James Blaylock is an American fantasy author celebrated for his distinctive, humorous style. His characters are known for their peculiar ways of moving and engaging in conversations that humorously question the impossible, like the feasibility of flight. Blaylock's works often blend the fantastical into our present-day world, a style termed fabulism or magic realism. Mentored by Philip K. Dick, he frequently collaborates with fellow author Tim Powers.
"With a 100-year storm threatening the southern California coast, Jane Larkin is approached by a strange, audacious woman who wants to invest much-needed money in Jane’s Old Orange Co-op. Meanwhile Jane’s husband Jerry discovers an ancient excavation beneath the Larkin home. On that ominous morning in autumn, shadows descend over the deceptively quiet neighborhoods of Old Orange, ushering in a flood of chaos, terror, and murder
The story begins with an inheritance. Following a protracted legal battle, Alice St. Ives, Langdon’s wife, has come into full possession of Seaward, the house left to her by her late Uncle Godfrey, a man with a number of bizarre proclivities. Heartened by this good fortune, Alice, Langdon and their surrogate son Finn prepare to take possession of the house. From this point forward, events spin out of control, taking on a madcap logic of their own that is exhilarating and—in typical Blaylock fashion—often quite funny. What follows is, in a sense, a tale of two houses. The first, of course, is Seaward, a “rambling, eccentric old house” with it its history, its secrets, its priceless accumulation of volumes of arcane lore. The other is a neighboring house known, for good reasons, as “Gobblin’ Manor,” home base of The Gobblin’ Society, a “culinary establishment” with its own peculiar—and very dark—traditions. In the course of an event filled few days, St. Ives and his cohorts will encounter smuggling, mesmerism, kidnapping, cannibalism and murder. It is, in other words, a typical—and typically eccentric—Langdon St. Ives adventure.
'No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's...' So begins H. G. Wells' classic novel in which Martian lifeforms take over planet Earth. As the Martians emerge, they construct giant killing machines - armed with heatrays - that are impervious to attack. Advancing upon London they destroy everything in their path. Everything, except the few humans they collect in metal traps. Victorian England is a place in which the steam engine is state-of-the-art technology and powered flight is just a dream. Mankind is helpless against the killing machines from Mars, and soon the survivors are left living in a new stone age.
What my book is about. Well, it's a tapestry of many differently shaped and colored patterns of life, but the golden thread that keeps everything woven tightly and brightly together, is God. It's my earnest hope that these mere words help you find joy, peace and love.
The collapse of the Victoria Embankment uncovers a passage to an unknown realm beneath the city. Langdon St. Ives sets out to explore it, not knowing that a brilliant and wealthy psychopathic murderer is working to keep the underworld’s secrets hidden for reasons of his own. St. Ives and his stalwart friends investigate a string of ghastly crimes: the gruesome death of a witch, the kidnapping of a blind, psychic girl, and the grim horrors of a secret hospital where experiments in medical electricity and the development of human, vampiric fungi, serve the strange, murderous ends of perhaps St. Ives’s most dangerous nemesis yet.
The secret log of a murdered lighthouse keeper falls into the hands of the immensely wealthy Gilbert Frobisher, who discovers encoded within it a stunning and dangerous mystery. Against all odds Langdon St. Ives and his companions set sail in the dark of night for the West Indies aboard Gilbert Frobisher’s steam yacht, pursued by murderous pirates and bound for an uncharted volcanic island on the verge of eruption. There they undertake the perilous search for a hidden treasure protected by an unspeakable pagan god, and in the process unleash a power that will ultimately threaten the devastation of London.
Professor Langdon St Ives brilliant but eccentric scientist and explorer is at home in Aylesford with his family. Not far away a steam launch is taken by pirates, the crew murdered, and a grave is possibly robbed of the skull. The suspected grave robber, the infamous Dr Ignacio Narbondo, is an old nemesis of St Ives.
Mentored by Philip K. Dick, James P. Blaylock is best known for his Langdon St Ives sequence - one of which, Homunculus, won the Philip K. Dick Award - and, along with contemporaries Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter, is regarded as one of the founding fathers of Steampunk. All three of the novels collected in this omnibus were shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award.
It is the late 19th century and a mysterious airship orbits through the foggy skies. Its terrible secrets are sought by many, including the Royal Society, a fraudulent evangelist, a fiendish vivisectionist, an evil millionaire and an assorted group led by the scientist and explorer Professor Langdon St. Ives. Can St. Ives keep the alien homunculus out of the claws of the villainous Ignacio Narbondo?
Determined to avert the doom of his beloved wife, scientist and detective Langdon St. Ives sees his only hope for doing so in Lord Kelvin's time machine, but the diabolical Dr. Ignacio Narbondo has other plans for the invention. Reprint.
