that would be reflected in most of Blaylock’s work
during the 1990s.
The Digging Leviathan(1984) is also quite play-
ful despite a more serious tone. The protagonist is
a boy born with webbed fingers and the magical
ability to create worlds from his imagination.
When he discovers the books of Edgar Rice Bur-
roughs, he decides to create similar environments,
which do not always turn out exactly as intended.
Homunculus(1986) is a fascinating Victorian fan-
tasy about the efforts by a scientist to bring the
dead back to life or to create artificial life from
nothing, in this case in the form of a homuncu-
lus—an animated human form enlivened by un-
natural means. The novel won the Philip K. Dick
Award and was followed by an episodic and less-
satisfying sequel, Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992),
which blends magic with time travel paradoxes.
Land of Dreams(1987) is a contemporary fan-
tasy involving three friends who investigate the re-
sults of a rare astrological conjunction that frays
the barrier between the waking world and the one
we enter when we dream. The evil carnival se-
quences are particularly effective. In The Last Coin
(1988), one of Blaylock’s best novels, a monoma-
niac has gathered together all but one of the silver
coins given to Judas to betray Christ. If he acquires
the last one, the world will end, but it is being held
safe by a man living in a magical house. One of the
characters in this unusually inventive novel is
eventually identified as the Wandering Jew. Even
better is The Paper Grail(1991), a diffuse but very
moving story that mixes a mildly mysterious death
with the discovery of an odd machine that seems
to have no function. The author introduces a
number of disparate plot elements and ties them
up very efficiently.
Night Relics(1994) is a contemporary ghost
story, although more mysterious than terrifying.
Blaylock also invokes a ghost in Winter Tides
(1997), but in this case the supernatural becomes
almost a peripheral issue in a story of murder and
other villainy. All the Bells of Earth(1995) is a deal-
with-the-devil story whose protagonist is searching
the world for a means to recover his soul. He finds
his destiny in a small California town that is the
focus of a monumental mystical battle. A young
boy has the unique ability to perceive the super-
natural around us in The Rainy Season(1999),
Blaylock’s most recent novel.
Although not a prolific short story writer,
Blaylock has produced at least one first-rate story,
“Paper Dragons” (1985), which won a World Fan-
tasy Award. “Two Views of a Cave Painting”
(1988) is also quite good, and “Thirteen Phan-
tasms” (1997) won another World Fantasy Award.
His short fiction has been collected in The Pink of
Fading Neon(1986), The Shadow on the Doorstep,
with Trilobyte(1987), and Thirteen Phantasms and
Other Stories(2000), of which the last is the most
comprehensive. The Magic Spectacles(1991) is a
children’s fantasy.Bloch, Robert(1917–1999)
Robert Bloch is best-known to the general public
as the author of the psychological suspense novel
Psycho(1959), the basis for the famous Alfred
Hitchock movie filmed the following year. Bloch
was a prolific writer, particularly at shorter length,
and had been active since the 1930s, contributing
to a variety of pulp magazines under his own name
and others’. Throughout his career Bloch inter-
mixed fantasy and horror, science fiction and non-
fantastic suspense, supernatural and sometimes
even ambiguous story elements, and his many col-
lections rarely fall into a single category. Those
listed in the bibliography of this volume are the
ones most predominantly fantasy or supernatural
horror, but individual stories in those genres can
also be found in collections that were packaged as
science fiction.
Bloch’s first published short story was “Lilies”
(1934), and he sold more than 100 more stories
during the next 10 years. Much of his early work
was heavily influenced by that of H. P. LOVECRAFT
and bore melodramatic titles such as “The Feast in
the Abbey” (1934), “The Shambler from the Stars”
(1934), and “The Fane of the Black Pharaoh”
(1937). A few of his early stories were fantasies,
most notably “The Black Kiss” (1937), written
with Henry KUTTNER, but during the 1940s most
of his fantasy became lighter, generally humorous
adventures. The best of his fantasy fiction can be
found in the collection Dragons and Nightmares
(1969) and the novel The Big Binge(1955), which26 Bloch, Robert