the rules except a handful of exceptions, who exist
to provide random elements. The protagonist is a
shape-changer who returns in Necromancer Nine
(1983) to search for another of his kind who has
disappeared, Mavin Manyshaped, who would later
become the main character in the series. Wizard’s
Eleven(1984) is another lighthearted quest story
with a plot enlivened by the unique nature of the
imaginary world in which it takes place.
The next three titles were The Flight of Mavin
Manyshaped, The Search of Mavin Manyshaped,and
The Song of Mavin Manyshaped,all published in
1985 and comprising a loose trilogy within the
larger frame story. They tell the story of Mavin,
who sets out on a series of quests and resolves con-
flicts peculiar to those who are not bound to a sin-
gle physical form. Jinian Footseer(1985) is the first
in another trilogy set within the True Game uni-
verse, this one considerably darker in tone. A pow-
erful magical force has arisen that could bring the
elaborate game of existence to an abrupt end.
Jinian gets caught in the middle when Order and
Chaos renew their long-standing war in Dervish
Daughter (1986), and she becomes the pivot
around which the conflict is finally resolved in
Jinian Star-Eye(1986).
Not all of Tepper’s fantasies are set within the
True Game universe. The Revenants(1984) is a very
similar quest adventure in another created world.
The Marianne Trilogy—Marianne, the Magus, and
the Mantichore(1985), Marianne, the Madame, and
the Momentary Gods (1988), and Marianne, the
Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse(1989)—starts
as a contemporary fantasy. A college student is
troubled when magical creatures begin appearing
on campus, which eventually leads to the revela-
tion that she has come to our reality from a world
very similar to that of the True Game. She manages
to conceal her secret, learns a serious lesson about
the dangers of tampering with time, and becomes a
playing piece in an elaborate game in order to re-
turn a magical artifact to its rightful owner.
Tepper’s novels began to grow darker in tone
during the middle of the 1980s and have generally
been more serious and occasionally polemic ever
since. She wrote two very good horror novels,
Blood Heritage(1986) and The Bones(1987), the
former about an obsessively rational man who
must embrace magic to defeat a demonic force
menacing his family, and the latter, which is much
the better of the two, about a woman who discov-
ers human remains on her property and slowly gets
caught up in an investigation of occult rites and
human sacrifice. The Awakeners(1987), which was
also published in two volumes as Northshoreand
Southshore,has a strongly feminist theme. A priest-
ess grows disenchanted with the ways in which her
society functions and begins to speak out, after
which she discovers she has attracted the attention
of ruthless and powerful enemies.
Beauty(1991) is her best fantasy novel, an elab-
orate and inventive retelling of the story of the
Beauty and the Beast. A Plague of Angels(1993) is
set in a version of Earth from which most of the
human race has disappeared, leaving the survivors
to struggle to find their place in a reality increasingly
dominated by inhuman creatures, many of whom
have magical powers. The elements of science fic-
tion were indicative of a shift in her interest, which
became obvious during the balance of the 1990s.
Tepper has written primarily science fiction
and detective fiction since 1993, although The Vis-
itors(2002), set in a postapocalyptic future, in-
volves the emergence of partially rationalized ogres
and other creatures from inside the Earth, and
some of her other novels in that genre involve
technology that approaches magic. Her last horror
novel, Still Life(1989), was written under the pen
name E. E. Horlak, an interesting story about an
artist whose paintings are imbued with a supernat-
ural power. She rarely writes short fiction, but
“The Gardener” (1988) suggests she might be
quite successful at that length.“The Terror of Blue John Gap”Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle (1910)
Although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is, of course, best
known as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories,
he also wrote the single most famous of all lost civi-
lization novels, The Lost World(1912). His fondness
for the concept that there might be forms of life liv-
ing on Earth unbeknownst to man did not begin
there, however, for he proposed another hidden ecol-
ogy in this earlier short story about a monster who
lives secretly right within the English countryside.“The Terror of Blue John Gap” 347