BUNDLE - The Darrell Schweitzer Collection

THAT IS NOT DEAD [hardcover ANTHOLOGY] Edited by Darrell Schweitzer

The Great Old Ones, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog Sothoth, and the rest, so vividly described by H. P. Lovecraft, have lurked in the dim places of the Earth since the beginning of time. That is not dead, wrote the mad poet Abdul Alhazred, which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.

TALES FROM THE MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY LIBRARY [hardcover ANTHOLOGY] Edited by Darrell Schweitzer

Miskatonic University, in fabled Arkham Massachusetts, has long been described in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and his successors. Here in the library, under lock and key, are some of the world’s most dangerous books, most famously the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. There was a notably unpleasant incident in the late 1920s, when a certain Wilbur Whateley tried to steal that particular volume, and met a hideous fate. Fortunately, that time at least, the head librarian and his colleagues were able to save the Earth from the dreadful danger of the Dunwich Horror.

THE LAST HERETIC [hardcover COLLECTIONY] by Darrell Schweitzer

A long-deserved tribute to his copious and entertaining career as a storyteller,” is how Paul Di Filippo describes this second volume of our Darrell Schweitzer retrospective in his introduction. “We might first make the observation that Darrell hews to time-tested narrative strategies:  classical, demonstrably effective modes of story-telling learned at the feet of the masters. . . This straight-line approach does not rule out suspense, trickery, or depth of portraiture.  Quite to the contrary, this reliance on immemorial methods of storytelling allow his work to hit home all the more impactfully.  Take a story like ‘The Dead Kid,’ which always lays all of its cards on the table in plain sight, Stephen-King-style, but which is nonetheless full of twists and punchy horror. . . . In ‘The Fire Eggs,’ we see an alien manifestation that greatly perturbs civilization, along the lines of a Ted Chiang piece.  In "Spiderwebs in the Dark" we get a mind-blowing look at the hidden underpinnings of the spacetime continuum.

THE MYSTERIES OF THE FACELESS KING [hardcover COLLECTION] by Darrell Schweitzer

Darrell Schweitzer’s career stretches back to the early 1970s. He has written novels, most notably The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995), which was expanded from a World Fantasy Award finalist novella, but he has probably most distinguished himself for a steady stream of short fiction which caused anthologist Mike Ashley (in The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers’ Tales) to call him “today’s supreme stylist” in the fantasy field. His work has appeared in a great variety of publications ranging from Amazing Stories and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone magazine to Interzone and numerous PS Publishing anthologies. The present volume is the first major retrospective of his work.

SHADOWS OPUT OF TIME [trade paperback ANTHOLOGY] Edited by Darrell Schweitzer

I hope the title of this book is not misleading. If you are expecting an entire volume of spinoffs from Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time, complete with consciousness-swapping across the aeons, cone-shaped scholarly beings compiling their archives while dinosaurs roam outside their cities and some nameless doom threatens them from below, this isn’t it. I did indeed include a few stories of that sort, as such titles as Robert Guffey’s “Toward a General Theory of Yithian Psychology” and Robert M. Price’s “Crom-Ya’s Triumph” imply. (Crom-Ya, as aficionados will recall, was a Cimmerian chieftain that Lovecraft’s protagonist met when imprisoned in one of those alien bodies during his sojourn in the past.) But the focus of this book is a lot broader. In his 1933 essay “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” Lovecraft wrote:

"The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression."

Italics are his, by the way. Contributors were given that quote and told, “Go. Great Race of Yith optional.” This book is the result.