Jonathan Carroll

The Panic Hand

Jonathan Carroll

• 1995 Stoker–Collection winner
• 1996 WFA–Collection nominee
• Score: 16.45

Through the course of his eight unforgettable novels, Jonathan Carroll has earned comparisons to writers as diverse as Herman Hesse, Stephen King, Mark Helprin, Shirley Jackson, C. S. Lewis, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and John Milton. As this volume of shorter fiction demonstrates, however, Jonathan Carroll is one of a kind.

The twenty stories collected here transmit the same intense charges of intellect and emotion that characterize Carroll’s longer works. Among the many pleasures are:. “Friend’s Best Man”—An award-winning story about a dog that teaches its owner the real and very frightening meaning of “The Animal Kingdom;” “Black Cocktail”—A short novel about a high-school kid who never grew up—literally;. “The Sadness of Detail”—What are we to do when contacted by angels? What are we to do when one makes an offer we can’t refuse?; and. “A Flash in the Pants “—Original to this volume—a story about a beautiful stranger and a house that remembers all too well its previous owners.

From the Teeth of Angels

Jonathan Carroll

• 1995 WFA–Novel nominee
• 1994 Stoker–Novel nominee
• Score: 12.45

Jonathan Carroll is no longer just a cult author. His previous novel, After Silence, placed this gifted and award-winning writer squarely in the mainstream. The San Francisco Chronicle raved, “After Silence is filled with people who feel as real as one’s closest friends, observed with a penetrating, and sometimes brutally chilling, clarity…a taut, original work whose excellence fulfills the promises made by this remarkable author over the last dozen years.” In From the Teeth of Angels, Jonathan Carroll returns to that unique literary landscape that he paves with magic and wonder.

While vacationing in Sardinia, Ian McGann meets Death in a dream. Death promises to answer any of McGann’s questions, but if he fails to understand the answers, he will have to pay with his life. In Los Angeles, successful film actress Arlen Ford is no longer happy living in the Hollywood fast lane. She gives up everything—her career, her house, her glamorous lifestyle—and moves to Austria, where she meets a passionate war correspondent. From the start, their relationship is all-consuming. Arlen…

A Child Across The Sky

Jonathan Carroll

• 1990 Clarke shortlist
• 1990 WFA–Novel nominee
• Score: 12.4

The Wooden Sea

Jonathan Carroll

• 2002 WFA–Novel nominee
• Score: 6.52

Set in the fictional town of Crane’s View, New York, the familiar setting of earlier Carroll novels, The Wooden Sea also brings back the character of Police Chief Frannie McCabe. Crane’s View is a small, comfortable town nestled along the river, a place where nothing out of the ordinary would happen—and doesn’t, to the casual observer. But when a three-legged dog named Old Vertue wanders into McCabe’s office and dies, he knows that something odd is beginning, and that his life will be forever altered.

As with all Carroll novels, The Wooden Sea is filled with memorable characters who are so familiar that you can’t help but be drawn into their world, a world that is always just a little off from the norm. Fans of his work will be delighted by the small details and recurring themes throughout the story, while newcomers will have the chance to discover all these little eccentricities for the first time. The Wooden Sea should not be missed.

Outside the Dog Museum

Jonathan Carroll

• 1992 WFA–Novel nominee
• Score: 6.42

Harry Radcliffe is a brilliant prize-winning architect—witty and remarkable. He’s also a self-serving opportunist, ready to take advantage of whatever situations, and women, come his way. But now, newly divorced and having had an inexplicable nervous breakdown, Harry is being wooed by the extremely wealthy Sultan of Saru to design a billion-dollar dog museum. In Saru, he finds himself in a world even madder and more unreal than the one he left behind, and as his obsession grows, the powers of magic weave around him, and the implications of his strange undertaking grow more ominous and astounding…

Sleeping in Flame

Jonathan Carroll

• 1989 WFA–Novel nominee
• Score: 6.39

Ricocheting between the haunted chic of Vienna and the mystical crassness of Los Angeles, between the world of desire and the landscape of dreams, Sleeping In Flame is a hypnotic literary, novel with irresistible elements of fantasy and magic.

It is the story of Walker Easterling, who saves a woman’ life only to place her in infinitely greater danger by falling in love with her. It’s the story of Maris York, an androgynous beauty who arouses incinerating passions in the around her. It is a novel populated by a shaman with a fondness for sandwiches, an autistic Adonis, and a tiny man as powerful and ravenously jealous as the God of the Old Testament.

Praised by writers ranging from Stanislaw Lam to Stephen King, Jonathan Carroll has made Sleeping In Flame a dizzying tour de force of tenderness and terror, realistic suspense and mythic imagination.