James P. Blaylock

From the inside flap: It was on a ferry ride to Manhattan that the idea for this anthology was conceived, Robin McKinley tells us in her foreword. The stories all would be fantasy, but with a particularly strong sense of location of the lands in which they take place. The result is an enthralling collection of nine stories, the settings of which range from what might be mistaken for a California landscape in James P. Blaylock's "Paper Dragons", to the hidden town beneath a real Norwich, England in Robert Westall's "The Big Rock Candy Mountain", to Robin McKinley's "The Stone Fey" which takes place in imaginary Damar, the scene of her prizewinning novels. And expert fantasists Peter Dickinson, P. C. Hodgell, Michael de Larrabeiti, Patricia A. McKillip, Joan D. Vinge, and Jane Yolen contribute their own visionary landscapes. The armchair traveller will find dragons and fairies, magic and myth, the best of fantasy on this grand tour of Imaginary Lands.

Nearly fifteen years ago, on a deserted southern California beach, Dave Quinn swam out into the winter ocean to save two drowning girls - identical twin sisters. He was only able to save one. Still haunted by the memory of his half-failed heroism, Dave immerses himself in the reality and illusion of a theater props company. When he meets Anne, a struggling artist from Canada, he has no idea that she is the child he saved so many years ago. Pursued by the threatening and jealous specter of her long-dead sister Elinor, Anne has been drawn back to the scene of her childhood tragedy. The truth will bring Dave and Anne together - and trap them in the swirling undercurrents of Elinor's hatred. To destroy their happiness, Elinor will find a man whose own dark passions match her own. And once in possession of his soul, she will be able to avenge her own missed chances and lost dreams - and live again. In the wake of Elinor's rage, Dave and Anne fight to stay afloat - and are given a second chance to survive the storms of the past and find redemption.

An exquisite novel of fantasy from a "true one-of-a-kind original" (Neil Gaiman).Calvin Bryson has hidden himself away from the world, losing himself in his work and his collection of rare and quirky books. He never meant to let so much time go by without visiting his aunt and uncle in the tiny town of New Cyprus, California. When he gets there, he’ll discover the town’s strange secrets and a mysterious group dedicated to preserving and protecting holy relics—a modernday incarnation of the legendary Knights Templar...

In 1870s London, a city of contradictions and improbabilities, a dead man pilots an airship and living men are willing to risk all to steal a carp. Here, a night of bangers and ale at the local pub can result in an eternity at the Blood Pudding with the rest of the reanimated dead.

A good deal of controversy arose late in the last century over what has been referred to by the more livid newspapers as The Horror in St. James Park or The Ape-box Affair.... So begins the first chronicle in the long and often obscure life of Langdon St. Ives, Victorian scientist and adventurer, respected member of the Explorers Club and of societies far more obscure, consultant to scientific luminaries, and secret, unheralded savior of humankind. From the depths of the Borneo jungles to the starlit reaches of outer space, and ultimately through the dark corridors of past and future time, the adventures of Langdon St. Ives invariably lead him back to the streets and alleys of the busiest, darkest, most secretive city in the world -- London in the age of steam and gaslamps, with the Thames fog settling in over the vast city of perpetual evening. St. Ives, in pursuit of the infamous Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, discovers the living horror of revivified corpses, the deep sea mystery of a machine with the power to drag ships to their doom, and the appalling threat of a skeleton-piloted airship descending toward the city of London itself, carrying within its gondola a living homunculus with the power to drive men mad....

A collection of fourteen fantasy stories by well-known authors, set in the age of steam engines and featuring automatons, clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never existed.

JEWEL OF THE PRAIRIE Ex-Major Booker Hayes had seen how much love this sun-kissed farmer's daughter had to give. And he wanted her in his life. As a mother to his orphaned niece, and much more. For Thea was the first woman to ever make him long for home and hearth. Tall and dark as midnight, Booker Hayes had come across the plains and moved right into Thea's lonely heart. Offering her a life that was a dream come true. A dream that could never be, until Thea learned to believe in Booker . . . and in herself.

Langdon St. Ives, explorer, scientist, naturalist, and family man rarely has a restful day.. adventure befalls him and a colorful cast of characters around every seemingly innocent turn. In this chronicle, St. Ives descends beneath the quicksand of Morecambe Bay into a dark, unknown corner of the ocean littered with human bones and the castaway detritus of humanity in search of a strange, possible alien machine. Madness at the Explorers Club in London and the disappearance of St. Ives's wife Alice leads him to the underground lair of evil genius Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, who has undertaken to set the entirety of London into a lunatic frenzy. A simple excursion to the West Indies is interrupted by bloodthirsty pirates whose depredations pale before the fury of the pagan god that erupts from beneath the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea. An inexplicable cataract of water falling from a cloudless sky sets into motion a ballooning adventure in which St. Ives disappears through a hole in the sky. And on a holiday in London, St. Ives investigates the insidious patent medicine salesman Diogenes, whose pills awaken strange longings and eons-old memories of man's ascent from the fishes.