MY 25 MOST FAVORITE NOVELS OF ALL TIME

MY friend Cliff is reorganizing his impressive book collection. He started by placing his favorite novels all on one shelf. From our past discussions I already knew what his top three novels were: 

The Stand  by Stephen King.
Lonesome Dove  by Larry McMurtry
The Name of the Wind  by Patrick Rothfuss

Cliff's other favorites surprised me though, and only one, Little, Big, I had read myself (Note: Cliff politely declined to give any but his top three preferential numbers):  

World War Z  by Max Brooks
Jonathan Strange  by Susanna Clarke
Little, Big  by John Crowley
The Last Werewolf  by Glen Duncan
This Is How You Lose the Time War  by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
The Ocean at the End of the Lane  by Neil Gaiman
Himself  by Jess Kidd
The Poisonwood Bible  by Barbara Kingsolver
The Good Fairies of New York  by Martin Millar

Circe  by Madeline Miller
Night Circus  by Erin Morgenstern
The Starless Sea  by Erin Morgenstern
The Mountain in the Sea  by Ray Nayler
The Time Traveler’s Wife  by Audrey Niffenegger

An Instance of the Fingerpost  by Ian Pears
Contact  by Carl Sagan
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O  by Neal Stephenson
A Gentleman in Moscow  by Amor Towles
 

I HAD never placed my favorite novels on one shelf before, or even listed them for posterity, so in deference to Cliff, I decided to do just that. Of course trying to cap my favorites to mirror his random 21 seemed like an impossible task, so I increased it to 25 (I could've pushed it to 50+ in all honesty). But even with such a high number one should always have hard and fast rules to govern by. Here's mine:

1.  Only one novel per author allowed (I know, I know, what a hindrance). 
2.  Trilogies are accepted but only if they were originally meant to be published as just one book.
3. Any single volume in a trilogy or series must have its own relatively independent conclusion.  

Of course rule #1 and #3 eliminated four of my favorites right away, Salem's Lot, The Shining, IT, and The Gunslinger, all by Stephen King. Abiding by rules also means making hard choices about the novels I love the most. So, after much deliberation I was finally able to narrow my favorites down to the agreed upon number of 25. 

Now, how do I number them in order of preference like the booktubers do? In my mind they're all equal in status save but one (well, actually, like Cliff, there are three). That one of course is my number one favorite novel, which happens to be the first epic novel that I read in my youth. So, in keeping more with Cliff's viewpoint, here's what I decided to do:

Each book will be listed in chronological order of when they were first read, and not by any numbered preference. That's important with me because each novel represented a chapter in my life (pardon the pun), as well as a place in time, just like an old song can be evocative when heard again. Aside from their superior entertainment value, these novels were also catalysts, steering me sometimes in new literary directions, but sometimes back to old familiar haunts. And, as you might expect from this blog, cover art played a significant role in how I felt about several of them. 

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The Lord of the Rings is the first epic novel that I ever read, fantasy or otherwise. It was conceived and written by J. R. R. Tolkien to be just that, one single novel*, and Tolkien hoped to publish it that way but its initial British publisher split it into three volumes instead. When Ballantine acquired the rights to publish LOTR in mass-market paperback in the U.S., they stayed with that trilogy format. The cover art by Barbara Remington was subsequently painted as a triptych, each section covering Part One: The Fellowship of the Ring, Part Two: The Two Towers, and Part Three: The Return of the King, respectively  (*it should be noted that LOTR has since been published in a single volume on more than one occasion).

I was 12 years old when I came across a 1965 first printing of Ballantine's Part One: The Fellowship of the Ring. I found it while rummaging thru a box of books my oldest brother Jim had brought home from college. Jim hadn't read it, and kept it in his dorm room primarily to impress girls (by 1968 LOTR had become a cult phenomenon on campuses all across America). I decided to read Jim's copy even though at my age I was completely intimidated by its 527 page length. But it was actually months later when I did start reading it and the story goes that it almost got me suspended from school. I was in my 7th grade math class when I foolishly decided to read Part One by concealing it inside my math book. I became so engrossed that I didn't hear my teacher approach until he had snatched Part One out of my hands. Then with a scowl he threw it violently into his desk. After class I was marched to the principals office for more humiliation. I was pissed though and I told my teacher he owed me a new paperback. Well, that didn't go over very well, so after narrowly escaping what was supposed to be a serious suspension I wound up getting a D in his class (and probably every math class after that too).  

Seen above-lower are my original LOTR paperbacks that I purchased in 1968 to complete the trilogy. I've kept them in fine condition for fifty-seven years now mostly out of love, but also I think out of spite for my 7th grade math teacher.  (Note: the edition above the trilogy is my prized 2020 deluxe hardcover from William Morrow, fully illustrated by Tolkien himself. It has a revised index and three folded maps laid loosely in). 

As I said, I was in middle school when I got hooked on Tolkien's epic story, but I knew nothing about Tolkien himself, that he had fought in the trenches in World War 1 for Great Britain and later wrote his masterpiece under the terrible shadow of World War 2. But I did know a lot about the Wars themselves, and by Part Two it began to dawn on me what Tolkien was doing, or what he was trying to do; embody real world events and people within the guise of fantasy: 

Sauron is Hitler. The Nazgul are Nazi Gestapo. The Orcs are Nazi foot soldiers. Saruman is a Nazi collaborator. Gandalf is Winston Churchill. Elrond is Franklin Roosevelt. The Elves are Americans. The Dwarves are Jews. The Fellowship is the Allied Forces. The Hobbits are the common folk of England and the Shire its rural lands. The Rings themselves represent power, greed, corruption and radical evil, symbols of fascism, imperialism and Nazism. They epitomize the notion that absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

In part because of this perception, The Lord of the Rings became the single most important work of fiction that I have read. It set the standard for courage, heroism, honesty and self-sacrifice, even more so than Doc Savage, who was my first fictional hero outside of comics. LOTR is rooted in faerie and myth, yet it offers deep insight into our real lives. Every character had to choose between light and darkness. So do we. The Fellowship was not seeking glory for themselves when they began their dangerous quest, their mission was the complete renunciation of the self for a cause that can only be described as exceptionally noble: the redemption of Middle-earth from the designs of Sauron, the Dark Lord.  In December of 1941, the "Greatest Generation," composed of our fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles and aunts, heard the call for noble action and did just what the people of Middle-earth did, they saved the civilized world from the greatest evil it had ever been threatened with: Hitler and his Axis powers. 

Today, the United States of America is in the grip of a corrupt, narcissistic, vindictive, convicted felon and would be dictator, whose corrupt, incompetent, and unqualified cabinet members and supreme court judges resemble the Nazgul. Did America completely forget the lessons of WW2? Are we no longer able to recognize good from evil? Have we lost our moral and ethical purpose? Our integrity? Our honor? Our minds? I know what the Greatest Generation would say if any of them were still alive to speak. And I know what Tolkien would say.

The Lord of the Rings is my absolute number one favorite novel for not only the reasons I've stated above, but for many other reasons as well, some related to travelogue aspects of the quest itself and nature's immense grandeur, always omnipresent in Tolkien's story, and some related to unforgettable characters such as Gandalf, Frodo, Samwise, Aragorn, Galadriel, Eowyn, Faramir and Tom Bombadil.  

Tolkien once said: "LOTR is written in my life's blood, such as that is, thick or thin."  LOTR is in my blood too, such as that is, thick or thin.  The only way any novel could ever supplant it as my number one favorite would be if I was the author of it.

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It was not long after I read Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings that I discovered the works of Robert E. Howard via a series of Lancer paperback editions with stunning Frank Frazetta covers. Specifically, they were the "Conan the Barbarian" stories, which upon reading them completely blew my twelve-year-old mind. However, it was not the 1967 Lancer edition seen above-top that I read first, which contained the only full-length Conan novel that Howard ever wrote, it was actually Conan the Warrior (Lancer, 1967), which contained these three stories, two* of which are now considered to be the author's finest works: *Red Nails, Jewels of Gwahlur, and *Beyond the Black River. By the time I got to Conan the Conqueror (or Hour of the Dragon as it was originally titled by Howard), which was the third published paperback in the series, I was convinced Howard was the most badass writer on Earth. Damn, but these Conan stories were fun to read! And I read them over and over again until Ballantine finally distracted me by flooding the store shelves with more of their high quality fantasy titles (see the next entry below).  In Hour of the Dragon, the now middle-aged Conan is being dethroned as King of Aquilonia by a group of foreign and domestic conspirators. With the aid of a powerful, ancient sorcerer they defeat Conan's army, imprison him and order his execution until a sympathetic slave girl risks her life to free him. Conan then goes on a hazardous quest across the Hyborian continent before coming back to Aquilonia to destroy his vanquishers, and elevate a certain someone to be his Queen.   Like me, acclaimed writer/editor Karl Edward Wagner was a huge fan of Howard's sword & sorcery and horror stories.  When Berkley Putnam reprinted Howard's novel in hardcover in 1977 (seen above-lower, jacket art by Ken Kelly) Wagner wrote in the afterword that "... Howard is mature as a prose stylist-- varying his delivery from headlong fast-paced action, to passages of atmospheric prose-poetry... as such, the novel ranks as one of Howard's best pieces of writing-- and as one of the best novels ever written in the epic fantasy genre."  Wagner was right on the money of course with his comment, but I believe what he really meant to say was this: "HOUR OF THE DRAGON is the most BADASS novel of its kind ever written in the epic fantasy genre."  

The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison was the third "epic" fantasy novel I read. The year was 1969 and I was now in 8th grade (I was also in the midst of reading as many Conan stories as I could get my hands on). Ballantine actually published the above edition of The Worm Ouroboros first in 1967, which was two years after they issued The Lord of the Rings in paperbacks, probably in the hopes that it would sell as well as Tolkien's trilogy did. It didn't, of course, but it didn't do that bad either. People were starved for more epic "Christian" based fantasy after reading LOTR, and with Barbara Remington providing a fabulous cover illustration that mirrored her LOTR covers, well, who among us could doubt that this wasn't the epic fantasy we were all craving. Oh, but were we in for a surprise. There was no pastoral Shire in these pages, no lovable halflings, just hedonistic knights from two different kingdoms fighting each other over and over again, sparking endless warfare, invasions, treachery, rescues, and court intrigue, hence the title, the snake eating its tail (whose concept becomes brilliantly apparent at the story's conclusion). The Jacobean styled prose was sensational though and I was quickly caught up in its weird eloquence. But don't mistake what I just said, for the average reader, even somebody with a proclivity towards fantasy, Eddison's 1922 novel is a difficult test at best. Even arduous. Cliff hated it. For me though it became a learning process, one I was eager to participate in at my age and one that allowed me to persevere through Shakespeare, Beowulf and Homer later in life. But another reason The Worm Ouroboros is one of my favorites is because it, and the LOTR trilogy, were the genesis for Ballantine's forthcoming "Adult Fantasy" paperback series, which beginning in late 1969 swept over me like a tidal wave. There were actually 14 precursors to the series proper, among them great novels by Mervyn Peake, Peter S. Beagle, and yes, more Eddison, this time with even more brilliance behind his words. I bought and (mostly) read 62 of the 85 total, and regret to this day the ones I overlooked. Every author in the series deserved to be on my list of favorites too, I loved them all (or most of them anyway). For five years I was on a fantasy high before finally floating back down to reality. And yet, when The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks was published by Random House in 1977 (a blatant homage to LOTR), there I was again, untethering my fantasy balloon. Brook's novel, despite its knocks, nearly made my top 25 too!

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My original 1969 Ace paperback edition of Dune, with its great cover art by John Schoenherr, didn't survive its third re-read. I replaced it with this identical (sans the price) 1965 Ace 1st printing that you see above-top, but I would have preferred a nice duplicate of my original, with its $1.25 price tag. Many years later, and because I hold Frank Herbert's Dune in such high regard, I started collecting various editions. Prized among them are Easton Press's 1987 leather-bound hardback (above-top, art by John Schoenherr), Barnes & Noble's 2013 faux-leather hardback (above-middle, art by Nancy Stahl), and most recently Ace's 2019 deluxe hardcover edition (above-lower, art by Matt Griffin). Yup, I'm a Dune fan. Dune was the first epic science fiction novel that I ever read and it's still one of the most impressive in that category. However, I know there are people that despise it for reasons that are both political and personal. Not surprisingly, based on aspects of its fascist story line, the alt-Right loves it, but ironically so does a generation of recreational and transcendental drug users. Naturally, Dune is a complicated novel to describe, or defend, especially when either it or its author come under attack. The best take on Dune that I know of came from writer Norman Spinrad. Supposedly it was an introductory essay in one of the many editions of Dune, but which one I don't know (isfdb was of no help). However, with a careful search you can find it posted in Goodreads. But read the novel first before letting anyone else, even someone as smart as Norman Spinrad, influence your thoughts.

The 1968 Magnum paperback edition of Robinson Crusoe with its fine cover art by Peter Caras is the edition that I bought and read when I was a teenager. Daniel Defoe's novel was first published long before that though, in 1719, and it was written with an interesting combination of epistolary, confessional and didactic forms. It follows the title character after he is cast away and spends twenty-eight years on a desert island near the coast of Venezuela. Crusoe encounters cannibals, captives, mutineers and other obstacles along the way before being eventually rescued. But his greatest obstacle was survival itself. It blew my mind how quickly Crusoe was able to adapt and sustain himself during his long ordeal. He was the Tom Silva of his day, a person skilled in many different ways. I quickly realized how inadequate I would be if I was suddenly thrust into the same situation as Crusoe. How could I eat without a grocery store? Shelter without a tent? Start a fire without a Bic lighter? Even more concerning was that I had no farming, carpentry or mechanical skills. Zilch. Nada. Nil.  A couple of years later, in 1974, I read Crusoe of Lonesome Lake (Ballantine Comstock, 1974, cover art by Karl Swanson), a true account of Ralph Edwards, who in 1913 at the age of 21 left civilization behind to live off the land in a remote wilderness valley in British Columbia. His story appealed to me because I could see myself wanting to do the same thing. Coincidentally there was a guy from my high school who did just that; he went to Alaska, built a cabin, and for five years ate moose meat every day. But Ralph Edwards spent more than forty years in the Canadian back country. He was the Tom Silva of his day too.   So too was Dick Proenneke, who in 1968 at the age of 51 hiked into a remote area of Alaska and built himself a cabin using only hand tools. He hunted, fished, and raised his own food for the next thirty years (amazingly, he had the foresight to document his activities in journals and on film). At the age of 83 he returned to civilization, where he lived out the remainder of his life, dying in 2003 at the age of 86. In 2007 Proenneke's cabin was added to the National Register of Historic Places.  Not surprisingly, both of the Crusoe books had a major impact on my life going forward (and also the DVD of Proenneke's life); I spent the next 15 years or so backpacking and camping in wild areas all over Colorado and Wyoming, but always with the best gear money could buy, and a trusty Bic lighter. I taught myself to hunt and fish too and I even learned some basic farming, carpentry, and mechanical work. But I'm no Robinson Crusoe, just an outdoor enthusiast. Crusoe, like my real-life heroes Ralph Edwards, Dick Proenneke and Tom Silva, was an absolute genius at every turn.

'Driven from their homeland, the Indians fought bitterly to keep a stronghold east of the Mississippi. almost inhuman cunning, strength, skill and knowledge of the wilderness were their weapons, and they used them mercilessly. But they didn't foresee the men who followed them, men who loved the land as much as they did, who wanted it for their own, men who learned their tricks and matched brutality with brutality.'

I've already chronicled my thoughts on The Frontiersmen in an earlier post found here. So what follows is a quick recap of that: Alan W. Eckert wrote six epic volumes in his "The Winning of America" historical series. Each is a stand alone volume covering a specific period in early American history, and completely accurate in its historical details, but each book was also written to read just like a novel, with made-up dialogue to advance the narrative, and that's exactly how they felt to me, like novels, so that's why this first volume in the series has been included among my "favorite novels." It opened a relatively new area of learning for me too; early American history east of the Mississippi River, both before the Declaration of Independence was signed (The French and Indian War) and after (The War of 1812). It also introduced me to two of that era's most significant real-life characters, Simon Kenton and Tecumseh. 

The Bantam paperback edition you see above-lower I bought and read in 1970. The impressive cover art that led me to this first volume in the series was produced by Ken Riley. Sometime later I acquired the Little, Brown hardcover 1st edition, seen above-top, with jacket art by John Alan Maxwell. 

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'Commander Bill Norton and his crew landed on the mysterious space vessel and made their way into its hollow interior. There they found a completely self-contained world... that was cruising through space for at least 2000,000 years... and now is seemingly dead.  But, as Norton and his astronauts begin to explore the spaceship, Rama suddenly comes to life...'

The thirty-one-mile-long by twelve-mile-wide cylindrical alien starship in Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, above-top, jacket art by Hal Siegel), which drifts into our Solar System, doesn't really compare in size with Larry Niven's million-mile-wide circular megastructure known as Ringworld, or Bob Shaw's Orbitsville, whose living space inside its Dyson shaped sphere is billions of times the surface area of the Earth, but it's still regarded as one of science fiction's most enigmatic "Big Dumb Objects."  To paraphrase a quote from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:  "...the very fact of humans being confronted by such artifacts as BDOs regularly modifies or confounds their mental programming and brings them that much closer to a conceptual breakthrough into a more transcendent state of intellectual awareness."   In other words, big dumb objects like Rama invoke in the protagonists who find and explore them a "genuine sense of wonder." That hopefully applies to the readers of such stories too, which I guess is the whole point in writing them. Though Rendezvous with Rama more than worked mere wonder on me, it completely solidified a place among my absolute favorite novels of all time. But having said that, I am still hesitant to re-read it for fear that it won't deliver like it did the first time around. So I made a compromise with myself: instead of re-reading it, I will just keep looking at Dean Ellis's fantastic foldout stepback illustration of Rama that is on the 1974 Ballantine paperback edition again and again and again until an actual BDO enters our Solar System (and no, the stinking BDO in our White House doesn't count).

I was in 5th grade when I read my first Robert A. Heinlein juvenile. It was Rocket Ship Galileo, and it pretty much sealed Heinlein's fate with me, and not in a good way. But at two of my brother's insistence I went ahead and read a few more of his juveniles, including Have Space Suit- Will Travel and Citizen of the Galaxy. Aha!--Heinlein wasn't such a boring writer after all. But after that I stopped reading his novels. Then in 1977, Ballantine began reissuing several of Heinlein's juveniles with nice new covers by Darrell K. Sweet. Although I already owned a 1971 Ace edition with an even better cover by Steele Savage, on a whim I decided to buy and read their edition of Tunnel in the Sky, which for the record wasn't one I had previously read.   The blurb on the back may have factored in too:     'It was just a test... just a test... just a test. But something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. What was to have been a standard ten-day survival test had suddenly become an indefinite life-or-death nightmare. Now they were stranded somewhere in the universe, beyond contact with Earth... at the other end of a tunnel in the sky. This small group of young men and women, divested of all civilized luxuries and laws, were being forced to forge a future of their own... a strange future in a strange land where sometimes not even the fittest could survive!'      Once I started reading Tunnel in the Sky I couldn't put it down, literally, until I had finished it. In a sense, what could be more exciting than a group of youths stranded on a hostile planet, who are forced to survive indefinitely with little or no technology, and create a workable society at the same time? Tunnel in the Sky was like a weird cross between Lord of the Flies and Robinson Crusoe. I loved it! Heinlein never wrote a better adventure novel in my opinion, juvenile or otherwise.

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'One summer day in the 1920's, Haverstock's Traveling Curiosus and Wondershow rides into a small Midwestern town. Haverstock's show is a presentation of mysterious wonders: feats of magic, strange creatures, and frightening powers. Three teenage girls attend the opening performance that evening which, for each, promises love and threatens death. The three girls are drawn to the show and its performers--a lusty centaur, Angel the magical albino boy, the rowdy stage hands--but frightened by the enigmatic owner, Haverstock. The girls at first try to dismiss these marvels as trickery, but it becomes all too real, too vivid to be other than nightmare reality....'

When I read Tom Reamy's novel Blind Voices in 1978 it struck a permanent chord in me. Its characters were young and weird, I was young and weird. It featured a carnival freak show, my family was a carnival freak show (well not really, but you know what I mean). I had also spent the last year living in the small Colorado mountain town of Leadville, which, unlike the fictional Hawley, Kansas, was less than idyllic, but it did resemble at times, most notably in the nearby Molybdenum mine where I worked, a freak show. Published posthumously in hardcover by Berkley Putnam one year after its author died of a heart attack while writing at his desk, Reamy's only published novel went on to be a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and BSFA Awards for Best Novel. All very remarkable considering it was released in a complete but not yet final draft. But just like everyone else I loved it nonetheless. Reamy's Bradburyesque world was magical, mysterious, dark and dangerous, and even now, forty-eight years later, its chord is resonating as permanent as ever with me. 

I also loved the jacket art by David Plourde, a heretofore unknown book and magazine illustrator (Note: apparently, Roger Stine of Sketchpad Studio also produced a painting for the book that was supposedly darker in tone, but as the deadline approached it was replaced by Plourde's lighter pastoral scene).  

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Note: I have already written about Dark is the Sun in a previous article posted in December of 2021, but rather than providing a link to it, or trying to improve on what I said, I am just going to re-post it here instead with only a slight revision:   

My favorite Philip Jose Farmer novel is apparently nobody else's favorite Farmer novel, or anybody's favorite novel at all. Seemingly under-read*, and definitely under-appreciated*, Farmer's episodic tale of Deyv, his two semi-intelligent pets Jum and Aejip, the beautiful girl Vana, and the plant-man Sloosh's incredible journey across a far future North American landscape to recover Deyv's stolen Soul Egg, all while under the glare of a dying sun, is, for me, one of the most memorable ever recorded in fantastic fiction. Packed with invention, language, puzzles and fascinating artifacts, plus a plethora of dangerous, imaginative creatures and situations, Dark is the Sun is thrilling in a way the Riverworld series never was. Why it received such a mixed reception by readers will never be understood by me. But to each their own I guess  (*Note: since 2021, positive reviews about Dark is the Sun have surfaced all over the internet).

And speaking of own, I wish I owned the book's original 23 x 16 inch acrylic cover painting by Darrell K. Sweet, which I love just as much as the novel. I would hang it front and center in my office. Dark is the Sun was first published in hardcover by Del Rey in 1979 (above) and then in paperback in 1980 with the same corresponding cover art.   

Vonda N. McIntyre's novel Dreamsnake takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where nuclear radiation is still present and the skies are hidden by dust. Humans are living in low-tech tribes, with the exception of a single city, Center, which has advanced technology but is closed to all outsiders. Snake is a healer who uses serpents in her practice, among them the alien "dreamsnake" named Grass, which has the ability to ease pain and suffering. When Grass suddenly dies Snake must make a pilgrimage to Center to find a replacement. That's the basic story fronting the novel, although it's a lot more nuanced than that. McIntyre used her post-apocalyptic setting to explore a variety of social structures and sexual paradigms from a feminist perspective. For instance, she rewrote the archetype of a heroic quest: her central figure is a woman instead of the usual man. She also avoided using gender pronouns as much as possible, allowing characters to be introduced and recognized for their title and abilities rather than their gender. In today's world there's been a big push to allow the use of third-person pronouns in schools and in work places, to mostly annoying effect. McIntyre's subtle omission of pronouns were skillfully woven into her narrative so as not to be noticeable, or annoying.  But still, I am reminded of a joke I recently heard from Zarna Garg, an Indian immigrant stand-up comedian:  My 11-year-old son came home from school the other day, and he goes "Mom, my school has asked me to declare my pronouns--what should I say? I said, "You tell them you're Indian and your pronoun is doctor!"   I wasn't acutely aware of Dreamsnake's feminist perspective when I read it, although I wasn't oblivious to it either. I fell in love with Dreamsnake because I fell in love with Snake and her world, and I saw myself as the tribesman Arevin, her potential suitor. Plus, I like snakes: for years my brother Gary had a six-foot long boa constrictor as a pet and he/she/they/them/it was always fun to play with. 

I don't know which element prompted me to buy this 1979 Dell edition of Dreamsnake (above-top): the Nebula Award sticker on the front, the back cover blurb, a review in Locus, or the great cover art. Maybe it was all four. No one has ever been credited for producing the cover art, and when I cross-referenced other Dell's from the same period the only candidate I could come up with was Maelo Cintron. And yes, I do believe it is Cintron's artwork although I can't be 100% certain. The 1994 Bantam Spectra paperback edition that is seen below the Dell I bought as soon as it became available. Its beautiful cover art was produced by Jean Targete.

 

Romantically speaking, 1979 was a good year for me. I found myself falling in love with two amazing fictional characters. Snake you've already met. The second was Nile Etland, who, according to the paperback cover artist Robert Adragna, is every bit as beautiful as Snake. Etland is the star of James H. Schmitz's little-known science fiction adventure novel The Demon Breed (Ace, 1979). She's a biochemist with an incredible amount of intelligence and athletic prowess. Trapped on an island on a water-logged planet where an army of ruthless aliens called the Parahuans are preparing to secretly take over, Etland must first rescue a captured colleague, and then get word to the rest of the human-colonists and her own Federation warships about the impending invasion, and if that fails, thwart it herself. This might seem like a tall order even with the help of her powerful allies, a pair of sentient nine-foot-long otters, but not for the amazing Nile Etland. Watching a woman save an entire planet's population using only her resourcefulness, cunning, and intimate knowledge of its watery environment was in fact a treat that was exceedingly rare in any SF written before the 1980s. So, if you ever come across The Demon Breed in your book browsing, don't hesitate to take it home. Trust me, you won't regret it.

Schmitz's novel was first serialized in 1968 in Analog magazine under the title "The Tuvela." The image above the Ace paperback is the original 12x16 oil painting by John Schoenherr that was featured on the Analog cover.   

There must be something wrong with me to want to include this oddity among my absolute favorite novels. But when you discover a book that comes at you from such an unexpected place as Battersea Park in South West London, you have to take it seriously. And I did, and I still do, because I was literally gobsmacked by this quirky urban adventure novel (it came out in the U.S. in 1979, the same year as Walter Hill's quirky urban adventure film The Warriors, both now forever linked in my mind. Also of note is that when I was 14 I witnessed a full-blown rumble at my school, complete with bats, chains and knives. Yup, it was a scene right outta West Side Story). But better than me trying to pontificate about Michael de Larrabeiti's The Borribles (Ace, 1979), the first book in his Borribles trilogy (which is actually a standalone), or gush over the cover art by Walter Velez (which is reminiscent of John Cayea's jacket art on the first hardcover edition of The Stand, seen just below), let me instead reproduce an article from a 1976 British newspaper, which may help illuminate my stance:

"WATCH out Wombles*--the Borribles of Battersea are coming  [*The Wombles were a 1973 British children's stop-motion animated TV series].  They live in Battersea Park. A book being published next month describes them as generally skinny with pointed ears that give them a slightly satanic appearance.  They are pretty tough-looking and always scruffy with their bottoms (the book uses a different word) hanging out of their trousers. They look just like normal children although some of them have been Borribles for years and years. They notice everything and all of them are bright because there's no such thing as a dull Borrible. And the only people likely to get close to them are ordinary children because Borribles mix in with them to escape detection by 'the authorities'. Even normal kids are turned into Borribles--but very slowly. There are Borribles tribes all over London--including the Totters in Tooting, the Wendles in Wandsworth and the Neasden Nudgers. The Borribles arch enemy are the Rumbles of Rumbledom who are 'nasty bits of work, covered in fur like nylon hearth rugs with snouts like traffic cones'. The Borribles fear the Rumbles are coming to colonize their park at Battersea--and so begins the Great Rumble Hunt with eight of the best Borribles dispatched in the dead of night to liquidate the Rumble High Command. The Rumbles live on the west of Parkside--and on the east side the reader is left in no doubt it's the borough of Wandsworth! There's even Borrible characters in the book named Orococco, Chalotte, Vulgarian and Torrey-canyon.  The book's creator is Michael de Larrabeiti, who was brought up in Battersea. He was educated at Clapham Central Secondary School. His mother lived most of her life in the Lavender Hill area. He lives in Oxfordshire and is married with--as he puts it--'two Borribles.' He got the idea for his books from the trips he used to make to Wimbledon (sic) and further afield with his friends, telling the 'kids with posh voices' what they thought of them and scrumping fruit from the large houses up there. A spokesman for The Bodley Head, who publish the Borribles, said there seem to be some people who don't like the Wombles and who have been quite pleased Michael de Larrabeiti has made fun of them. "But I don't think he was deliberately trying to be rude. He's using certain things about the Wombles but he's not making fun at the Wombles characters."   The Borribles to be published by The Bodley Head on November ll, 1976. Price £2.95."

I once read an essay on Star Wars that began like this: Star Wars--where to begin? That's how I feel about Stephen King's epic novel The Stand. Where to begin? 

Well, lets start at the very beginning, with me... 

It's 1968 and I'm in my 8th grade math class and as usual I'm daydreaming: I'm the sole survivor of a apocalyptic event. Not a nuclear war but a pandemic, where all the people on Earth have been killed by an unknown pathogen. I am now free to walk or drive anywhere I want to in America. Everything is at my disposal: skyscrapers, shopping malls, art museums and private estates. But wait. I'm not alone! I see someone coming towards me. It's a girl, and wow, she's beautiful!  Suddenly a bell rings...

Now fast forward to the year 1980. I'm in a mall bookstore and I see a floor display holding copies of a very thick Signet mass-market paperback titled The Stand. Its author, Stephen King, was someone I was acutely aware of but had never read. Color wise and content wise the display could not have been more alluring: silver, blue and black supporting two overlapping enigmatic faces, each sharing the same intense reddish-yellow eye. I did not know who the artist was at that time but later on I learned it was Don Brautigam, who, beginning in the early 1970s, produced hundreds of striking book covers (Note: just above the Signet is the 1978 Doubleday 1st edition which I bought later with jacket art by John Cayea). Then I read the blurb and I knew this was a paperback I wanted to read and own. King had not only laid down my entire daydream in full, but augmented it with his own frightening nightmares.

In The Stand a pandemic has ravaged America (and the world), killing over ninety-nine percent of the population. The scattered survivors, now wandering around a country that has literally become a graveyard, are compelled to try and reinstate society for the good of everyone, modeled largely on democratic notions that went on before. But a dark, malevolent force is trying to corrupt their intentions, dividing them into factions, pitting one against another in an attempt to gain total control. Does it sound a little like America today? Yeah, I thought so. 

 

Stephen King said he was inspired to write The Stand by The Lord of the Rings, and indeed much of it resembles Tolkien's epic tale, especially the moral dilemma at its center: do we choose good or do we choose evil?  Some of King's characters would seem to parallel Tolkien's too: Randall Flagg is Sauron, Tom Cullen is Gandalf (or should it be Mother Abagail or perhaps Nick Andros?), Donald Elbert is Gollum, Stu Redman is Aragorn and Frannie Goldsmith is Arwen. The Stand is completely contemporary though, with its all-too-familiar geography and landmarks, pop-cultural and material references, vernacularisms, and regional, racial and class stereotypes. The only thing not in the book is my 8th grade math class. And while all of that can make The Stand an easy target to deconstruct (although few have because it's so universally loved), it's also what makes it so uniquely special, and of course, uniquely American.

Cliff handed me a card once while we were debating a particularly controversial author that simply said "NUANCE." I get what he meant by that too because The Stand as a work of speculative fiction is incredibly nuanced, but also incredibly entertaining and fulfilling to read. I couldn't wait to get home each day to read another chapter, or multiple chapters as it were. Few novels have ever gripped me so, even though I might make a case that all of my favorites, save but one, are page-turners.  

Back then my brother Gary's reading experiences ran parallel with mine, but he beat me to Robert McCammon's Swan Song (1987), an epic post-apocalyptic homage to The Stand. He declared it to be superior to King's novel, and after I read it I was inclined to agree. But the funny thing is that in the decades that followed I've forgotten most of what took place in Swan Song, but I will never forget the incredible cross-country journey that led up the climactic conclusion in The Stand. That journey, its people, and the original paperback cover art, are forever ingrained in my mind, which is why The Stand is my third favorite novel of all time.

It's 1983, and I've just finished reading for the first time John Dickson Carr's "impossible crime" novel The Crooked Hinge (Harper, 1938, above-top). I found a first edition of it in a used bookstore, sans the dustjacket by Leo Manso, for a mere five bucks (I've yet to add a facsimile jacket but want to). I didn't know much about Carr back then, I only read it because it was one of dozens of fiction recommendations in a two-part article in the June and August issues of The Twilight Zone magazine titled "The Fantasy Five-Foot Bookshelf." The article was basically a series of lists of favorite SFF and horror novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories, emphasizing, or defaulting as regards to horror, each genre's darker, weirder, twilightzonian side. They were compiled by four leading scholars: Thomas M. Disch (an author), R. S. Hadji (aka Robert Knowlton, an editor), T. E. D. Klein (an author) and Karl Edward Wagner (an author and editor). There was a grand total of 117 titles, spread over nine categories in ten separate lists. I tried to buy or borrow every book on the list that I was unfamiliar with, which totaled about a third of the listings. The Crooked Hinge, Wagner's recommendation from his "13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels," was my first successful acquisition outside of an interlibrary loan. Not surprisingly, considering Wagner's taste in genre fiction tends to mirror my own, Carr's novel would prove to be one of my favorites. However, so as to not reveal any spoilers, all I can safely say about The Crooked Hinge is that it concerns two men who show up simultaneously to inherit an estate, and both claim to be the same person. And then things get really sinister. And really really macabre. 

The 1955 Dell paperback edition of The Crooked Hinge that you see above I bought a few weeks after finding the hardcover (art by William George), and it is naturally one of the most coveted items in my vintage paperback collection.

I think most folks who have read Dean R. Koontz's 1983 novel Phantoms can all agree that it contains perhaps the best first half of any horror novel ever written. It's certainly the most mysterious, the most suspenseful, and perhaps even the most original first half ever written. The second half apparently not so much. Most folks think it's a real let-down. But not this reader. I think the second half perfectly supports the first half, and when the two are combined they make Phantoms the best piece of fiction Koontz ever wrote back in the 20th century. But don't worry, I won't describe any of the events in the book for fear of giving away important spoilers, except to say that all of the action takes place in a fictional, out of the way, off-season California ski town (which reminds me of Colorado's own Crested Butte and its isolation). The 1998 movie that was based on the book was partially filmed in Georgetown, Colorado (obviously not the ski town in question), and if you can somehow suspend your disbelief that Ben Affleck and his peach fuzz is old enough to be an actual sheriff well you might just enjoy that version too. It ain't half bad.

Putnam, 1983, 1st, jacket art by Mike Stromberg. 
Berkley, 1982, 1st, cover artist unknown.
Berkley, 1991, 46th, cover art by Don Brautigam.

Fingers of Fear by the poet John Urban Nicolson (Covici Frede, 1937) became for me Karl Edward Wagner's single most important recommendation in his "13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels" list. That list was one of three remarkable ones he made for The Twilight Zone magazine's 1983 article "The Fantasy Five-Foot Bookshelf." I had never heard of the book before and I think nobody else had either. Surprisingly though, I was able to borrow a copy right away from the Mid-Continent Public Library in Kansas City, Missouri. I think they were the only lending library in the U.S. that owned the title. However, when I borrowed it again from them for the third time it arrived without its dustjacket (art by Arthur Hawkins, Jr), no doubt stolen by an enterprising thief. Currently on the internet there are only three copies for sale of the first edition that still have their original jackets, priced at $650, $1,250 and $8,500. That's right, Nicolson's only published novel, the proverbial "kitchen sink" of gothic-themed horror, is now extremely valuable. And while it's easy to blame Wagner for that, the real reason Fingers of Fear has become so collectible is because it is ABSOLUTELY FREAKING AWESOME. I kid you not, it really is! FOF immediately became my favorite horror novel of all time, and it almost surpassed The Lord of the Rings as my favorite novel of all time. Imagine that, Nicolson, a complete unknown, almost edging out Tolkien.

Many years ago I was fortunate enough to purchase a first edition of Fingers of Fear to which I added a facsimile dustjacket. It should be noted for any would-be-readers that the novel was republished once in paperback in 1966 by Paperback Library (seen above-middle, art by George Ziel), and in a limited edition hardback from Midnight House in 2001 (seen above-lower, art by Allen Koszowski), and then most importantly of all in a trade softcover edition from Valancourt Books in 2015 (not shown).

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There was a period of time between reading Fingers of Fear in 1983 and The List of Seven in 1993 where I didn't substantiate anything new that I had read as being an absolute favorite. In truth though, I probably read more than a dozen novels that could have easily qualified, and should have, but Mark Frost's remarkable debut seemed to overshadow them all, and for several reasons.  Firstly, The List of Seven is an incredibly thrilling mystery-occult-adventure with few if any equals of its type.  Secondly, in addition to its many fictional characters, it is populated by real people, among them Bram Stoker, Madame Blavatsky, Eileen Temple, Arminius Vambery (here Vamberg), Sir William Gull (here Nigel Gull), Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria Regina, and most intriguingly, Arthur Conan Doyle.   Thirdly, because Doyle is one of the book's primary characters, it reads like an homage to Sherlock Holmes, which it most definitely is except here the school teacher Dr. Joseph Bell is not the model for Holmes, and instead, it's an entirely made-up character named Jack Sparks. Sparks is the Crown's top secret agent: he's ascetic, aloof, and mentally and physically extraordinary. He's also battling an addiction to cocaine, smokes a pipe and plays the violin. When Sparks rescues Doyle from the clutches of an evil cabal the game is suddenly afoot, and the two become partners in an effort to stop the cabal from transforming an incorporeal Satan into corporeal flesh. It all sounds unabashedly corny I know, and it absolutely is, but that didn't prevent The List of Seven from providing me with one of the best reading experiences of my life. Consider it substantiated.

William Morrow hardcover, 1993, 1st, jacket design by Robert Aulicino.
Avon paperback, 1994, 1st, cover and stepback art by Daniel Horne.

When DVD players were launched in the Spring of 1997 I practically raced to a store to buy one. Having a home video format that was actually archival, as opposed to tape, was a dream come true. Like every film buff after that I started building a collection of DVD movies, and when director Frank Capra's 1937 film Lost Horizon was released on DVD for the first time in 1999 there I was, racing to a store again.  After watching the film, which was one of my favorites since childhood, I decided to read the 1933 novel it was based upon. I knew and was counting on the fact that novels are usually superior to their film adaptations, or sufficiently different, and James Hilton's Lost Horizon was no exception. The basic story though is pretty much the same as it is in the film: four travelers are abducted and brought to a lamasery in a hidden valley in Tibet for the purpose of further experimentation in longevity. Shangri-La, they are told, is a kind of utopia, where the laws of time and space don't properly exist. On top of that its climate is temperate, its orchards and gardens lush, and its incredible library of forgotten knowledge unmatched in the outside world. But Hilton's novel went even deeper than Capra's film did, which itself was pretty deep, wrestling with profound questions about the very meaning of humanity's existence. Shangri-La though is also a place of contradiction, where a culturally entrenched system benefits the elitist few (the lamas and their guests), and nothing, including liberty, responsibility, and of course aging, is as it is supposed to be. Still, who wouldn't want to luxuriate for as long as possible, perhaps forever, in a time-suspended paradise of this magnitude? Well, apparently, one of our four abductees: he yearns for his former way of life in the outside world, a world that appears to be under the ever encroaching shadow of an ominous global conflict. And therein lies the brilliant crux of Hilton's thought provoking story and why Lost Horizon became one of my favorite novels of all time.  

  
Pocket, 1939 1st, cover art by Isadore Steinberg
Pocket, 1998 101st, cover art by Isadore Steinberg. 
Pocket, 1961, 47th, cover art by Clark Hulings.

  

 

It was 2001 when I decided to read Brian Aldiss's debut novel Starship. That was forty-two years after it was first published in Great Britain under the much more appropriate title of Non-Stop. I guess I should thank Dean Ellis for that. It was his evocative cover art on the 1969 Avon paperback edition that prompted my reading of it, eclipsing even Paul Lehr's colorful rocketship on the 1960 Signet paperback edition which I also owned, and Aldiss's own vaunted reputation as one of science fiction's premier authors and scholarly critics. And yet, had I read Aldiss's post-apocalyptic novel Greybeard first, which ultimately disappointed me, I might never have wanted to read Starship, which I am now convinced is a SF masterpiece.  Here's Avon's intriguing back cover blurb:   'In the savage world of the Greene tribe, losing a woman was unforgivable, and Roy had lost his while hunting in the jungle called "the ponics." Disgraced, isolated, he joined the disreputable priest Marraper on a forbidden expedition through Deadways to find the legendary land of Forwards. They were to meet mutants, and giants, regimented rats and telepathic rabbits, and the fabled Outsiders. Finally they would confront a secret kept hidden for 23 generations--a secret whose discovery would reveal their origins and destiny even as it destroyed their world!'    Unfortunately, the very title of the U.S. edition gives away the story's innermost secret, but don't let that spoiler deter you from reading Starship. It will still blow you away as one of the most brilliant treatments of "conceptual breakthrough" that has ever been written, so ignoring it for decades like I did is just plain foolish. Read it now, today in fact. It's never too late to reward yourself with a great book.

I love mystery novels that are set in places I'm familiar with. That could be a city, town, state or country that I have either lived in or visited, or a geographic area that I have explored. So in 2004 when I made a determination to read the remaining vintage paperbacks in my collection that had gone untouched since the day I acquired them back in the 1980s, Herbert Brean's Hardly a Man is now Alive (Dell, 1953) was the first to grab my attention. Besides the lure of the great cover illustration by Tommy Shoemaker, Brean's mystery was set in Concord, Massachusetts, a historic town that I had become very familiar with after my first trip to it in 1994. Since then I've frequented every shop and restaurant in Concord and walked or driven down every one of its streets and back roads. I've stood on the North Bridge a half dozen times, toured all of area's historic houses and museums and I've even hiked on the Lexington Trail. I've also stayed at the historic Colonial Inn, which I've been told is haunted (below is a photo I took in 1994 outside room No. 24 that appears to support that claim).

Concord is also home to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where many of the town's most famous citizen's are buried. These include, among others, Amos Bronson Alcott (transcendentalist and educator), Abby May Alcott (social worker and abolitionist), Louisa May Alcott (author), Ephraim Wales Bull (creator of the Concord Grape), William Ellery Channing (transcendentalist and poet), James Underwood Crockett (gardener and host of PBS's The Victory Garden), Mary Wood Emerson (diarist and letter writer), Daniel Chester French (sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial), Nathaniel Hawthorne (author), Sophia Hawthorne (painter and illustrator), Harriet M. Lothrop (author), Robin Moore (author), Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (author and social reformer), Harriette Lucy Robinson Shattuck (author and suffragist), Helen Louisa Thoreau (teacher and abolitionist), Sophia Thoreau (editor), and of course the American literary giants RALPH WALDO EMERSON and HENRY DAVID THOREAU, whom Brean has brilliantly incorporated into his contemporary, yet history-imbued, murder mystery plot. Or should I say plots, because the Battle at the North Bridge that took place on April 19, 1775, and kick-started the Revolutionary War, is also part of the machinations. Brean also throws in some ghostly manifestations, a seance, a wedding, and a 104-year-old nuptialist, handling it all with masterful John-Dickson-Carr-like adroitness. If there is a negative to be found in Hardly a Man is now Alive it's strictly with the excessive smoking and drinking that goes on ad nauseam by our two main protagonists Reynold Frame and Connie Wilder. And I do mean ad nauseam: if an editor was to remove the smoking lines alone this 224 page book would be reduced to 200.

Note: Herbert Brean wrote a total of four mysteries featuring journalist/photographer Reynold Frame, and they're all excellent. The first and most famous in the series is Wilders Walk Away (Pocket 1949, reprinted by Polygonics in 1987), which is set in Vermont, followed by The Darker the Night (Pocket 1950), then Hardly a Man is Now Alive (Dell, 1953), and finally The Clock Strikes 13 (Dell, 1954). In addition to several non-fiction books, Brean wrote another mystery series totaling three volumes but I've not read any of those as of yet.

Imagine a celestial event which permanently blinds all of the humans who watch it. John Wyndham did, and then so did I, and the very idea of it freaked me out. That's why I purposely avoided reading his 1951 post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids for decades, literally. Give me a mobile, man-killing carnivorous plant any day over indefensible blindness. But wait, that's exactly what triffids are: mobile, man-killing carnivorous plants! Egads it's shades of Audrey Jr.!  So ultimately, the idea of killer plants feasting on humans is what allowed me to overcome my phobia about blindness and in 2005 actually read Wyndham's novel (well that and a handsome Easton Press leather-bound reprint of the original Doubleday edition that someone generously gave me).  But is The Day of the Triffids really more about killer plants than it is humans struggling to survive with sudden blindness? No, not really-- triffids are merely a component, albeit a very scary component, in a marvelously gripping horror story about the rebuilding of society after it has completely collapsed, headed by those few who were fortunate enough to remain sighted. Naturally, there's stimulating virtue on display in The Day of the Triffids, even romance, but also plenty of dark nuances (pardon the pun), and that's just in the American version that I read which I'm told was cut by some twelve percent over the British version. The longer British version has a different origin for the triffids, more post-WW2 cultural and class references, and supposedly a different ending as well. Karl Edward Wagner, I believe, cited that version as one of his "13 best science fiction horror novels." Sure, I'd like to get my hands on what he read, but I'm more than happy with the version I did read.  

Easton Press, 1989, cover design uncredited (frontis by Richard Powers not shown).
Popular Library paperback, 1952, 1st, cover art by Earle Bergey.
Fawcett Crest paperback, 1973, 8th, cover art by Richard Powers.
Fawcett Crest paperback, 1980, 10th (?), cover art by Richard Courtney.

I discovered Paul Bailey's totally obscure horror novel Deliver me from Eva quite by accident (Murray & Gee, 1946, jacket art by Jack Lynch, seen above-top, and previously addressed here). It was August, 2007, and I was attending the Rocky Mountain Book and Paper Fair where typically I would be on the lookout for unusual books in the fantastic vein, but instead I was at my friend Linda Lebsack's "Americana" booth, where I didn't expect to see anything unusual at all, but there it was, staring luridly at me from inside one of her glass cases. Wow, a decapitated head on a silver platter! Damn! Linda practically gave the book to me after seeing how excited I got, and I do believe I started reading it that very night. A couple of months later I learned that Colorado's own Centipede Press had just republished it in a high quality, limited edition hardback with paste-down cover art by German artist Carlos Schwabe (seen above-lower). Talk about serendipitous concurrence! Like Fingers of Fear before it, Deliver Me From Eva was an out of the blue stunner for me! Apparently it was historian Paul Bailey's only foray into the fantastics, but he got everything right as if he were an absolute master of the Grand Guignol: grisly killings, hypnotism, oddball characters, bizarre revelations, insane science experiments, and a femme fatale to literally die for. Bailey's novel could also double as a weird atmospheric mystery or even a unique science-fiction novel. It was everything I ever hoped for when coming across an unknown work, and it became an absolute "no-brainer" for my favorite list (inside-joke, pun intended).

Note: Bruin Books republished this novel in an affordable edition in 2011 (not shown).

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On my first visit to Massachusetts I toured the Back Bay of Boston. I was fortunate to have my then future wife, Lisa, a native of Massachusetts, as my guide. We strolled its famous streets lined with Brownstones, poked our heads into the Public Library, stood in the shadow of the Prudential, and marveled at the architecture of the Old South Church (seen above in the lower illustration). It was a wonderful time, and trust me, I'm not a big city guy. Then many years later in 2012 while preparing an article on artist Roger Kastel, I found myself scanning the cover and stepback art that he did on a paperback titled Back Bay (Pocket, 1980). Its setting was right up my Brean alley so I decided to read it. Back Bay I learned was William Martin's fiction debut. As a 1979 Crown hardcover (above-top, artist unknown) it spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The plot follows the trail of "The Golden Eagle Tea Set," thirty-one pieces of flawless silver created by Paul Revere and presented to the White House in perpetuity by George Washington, after it suddenly goes missing while being fenced by a disgruntled merchant named Horace Pratt. Now jump forward to present day Boston where history-grad student Peter Fallen and Evangeline Carrington, a Pratt descendant, are determined to locate the Tea Set before it's found by a variety of bad guys. Back Bay, it turns out, is history/mystery/treasure adventure at its very best, the equal in every way to Herbert Brean's Hardly A Man Is Now Alive only on a much more epic scale (and undoubtedly the inspiration for the Nicolas Cage National Treasure movies). It neatly flips back and forth between the centuries and is loaded with brilliant detection, scandals, drownings, shoot-outs, chases, narrow escapes, romance, and murders galore. Martin, not surprisingly, would go on to write more adventures starring Peter Fallen, each one a masterpiece of invention and superior pacing. But his Back Bay will always be the one I love the most. Like Lisa, then and now.

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When I am in the great outdoors staring at a spectacular vista I don't want it ruined by the presence of people or artificial things. But when I look at a landscape painting of similar conceit, I prefer people and things to be in it, to give it added complexity and interest. I'm weird that way. So in 2018 when I saw this stunning jacket art above by John Alan Maxwell I knew I had to own it, and read the book. I just never expected to be so impressed with the story it contained, but I should have known better. I knew the author James D. Horan from reading his knowledgeable text in the McKenney-Hall Portrait Gallery of American Indians (Crown, 1972), one of the most influential art books in my collection, and from researching his other works, a mix of crime thrillers, historical novels and non-fiction books. Horan's The Shadow Catcher (Crown, 1961) is a work of fiction but it's based on historical accounts of actual trappers, explorers and adventurers and features several real people. Taking place some thirty years after the Lewis and Clarke Expedition of 1803, this is the story of an similar expedition whose purpose is to try and break the British monopoly of the northwest fur trade and establish an American settlement in Oregon. Led by a fierce and intimidating Captain, but told through the trained eyes of a young artist/painter named Matt Winters (recruited to be the expedition's visual chronicler and dubbed "the Shadow Catcher" by the Indians), their wilderness journey across the western half of North America, accompanied by a motley group of humanity including a scientist and his wife, a free Negro mountain man, the adopted daughter of an Oto chief, a minister and his sister, and an assortment of keelers, scouts and hunters, would not only test the physical and emotional limits of both men to their fullest, but the entire party as well. Rugged, unrelenting, and refreshingly free of PC revisionism, Horan's epic novel about a small group of men and women who helped forge a young nation is to me a masterpiece of American historical literature, and one of my absolute favorite novels. 

♦    ♦   ♦   ♦    ♦

SO THERE you have it, my 25 Most Favorite Novels (for convenience I've listed them below in the same order that they were reviewed above. I also picked out my top three like Cliff did): 

The Lord of the Rings  by J. R. R. Tolkien   (1) 
Conan the Conqueror (Hour of the Dragon)  by Robert E. Howard
The Worm Ouroboros  by E. R. Eddison
Dune  by Frank Herbert
Robinson Crusoe  by Daniel Defoe
The Frontiersmen  by Allan W. Eckert
Rendezvous With Rama  by Arthur C. Clarke
Tunnel in the Sky  by Robert A. Heinlein
Blind Voices  by Tom Reamy
Dark Is The Sun  by Philip Jose Farmer
Dreamsnake  by Vonda N. McIntyre
The Demon Breed  by James Schmitz
The Borribles  by Michael de Larrabeiti
The Stand  by Stephen King    (3)
The Crooked Hinge  by John Dickson Carr
Phantoms  by Dean R. Koontz
Fingers of Fear  by John Urban Nicolson   (2)
The List of Seven  by Mark Frost
Lost Horizon  by James Hilton
Starship (Non-Stop)  by Brian Aldiss
Hardly A Man Is Still Alive  by Herbert Brean
The Day of the Triffids  by John Wyndham
Deliver Me From Eva  by Paul Bailey
Back Bay  by William Martin
The Shadow Catcher  by James D. Horan


THE next post will feature "Honorable Mentions"-- that is, titles that did not make the final list but probably should have. 

Also, while going thru my collection and setting aside favorites and honorable mentions, I found myself making a stack of TBR's (to be read's). It will be interesting to find out which one of those (listed below), if any, become honorable mentions.
 
My TBR List:
Cat and Mouse  by Christianna Brand
Golden Urchin  by Madeleine Brent
World War Z  by Max Brooks
The Fabulous Clipjoint  by Fredric Brown
Something About Eve  by James Branch Cabell
Dark December  by Alfred Coppel
11/22/63  by Stephen King
Lonesome Dove  by Larry McMurtry
Burn Witch Burn  by A. Merritt
The Black Corridor  by Michael Moorcock
Night Circus  by Erin Morgenstern
The Barefoot Mailman  by Theodore Pratt
Long Voyage Back  by Luke Rhinehart
Walkabout Woman  by Michaela Roessner
The Name of the Wind  by Patrick Rothfuss
Contact  by Carl Sagan
The Book of Skulls  by Robert Silverberg
First He Died  by Clifford D. Simak 
The People Beyond the Wall  by Stephen Tall
The Gate To Women's Country  by Sheri S. Tepper
The Lady Vanishes  by Ethel Lina White

[© May, 2026, Jeffersen]