Everland and Other Stories

In the quarter century since the publication of his first short story, "Red Shift," Paul Witcover has slowly but steadily produced an impressive body of short fiction alongside his critically acclaimed novels, Waking Beauty, Tumbling After, and Dracula: Asylum. Fusing elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and fairy tales, Witcover's work inhabits the borderlands of genre. Everland collects twelve of his best stories, seven previously published, including the Nebula Award finalist "Left of the Dial," and five appearing here for the first time, including the title story, which does not so much reimagine as reinvent J. M. Barrie's classic tale of a boy who never grew up. In "Mayaland," a callow young man with a romantic attachment to a bloody past learns that there is a price to pay for ignorance . . . and for understanding. Fundamentalism meets fascism in "Twilight of the Dogs," a horror story that is also a ghost story that morphs into a science fiction story and then . . . In "Lighthouse Summer," a young boy has the adventure of several lifetimes when a summer storm washes an eccentric traveler ashore . . . A lost marble that is more than it seems catapults a timid legal proofreader into a war between gods and demons in "Where Balloons Go." Ranging from present day New York to Central America, from Revolutionary France to a near-future United States convulsed by civil war, the twelve stories in Everland are both topical and timeless, showcasing Witcover's affinity for the strange that lurks within-or alongside-the familiar. Featuring an introduction by award-winning author Elizabeth Hand, with whom Witcover created and wrote the ground-breaking DC Comic Anima.


Genre: Fantasy