cover book is not worth it.If it had been included in a larger anthology of Ashbless' works, letters, and IOUs, then maybe I can see the value in that.

Kind of a letdown
I was hoping for a lost treasure, instead it seems to be a bunch of in jokes from Powers and Blaylock. ... Read more

Product Description
A California museum curator goes to Mendocino to pick up a nineteenth-century woodcut sketch for his collection and runs into strange characters who seem to think the folded scrap of paper holds magnificent powers. Reprint. AB. PW. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

junk
The first edition was released through the Science Fiction Book Club. It is a boring, tearse, dreary read. Imagine if Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft were working together with (assistance from P.K. Dick for scenery) to produce a novel to put people to sleep. Every once in a while, something mildly interesting might show up to be a plot point, but then the book completely ignores it until much later. I gave up on the book, and didn't bother to finish it, something I almost never do. Save your time and money.

Weird Flavor
A book a bit too long. Rather difficult to characterize. Not bad but not very good. A story I was eager to discover and found dragging on. The main interest of this book lies in the uncanny atmosphere JB creates to make you believe the world is not what you know it is.

One of my favorite books
I love James Blaylock and his quirky, fun, bizarre, mysterious and hilarious novels and this one has to be my favorite.In point of fact, I gave this to my wife to read and it instantly became her favorite book as well. Now how often do married people ever agree? That's how good this book is.

Blaylock weaves an enthralling and soothing world that you love to enter and populates it with not-your-normal people; off-kilter and unlikely, yet intensely lovable heroes and comic-opera, bumbling yet really aggravating villains. Nothing quite like him anywhere, although Tim Powers (who is a friend and collaborator in novels sometimes) has a similar voice.

So go get youself this book, give yourself a night off, and have yourself a heck of good time. You'll never regret reading this one!

The Universe in Small Things
This was the first Blaylock novel I ever read, and it hooked me hard.Probably best labeled as Contemporary Fantasy, many of his books paint a world of eccentric heroes and off-beat villains, locked into bizarrely-magical combat in suburban America.'The Paper Grail' puts an entirely new twist on the grail legend.Howard Barton, genial and somewhat bumbling curator, drives to Mendocino, California to acquire a 19th-century woodcut drawing for his museum's collection.In the process, he hopes to mend fences with his childhood sweetheart, Sylvia, and recapture the spark of romance that's been missing from his life ever since.Laying his hands on the drawing turns out to be a lot more difficult than he expects, and reconnecting with Sylvia isn't much easier.Along the way, he stumbles into the middle of a quiet but desperately earnest battle over the Holy Grail.To the keeper of the Grail goes incalculable power, and all the wrong people want it for all the wrong reasons.

Jeff Edwards, Author of "Torpedo: A Surface Warfare Thriller"

A Wonderfully Offbeat Grail Quest
The quiet curator of a small museum in California has no idea what he's getting into when he begins a trip to claim a rare Japanese sketch for his museum. He finds himself in the middle of a life-and-death struggle for the Paper Grail, an origami cup with mystical powers over land and water. Blaylock slips adeptly from the everyday to the sublime, pitting unlikely heroes -- failed small businessmen and eccentrics -- against some pretty likely villains of our time: greedy real estate tycoons and cynics who would use the Grail's powers for their own aggrandizement rather than the good of the land. You're more likely to enjoy this beautifully written, highly literate book if you have read a good deal of Arthurian literature and if you're familiar with the Pre-Raphaelite artists of the late Victorian period. Fans of Tim Powers' _Last Call_ should definitely read _Paper Grail_: to judge by the dedications, the two authors were probably trading ideas the whole time they were writing. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Tim Powers and Jim Blaylock at their most playful.
This excellent little book is purported to be a collection of the work of a purely fictional writer named William Ashbless.
The authors originally created him when they were literature students at Fullerton State University near L.A. Over the years he has either appeared in or been referred to in most of their books and Tim Powers considers him a "good luck charm". ... Read more

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