Fantasy Masterworks

Who is the Child of Night? That's what small-town reporter Will Barbee must find out. Inexorably drawn into investigating a rash of grisly deaths, he soon finds himself embroiled in something far beyond mortal understanding. Doggedly pursuing his investigations, he meets the mysterious and seductive April Bell and starts having disturbing, tantalizing dreams in which he does terrible things -- things that are stranger and wilder than his worst nightmares. Then his friends begin dying one by one, and he slowly realizes that an unspeakable evil has been unleashed. As Barbee's world crumbles around him in a dizzying blizzard of madness, the intoxicating, dangerous April pushes Barbee ever closer to the answer to the question ''Who is the Child of Night?'' When Barbee finds out, he'll wish he'd never been born.

"...Beautiful Blood begins in the 1850s in the town of Teocinte, in a world "separated from our own by the thinnest margin of possibility." It is a landscape whose dominant feature is the massive, long-dormant body of an ancient dragon that has lain there motionless, for millennia, exerting a powerful but mysterious influence on the surround area. The novel tells the story of Richard Rosacher, an ambitious young medical student who becomes fascinated by the properties inherent in the dragon's blood. His exploitation of those properties launches him on a career that leads him from the shabbiest quarter of Teocinte to a morally ambiguous position of power, wealth, and influence. Beautiful Blood takes us through the entire length of that career, which is marked throughout by the invisible agency of Griaule, who may well be the driving force behind Rosacher's astonishing ascension. The novel also encapsulates the events of the initial Griaule story, events that dovetail neatly with the current tale. Meric Cattanay, the eponymous protagonist of "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," makes a welcome reappearance here. Meric's decades-long involvement with the dragon begins at roughly the same time as Rosacher's. Their stories proceed along parallel but independent lines that occasionally intersect, providing us with a view of familiar events wider and deeper than any we have had before. The result is a colorful, involving narrative with profound metaphysical overtones, one that raises - but does not answer - significant questions. Is the dragon merely a bizarre but entirely natural phenomenon? Or is he/it the manifestation of some divine purpose? And to what extent are the actions of men like Meric and Rosacher the reflections of its implacable but enigmatic will? Quesions such as these animate the narrative at every turn, adding an extra level of resonance to one of the most original and important fictional creations of recent years." -- dust jacket inside flaps.

"Available to American readers for the first time, this collection gathers four fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light. Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Nights. Back in print after a long absence, these singular tales of a timeless realm and its enigmatic inhabitants are now reborn and compiled to captivate a whole new generation."--Jacket.

Holger Carlsen, wounded in Nazi-occupied Denmark, awakens to find himself in a magical land of knights, dragons, and sorcerers.