I encountered The Watchers for the first time during my last trip to Barnes & Noble. There I was with an arm full of paperbacks, making my way to the register, when I spotted it on a display in the middle of an aisle.

The cover looked intriguing, in a spooky, gas-lit London sort of way. But was it fantasy? I don’t want to get stuck with another Da Vinci Code clone.

The Booklist quote on the cover called it “A seductive cosmic thriller.” What the heck did that mean? Cosmic, like Elder Gods cosmic? Thanos versus The Avengers cosmic? Or 700-pages-that-feel-like-they’ll-never end cosmic?

The back cover text wasn’t much help:

Every hour, childlike Marc Rochat circles the Lausanne cathedral as the watchmen have done for centuries. Then one day a beautiful woman draws him out of the shadows — the angel his mother once promised him would come.

But Katherine Taylor is no angel. She’s one of the toughest and most resourceful call girls in Lausanne. Until something unnatural seething beneath a new client’s request sends her fleeing to the sanctuary of an unlikely protector.

Into their refuge comes Jay Harper. The private detective has awakened in Lausanne with no memory of how he got there — and only one thing driving him forward: a series of unsettling murders he feels compelled to solve.

That doesn’t even tell me what era it is. Present day? 1880s? Were there private eyes in 1880s London? Look, is this a fantasy or not? All these books I’m holding are getting heavy.

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I got my first taste of Greek mythology from D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths. Later, when I was old enough for Bulfinch’s Mythology, I thought I had graduated to the real thing. Homer came to me by way of a dusty turn-of-the-century book with a title along the lines of The Boy’s Own Homer, with glorious color illustrations. D’Aulaire gave me the Norse myths, too, though I didn’t get The Ring of the Niebelungen until a friend gave me a mixtape that included Anna Russell’s brilliant twenty-minute Ring cycle sketch.

When my parents realized I knew nothing whatever about the Bible — I was ten — they rectified my cultural illiteracy with Pearl Buck’s two-volume The Story Bible. Of all those beginner versions of classics, only Buck’s biblical books kept all the sex and violence in. Imagine my shock when my mother handed me Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Mandelbaum’s complete and very faithful translation. I was twelve. What was she thinking? If the Metamorphoses were a blog, every post would have cut text with PTSD trigger warnings.

Mark Rigney’s post on how old a kid should be before reading or watching The Hunger Games touched on a problem I face often as a teacher of teenagers, some as young as 13. Since I’m a freelance teacher, making house calls, my students’ parents are sometimes directly involved in the question of how old is old enough for which book. Other times, especially when the parents don’t speak much English, I actually wish I could involve them more directly than the language barrier allows.

I’ll face the age question all over again, differently, when my own kids can read on their own. Inevitably, I come at the predicament through my own history as a reader — which stories I was denied too long or permitted too early. As a maker of stories, I’m fascinated also with seeing what of a story can survive the translation into the consciousness of the young, either through the efforts of adult writers who reinterpret the stories, or through the efforts of kids themselves when they try to make sense of them.

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Twenty Palaces
By Harry Connolly
Self-Sabotage Press (E-book, $2.99, November 2011, available on Kindle and Nook)

This seems as good a time and place as any to say a word about the tragic fate of the Twenty Palaces series. The books gathered critical accolades, high Amazon.com rankings, and a blurb from the prince of urban fantasy, Jim Butcher himself. However, after the third novel in the series, Circle of Enemies, the series was cancelled by Del Rey due to underperforming sales. Harry Connolly had a fourth novel — a prequel exploring Ray Lily’s introduction to the bloody world of the Twenty Palaces society — already written. Rather than allowing it to be consigned to the bottom drawer of his dresser, the deepest recesses of his hard drive, or the bottom of the Hudson River, Connolly did the world a favor and produced it as a self-published e-book.

I’ll be writing reviews of the second and third volumes in the series (watch this space!) but for this week, I wanted to look at that prequel, Twenty Palaces, for three reasons. First, sales of this book will put more money in the author’s pocket than sales of remaining copies of the other books, and I’m a big enough Connolly fan to think his labors deserve it. Second, if you’d like to give the books a shot, but are too profoundly avaricious to lay down $7.99 for Child of Fire, you’ll be delighted to learn that Twenty Palaces is available on Kindle and Nook for the fantastically low price of $2.99, payable in one easy installment. Third, it’s a good book.

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Fantasy readers expect the world of a fantasy novel to be different from our mundane reality.

There’s magic afoot – of course the world operates differently. The author paints the fantastical milieu and we enter it primed to believe, donning those 4-D glasses that let us accept strangeness. It’s a more-than-willing suspension of disbelief.

We don’t ask for justifications, as long as the fantastic elements of the world are internally consistent. It’s in the tradition.

But with fantasy as re-imagined history or a re-imagined place, we enter a slightly different relationship with the story. Now we’re in a realm that is accessed, not through a portal or straight immersion in a new world, but through a delicate balance of writer allusions and reader indulgence. Readers know they’re being seriously mucked with. And the author must go the extra mile to pull it off.

There’s something logically different about creating an imagined world — like Middle Earth — versus fiddling with the actual world and its history. After all, it already happened the way it did. So the reader must swim against the mental tide of a different narrative, that of history.

Depending on your preferences for justification, you may want an explanation of how it all came to be, or you may wish the author would just get on with it.

One way to coax the reader into abandoning “real” history is with parallel worlds. Michael Moorcock uses this framing device in Gloriana, the Unfulfill’d Queen, set in a twisted Elizabethan-style court and a very changed history.

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Robert Silverberg’s last post at Black Gate was “Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?” (which, as I recall, generated a lot of debate, including an intriguing counter-argument by Jerry Pournelle.)

His post seemed like a good excuse to finally get around to reading Lord Valentine’s Castle, the first novel in his Majipoor Cycle. It’s one of the few major fantasy series I haven’t tried, and I’ve long been intrigued by its science fantasy setting. Majipoor is a vast world, much larger than Earth (but much less dense, hence with a comparable gravity), settled by a host of bizarre alien races who co-exist more-or-less peacefully with the shape-changing natives, the Piurivar. It’s is a low-tech planet where agriculture is the main occupation, but numerous artifacts of a space-faring culture dot the landscape, some of them quite mysterious — the perfect stage for some grand adventures.

Lord Valentine’s Castle was highly acclaimed when it first appeared in 1980, garnering a Hugo nomination and winning the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Five more novels followed, including Valentine Pontifex (1983) and Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997), and one collection, Majipoor Chronicles (1982).

In the two decades since that last collection, Silverberg has published some major short work set in Majipoor, including:

• “The Seventh Shrine,” a murder mystery from Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy
• “The Book of Changes,” a novella of Majipoor’s early history from Legends II
• “The End of the Line,” a novelette featuring Lord Stiamot from Asimov’s Science Fiction (read an excerpt here)
• “The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn,” from online magazine Subterranean (read the complete story here)
• “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a novelette from Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy
• “Dark Times At The Midnight Market,” from Swords & Dark Magic
• “The Way They Move the Spells at Sippulgur.”

All seven of these tales are collected in Tales of Majipoor, the new collection from Roc that goes on sale this month. I found Lord Valentine’s Castle buried under review notes, still unopened, only a few weeks after I took it down to read it. But that’s okay, because Tales of Majipoor looks like an even better way to take my first steps unto this vast planet.

Tales of Majipoor was published on May 7 by Roc. It is 320 pages in trade paperback, priced at $16 ($9.99 for the digital edition).

There’s a sub-genre known as “quiet horror,” an alternative to the explicit gore or overtly supernatural fare that’s been prevalent in horror since the eighties. Charles Grant’s much-praised Shadows series is one of the best examples you’ll find of this type of writing. There aren’t a lot of writers today who try this type of story and even fewer who succeed. Karen Heard is one of those rarely talented authors who can unsettle a reader without ever explicitly stating what has happened. It’s Dark Inside is her first collection and these six stories are hopefully only the beginning of many more to come.

The collection begins with “The Lighthouse,” a tale of isolation in the wake of some manner of unspecified disaster. “Snap” is set in what may be a not-too-distant future, wherein a photo-journalist is on a quest to find and photograph the last living elephant. “The Picture” is a different type of ghost story, where we learn about the things that can scare a man who is already dead. “Out of Order” surprises the reader by starting as one type of standard horror story before shifting into something very different as the reader is left unsure of not only what the “monster” is, but where exactly it is hiding. “The Promise” was a bit frustrating, as it depends on the protagonist not figuring out what is fairly obvious to the reader, but makes up for it with a wonderful twist ending. The collection wraps up with “Inside,” a story that leaves the reader unsure if the protagonist is beset by a supernatural menace or merely losing her mind, still managing to surprise with an unexpected (yet in retrospect completely logical) solution.

It’s Dark Inside is available in paperback for the low price of $6.50. For those of you on a budget, there’s the even lower-priced e-book edition for only 99 cents. For those of you on an even tighter budget (come on, already), you can preview one of the stories, “The Lighthouse,” on Ms. Heard’s blog, Misheard Fiction. Check it out and then decide if one of the best quiet horror story collections you’ll read this year is worth the cost of half a cup of coffee.

On April 27, I wrote a Vintage Treasures article about Robert E. Howard’s The People of the Black Circle, one of the first fantasy books I ever owned.

The Comments section quickly became a discussion of REH collecting, with readers swapping photos of their favorite Howard books. Joe H. shared a LibrayThing catalog of his Howard collection, noting the hardest title to find had been Cthluhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors. “It took me years to track down a copy,” he said.

Well, that’s exactly the kind of thing that perks up a collector’s ears. Intrigued,  I went on a quest to find my own copy of Cthluhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors, a collection of Robert E. Howard’s Cthulhu stories.

I finally succeeded this week, after a two-week search. I settled in with my new copy today. First thing I noticed is that the cover, by Stephen Hickman, depicts a treasured artifact from my own collection: the Hickman-designed Cthulhu statute by Bowen Designs — a prized collectible these days. Now that it’s worth something, maybe my wife will let me bring it up out of the basement.

The other thing I noticed is that this is a sizable collection: 250 pages. While I knew Howard had made some minor contributions to Lovecraft’s famous milieu before his death, I had no idea he’d written so many stories that could be categorized as part of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Perhaps editor David Drake has been fairly liberal with his selections. I note that “Pigeons from Hell” is included, and that’s only peripherally a Cthulhu story — but it’s a damn good tale, so I’m not complaining.

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My copy of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World has an about-the-author section that describes the 1962 book as “a brilliant first novel that won him instant acclaim and had a dramatic effect on the state of science fiction.” Even allowing for the typically excessive claims of PR text, this is inaccurate: Ballard’s first novel was actually The Wind From Nowhere, published in 1961 and written in two weeks. Still, Ballard’s consistently downplayed and even disowned the earlier book, so let’s take him at his word. How does The Drowning World look fifty years on?

It has to be said that it’s one of those science fiction books that would seem at first glance to be strikingly relevant, if not prophetic — dealing with an idea become disturbingly significant in the years since the story’s first publication. In this case, the book’s set in a future sometime in a mid-21st-century suffering from extreme global warming due to a series of solar storms. The sea levels have risen; the world has drowned. The lead character has no memory of any civilisation we recognise, living with a few million other human beings in the polar latitudes. Reading this book on the heels of news that atmospheric carbon dioxide has passed the 400 parts per million threshold, it’s impossible not to feel a sharpening of one’s interest.

But, like much of the best science fiction, the core of the book is not the science but the fiction. Ballard uses his setting — a flooded tropical London claimed by iguanas and marmosets, totally lacking human life but for a visiting scientific and military expedition and one woman who grew up in the drowned city — to explore strange psychological effects of this particular future. It’s a kind of exploration of depth psychology, of dreams and a collective unconscious. Individual ontogeny is affected by global phylogeny; human identity is affected by a return of the climate and fauna of the Mesozoic era. The book becomes more fascinating as it goes on, increasingly moving away from the science of climate change and using the drowning of the world as a mirror for the submerging of rationality. It is, ultimately, truly concerned with apocalypse: not merely the erasure of the old world, but the making of the world into something new.

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I first met Michael Penkas in 2010 at the Top Shelf Open Mic in Palatine, Illinois, a friendly local reading event hosted by C.S.E. Cooney.

The Top Shelf Open Mic has attracted some extraordinary talent over the years. Gene Wolfe read chapters of his upcoming novel The Land Across, Joe Bonnadonna shared early drafts of Waters of Darkness, David C. Smith read from his supernatural thriller Call of Shadows, and of course C.S.E. Cooney regularly entertained us with boundless energy, reading from The Big Ba-Ha, Jack o’ the Hills, and other acclaimed publications.

But I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Michael Penkas has become the unexpected true star of our local reading group. His creepy and electrifying short stories have mesmerized us month after month.

Michael has an uncanny ability to pry open your heart with sparkling prose, humor, and warm and genuine characters… and then drive a cold spike through it with relentless and diabolical twists. All with some of the most compact and economical prose I have ever encountered.

Michael has published over a dozen stories since 2007. While he’s best known for his extremely effective horror and dark fantasy, he’s equally at home with mystery, science fiction, and gonzo humor — as his upcoming story for Black Gate illustrates. ”The Worst Was Yet to Come,” a chilling retelling of Moses’s unexpected conversation with God immediately after the Ten Plagues of Egypt, will appear here this Sunday. It’s sure to win him many more fans, or possibly get him strung up — or both.

Michael has just released his first — and long awaited — collection, assembling four of his earliest published stories. It’s a delightful sampling of some of the best work of a fast-rising dark fantasy and horror author.

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Oh, Internet. Will you ever cease to come up with new ways for me to waste time?

So the latest thing I’ve been doing is hitting the Lucky Dip button in the Picture Gallery section of the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It generates a random book cover from their massive archives:

• Try it!

So far, I’ve seen a few hundred vintage hardcovers and paperbacks, from a 1951 Lord Dunsany hardcover I never knew existed (The Last Revolution) to Samuel R. Delaney’s 1977 collection of critical essays on science fiction (The Jewel-Hinged Jaw); from John Brunner’s 1968 Lancer paperback Into the Slave Nebula to the 1954 Gnome Press edition of C. L. Moore’s Northwest of Earth. And many hundreds in between.

It’s a fascinating kaleidoscope (I can’t really call it a tour) of our genre — and a great launching point to ignite your interest. I ended up reading about UK author M. John Harrison after seeing the cover to his 1975 Panther paperback collection The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other Stories. Plus, doing about a dozen Google searches on the words “Slave Nebula.”

Of course, there’s a powerful search function as well, in case you want to leap directly to a specific book or author. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the new online incarnation and third edition of the classic reference book edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, indexes some 54,000 individual titles, with 113,500 internal hyperlinks and over 4,000,000 words. It builds massively on the text of the (already massive) 1995 CD-ROM edition, and is produced in collaboration with British SF publisher Gollancz and the SF Gateway. And it is, as the introduction points out, still a work in progress.

The only thing that’s missing? The back button. I tried to scroll back to some of the earlier samples, but no dice. Looks like the Lucky Dip is powered by a Javascript app of some kind that doesn’t allow you to page back through prior selections — so if you see something interesting, be sure to write it down!