In the dead of night, a man climbs the tower of St. Anthony's Church, driven by a compulsive urge to silence the bells.

In a deserted alley, a seemingly random victim is consumed by a torrent a flames.

And in the deceptive light of day, a mail-order businessman named Walt Stebbins receives a bizarre artifact - a glass jar containing the preserved body of a bluebird.

Things like this don't usually happen in a town like Orange, California. Ordinary people don't expect to face evil - real evil - in their backyards. But as Walt unravels the mystery of the bird in the jar, he learns that the battle between good and evil is taking place every day...

World Fantasy Award-winning author James P. Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has written eighteen novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles.

This mesmerising collection from World Fantasy Award-winner James P. Blaylock offers seven brilliant excursions into one of the most idiosyncratic imaginations of our time. Highlighted by the acclaimed novella, "The Trismegistus Club" - a brilliant riff on the antiquarian ghost story - In for a Penny goes from strength to strength, taking us deep into the heart of a quirky, deeply engaging fictional world that no one but Blaylock could have created.

Other high points include "Home Before Dark," which chronicles one man's first few hours in the afterlife. Its thematic companion, "Small Houses," recounts an aging widower's last few hours on earth. Both stories constitute deeply felt, lovingly detailed farewells to the things and places of this world.

In "The Other Side," a minor precognitive episode leads the hero to an obsessive fascination with the hidden mysteries of the universe. In "His Own Back Yard," a story worthy of the great Jack Finney, a middle-aged man finds himself stranded in the haunted territory of his childhood. The blackly funny "War of the Worlds" uses a bowling ball and the imminent end of Life As We Know It to illuminate the fault lines in a modern marriage. Finally, in the wonderfully imagined title story, the single-minded pursuit of treasure - of something for nothing - leads Blaylock's protagonist to a harrowing confrontation with his own worst self.

Startling, funny, eccentric, and often unexpectedly moving, the Blaylockian worldview shines forth with undiminished vigor in this marvellous collection, which shows us ourselves - and the world around us - from a wholly unique perspective.

When a boat-sized shoe and giant spectacles wash up on the shore, three of the town's orphans - Jack, Skeezix, and Helen - know there's something fishy going on, and the old ghost in the orphanage attic is inclined to agree. An evil carnival comes to town, run by a sinister gentleman who can turn himself into a crow. A mouse-sized man hiding in the woodwork leaves Jack an elixir that might, just might, allow him to cross during Solstice to another world, a mysterious land of dreams that holds the key to Jack's past and all their adventures.

Land of Dreams is a phantasmagorical adventure reminiscent of Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Metamorphosis is collection of three short stories, written by three young students in collaboration by James P. Blaylock for a class taught by Tim Powers, who provides the introduction.

Mirrors, shadows, and secret rooms: the houses in which we dwell are sometimes much stranger than they seem to be, as are the people we think we know. Here are three stories of haunted places that stand waiting for you to enter, their windows shuttered, but their doors unlocked.

From the dark imagination of James P. Blaylock comes a new, chilling tale of the supernatural.

When Peter Travers moves into an old house in a remote canyon to try to separate himself from his old existence, his wish becomes reality... all too literally. For his wife and son vanish and the people of the idyllic rural town begin to relive the horrors of a nightmarish crime committed one windy autumn, sixty years earlier. Against a backdrop of murder and midnight terror, Peter must contend with the abandoned relics of his own past before he can overcome the dark forces that haunt the canyon and the people he loves.

The price of immortality...

Two thousand years ago, there lived a man who sold some valuable information for a fee of thirty silver coins. His name was Judas Iscariot and he is no longer with us. The coins, however, still exist - and still hold an elusive power over all who claim them...

Like Andrew Vanbergen, whose attempts at innkeeping bring in stranger business than he ever expected.

And Aunt Naomi, whose most prized family heirloom is a silver spoon - with a curiously ancient-looking engraving.

And especially old Mr. Pennyman, who is only five silver coins short of immortality...

A YA adventure from World Fantasy Award winning author James P. Blaylock.

A suddenly appearing curiosity shop owned by a small man who might, or might not, be the Man in the Moon; a pair of strange spectacles buried in a fishbowl full of marbles; an old window glazed with sea-green glass found beneath a suburban house; and two adventurous boys who buy the spectacles and climb through the window into a land of goblins, ghosts, and rope ladders that reach to the moon...

Who exactly is Mr. Deener, the fat man who makes magic out of bits of coloured glass, has a passion for glazed doughnuts, and whose seeming twin brother sleeps fitfully in an attic room? And who are the little men who ride out of the forest on windblown sycamore leaves in order to whisper into Mr. Deener's ear? Is Mr. Deener, like a fallen Humpty Dumpty, broken apart? John and Danny need to know. To find their way home they'll have to put Mr. Deener back together again and solve the mystery of the sleeping land - a task that leads them to the pool of reflections in the deep woods and ultimately to a house built of light and magic and memory that sits at the edge of the heart's ocean.

Howard Barton came to Mendocino in search of a folded scrap of paper. Not just any old scrap of paper, but one bearing what might be a sketch by the legendary Japanese artist, Hoku-sai. But Howard, unfortunately, is not the only one who wants the sketch...

There's old Heloise Lamey, whose lush and noxious garden is watered with blood, ink, and stranger substances.

And the enigmatic Mr. Jimmers, whose workshop holds a bizarre invention designed to raise the dead.

Even Howard's Uncle Roy, a builder of haunted houses and founder of The Museum of Modern Mysteries, has an interest in the sketch.

In Northern California, nothing is what it appears, but everything is connected - Howard is led to a mysterious private war between secret, underground societies. Now Howard just needs to figure whose side he's on in the quest for the Paper Grail.

It's a gray, wet winter in southern California, and Phil Ainsworth is alone. The sudden death of his young wife has left him shaken, and he gets eerie sensations as he roams around the big, old house he inherited from his mother. He's sure he's seen people snooping around his property, by the old well that, in this wet weather, always seems ready to overflow. How much is real and how much is in his head? That's the question.

A late-night phone call brings more bad news: Phil's sister has died, leaving her ten-year-old daughter Betsy an orphan and naming Phil as guardian. It seems like a bad time to bring a child into this unhappy house, but Phil had always promised he'd take care of Betsy - and now she's all the family he has left.

What he can't know is that Betsy is a very special child. She has the ability to sense the powerful emotions of the past, to hear voices of the dead, and to see the uncanny powers that are closing in around this house...

Fifteen years ago, on a deserted California beach, Dave Quinn swam out into the winter ocean to save two drowning girls - identical twin sisters. He was only able to save one.

Now, years last, he meets Anne, a strugglng artist from Canada. He has no idea she is the child he saved so long ago. And he has no idea that Elinor, the long-dead sister he couldn't save, has come with her...

A skeletal hand clutching an iron key lies hidden within a mermaid’s wooden sarcophagus; a hand-drawn map is stolen from beneath the floorboards an old museum; an eccentric sleeping inventor dreams of a passage to the center of the hollow earth, and by dreaming of the passage, brings it into being….

Pursued by kidnappers thinking of riches and murder, Katherine Perkins and her two cousins, junior members of The Guild of St. George, must descend into the depths of the hollow earth in order to return the Sleeper to his ancestral home on the shores of Lake Windermere. But to awaken him might mean the end of his dream, the closing of the Windermere Passage, and the three intrepid explorers marooned in a savage land forgotten by time itself….

Zeuglodon, set in the world envisioned in James Blaylock’s The Digging Leviathan, is a landscape of color, mystery, and adventure, in which reality and fantasy are shifting currents, and nothing is quite what it seems to be.