SF Site Resurrection: The Desert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones

Howard Andrew Jones died a year ago, on January 16, 2025. He was only 56 (and could have passed for 36!) He was one of the undersung stars of the modern day sword and sorcery field -- a fantastic writer, a first-rate editor, an exceptional critic with tremendous knowledge of the fantasy field in general as well as key related genres -- adventure fiction and historical fiction in particular. He was also, hands down, one of the purely nicest people you could ever hope to meet, and I was honored by his friendship for the past couple of decades.

He wrote three primary series of sword and sorcery novels and stories -- the tales of Dabir and Asim, the Ring Sword Trilogy, and his series, ongoing at the time of his death, about Hanuvar, a fantasy analog to Hannibal. All of these are very entertaining, and his career, a bit of a slow burn commercially (he deserved much better) seemed to be taking off when he was taken from us. I haven't written enough about his work yet, but I did review his first novel for SF Site, and so it is my latest SF Site resurrection. (If only we could resurrect Howard!)

(As ever, I print the review essentially unchanged, so the comments about Howard date to 2011.)

SF Site Review: The Desert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones

a review by Rich Horton

Howard Andrew Jones has been publishing stories about the scholar Dabir and the soldier Asim -- sort of an 8th Century Arabian version of Holmes and Watson -- for several years now, in places like Black Gate and Jim Baen's Universe. These have been consistently very enjoyable. Jones is an expert on Sword and Sorcery and Adventure fiction -- he has edited books of Harold Lamb's stories, he was the founding editor of Flashing Swords magazine, and the longtime Managing Editor at Black Gate. And he proved early on that he could translate his knowledge of fantasy adventure stories into the real thing. The Desert of Souls is his first published novel. (I should add, in the interest of full disclosure, that Howard is an associate of mine, and a friend, because of our shared experience at Black Gate.)

As with all the Dabir and Asim stories, The Desert of Souls is told by Asim. It is not really an "origin story" for the duo, though it comes early in their career, before they truly became close associates. (The actual origin story, previously published in Black Gate as "Whispers from the Stone" is incorporated in the book as a tale told by Asim to a traveling company.) This story also serves as something of an explanation for Asim's later career as a chronicler -- as the book opens he is shown being rather dismissive of a poet in his Master's service, but for a variety of reasons, including a prophesy that he will take up the pen, he changes his attitude.

But what of the story, you say, the story! It's quite as good as any of us fans of Dabir and Asim might have hoped. The two are both members of the household of Jaffar, a prominent judge in Baghdad and an associate of the caliph. Asim is the Captain of Jaffar's guards, and Asim is the tutor to Jaffar's beautiful -- and very intelligent -- young niece, Sabirah. Attempting to raise Jaffar's spirits after the death of his beloved parrot, Dabir and Asim happen upon an escaping thief, and recover a valuable ancient door pull. Dabir soon realizes that the door pull is connected with the disappeared ancient city of Ubar, and that it might be put to terrible uses. And when it is stolen by a Greek visitor associated with Firouz, a fire wizard from a group with a (rather justified) grudge against the caliph, Dabir and Asim are sent on a journey to recover the door pull before Firouz can get to Ubar and put it to whatever fell purpose he has in mind.

Things are complicated when they find that Sabirah has stowed away on the ship in which they follow Firouz. Not only is this bad because Sabirah will be in harm's way, but because her student/teacher relationship with Dabir has already set tongues wagging, and this will only increase suspicions of impropriety. (Which in this culture means one is risking one's head.) But the mission to stop Firouz seems more urgent. Their journey is full of mundane problems like seasickness, traditional adventure problems like sea battles and sword fights, and imaginative magical concerns. (I particularly liked the worm they encounter in the title Desert of Souls.) Jones manages two climaxes without making the second seem an anticlimax, as there is first an encounter in Ubar, and then a final resolution in Baghdad.

Dabir's approach is unrelentingly rational -- which is not to say he denies the reality of magic. Asim's is plainer, reflecting his soldierly background, which can get him in trouble when he fails to perceive Dabir's intentions. Both characters are excellently realized. The story is primarily about the adventure plot: the need to catch Firouz and stop him. But there is also an effective ongoing thread about the personal lives of the two protagonists. Jones also manages to interweave triumph and failure -- the characters do not succeed completely, and there are real costs to their falling short. This is a very satisfying first novel, and I will certainly be looking for the promised sequel. In the meantime, I suggest that any readers who haven't yet encountered this duo by all means buy The Desert of Souls, and also seek out their appearances at shorter lengths.

Resuscitated Review: The Wooden Sea, by Jonathan Carroll

Here's another review I'm reposting after the demise of the outstanding old SF/F review site, SF Site. Note that for the most part I'm leaving these reviews unchanged. This was first published in 2001, when The Wooden Sea came out. My comments are from back then, and I've read more of Carroll's work since then, and the writer comparisons I make might seem out of date. So be it!

Review: The Wooden Sea, by Jonathan Carroll

by Rich Horton

The Wooden Sea is a fine new novel from a very interesting writer. I'm only slightly acquainted with the work of Jonathan Carroll: I've read one early novel (Bones of the Moon) and several short stories that have appeared in genre sources, such as "Uh-Oh City." Still, I had an idea what to expect: a contemporary setting, veering off into very strange territory at some time; an ordinary person, deeply in love, faced with an unexpected and unexplainable threat to those he loves; and fine writing with a mixture of almost goofy humour and wrenching tragedy. And that's what we get here. (Writers who come to mind as comparison points are William Browning Spencer, Jonathan Lethem, and Bradley Denton.)

The Wooden Sea is narrated by Frannie McCabe, the 47-year old police chief of a small town, Crane's View, New York. Frannie is on his second marriage, and he has a teenage stepdaughter. He is sometimes plagued by the town's collective memory: he was rather a juvenile delinquent as a youth, and, in high school, he dated the girl who is now the mayor; but by and large he seems respected and happy. One day he adopts, almost perforce, a sickly three-legged dog named Old Vertue -- within a few days the dog is dead, and Frannie's attempts to bury the dog seem to set in motion a series of increasingly surrealistic events.

The strangeness starts out small, as it were: the buried dog disappears, and needs to be reburied. The dog turns up again, sort of, in an Old Master painting. And a high school girl dies of an overdose, leaving behind a notebook with tantalizing hints that she too was involved in these strange events.

From this point things become very odd indeed. The novel involves trips both forward and backward in time. Frannie's 17-year old self becomes a major character, as does a sinister businessman from decades in the future. Frannie finds himself presented with an ultimatum -- figure out what he needs to do in a week, or else -- with almost no idea of what he is to figure out, or what the "else" is. And this is to say nothing of the gods and/or aliens.

In a way, this book might be called "Science Fiction Magical Realism": it uses Science Fictional imagery in ways reminiscent of how more usual "Magical Realism" uses Fantastical imagery. (This is a term I've also been tempted to apply to Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist and M. John Harrison's Signs of Life, though I ought to emphasize that in most ways, these three novels are very different from each other.) On first reading, I had some difficulty with this: there's a temptation to make the book be about the Science Fictional events, and it really doesn't work that way. They don't end up making outward sense, and they aren't really properly resolved. But reading the book more as a mainstream (or, dare I say, slipstream) novel -- that is, as a story about the life of Francis McCabe -- works much better. We get a portrait of a believable man, a good man, and a happy man, facing a crisis from out of nowhere. The characters are very nicely done: Frannie, his younger self, his wife Magda and stepdaughter Pauline, his strange neighbour George Dalemwood. The action, for all its weirdness, is always interesting, though at times I felt a bit disconnected from things: at times things simply got too weird. The resolution is moving and bittersweet.

2025 Reading Summary

Here is a quick and dirty look at the books I read in 2025, and how they fit into various categories. To some extent, these categories simply track some of my personal interest: how many "classic" novels did I read, for example, or how many SF/Fantasy novels, or how many in the category of "Midcentury UK women writers", a group that interests me greatly. Some of these categories are more obvious: how many by women versus how many by men, how many translated novels did I read. I freely confess that I slotted these books into categories rather arbitrarily at times.

Here's the breakdowns first.

I read 91 books total. Magazine and invidudal short stories aren't counted, except for novellas published as separate books (including Dickens' five "holiday" novellas, though I counted that as only one book.) 37 books were by women -- about 40%, a bit of a comedown from last years' dead even split. (I blame that in part on reading 6 books by Anthony Trollope and 3 each by Charles Dickens and J. R. R. Tolkien -- if I just count authors the share of women goes up to 46%.) I've reviewed almost all of these book, either here at this blog, at my substack, or at Black Gate.

I read 8 novels in translation, 4 from the French, and one each from the Japanese, the Spanish, the Danish, and the Swedish.

27 books were Science Fiction, and 23 Fantasy. Eight of the SF books were from writers outside the genre, and three of the Fantasies. I read five crime or thriller novels, 14 that I would call "contemporary fiction" (essentially, books written after about 1925). There were 3 nonfiction books, and a rather low (for me) 3 in the category of "Old Popular Fiction" -- books from the late 19th century through the first couple or so decades of the 20th Century. Of the "contemporary" novels, seven were by midcentury UK women writers.

A lot of my reading was novellas -- the five Dickens stories, and quite a few SF/Fantasy stories, a total of at least 14, though a couple books I categorized differently were very short, such as André Breton's Nadja and Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron. 80 of the books were long fiction, novellas or novels, and there were 7 story collections plus one anthology. 10 of the novels I read were very long -- say 500 pages or maybe 175,000 words plus.

Following is the list of books I read, ordered alphabetically by author. More detailed comments on the best of them can be found here: My Best Books of 2025.

The Case of the Late Pig, by Margery Allingham

Hidden Folk, by Eleanor Arnason

Spring List, by Ralph Arnold 

Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen

On the Calculation of Volume I, by Solvej Balle

The Early Worm, by Robert Benchley

The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett

A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen

A Royal Pain, by Rhys Bowen

Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost, by Chaz Brenchley

Nadja, by André Breton

Belinda, by Rhoda Broughton 

Evelina, by Frances Burney

Rakesfall, by Vajra Chandrasekera

Saint Death's Herald, by C. S. E. Cooney

Starhiker, by Jack Dann

The Artistry of Magic, by Helen De Cruz

The Tents of Wickedness, by Peter De Vries 

Some Trick, by Helen DeWitt

Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens 

A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures, by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas

The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar

Euphoria Days, by Pilar Fraile 

Treacle Walker, by Alan Garner

The Love of Monsieur, by George Gibbs

The River, by Rumer Godden

In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden

Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

Den of Thieves, by Daniel Hatch

A Mourning Coat, by Alex Jeffers

A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher

Space Trucker Jess, by Matthew Kressel

Lies and Weddings, by Kevin Kwan 

The Book of the Night, by Rhoda Lerman

Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman

In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner

This Shape We're In, by Jonathan Lethem

The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren

Changing Places, by David Lodge

Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

Metallic Realms, by Lincoln Michel

Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell

The Adventures of Mary Darling, by Pat Murphy

Where the Axe is Buried, by Ray Nayler

Collisions, by Alec Nevala-Lee

The Ante-Room, by Kate O'Brien

The Blighted Stars, by Megan O'Keefe

Miss Marjoribanks, by Margaret Oliphant

A Ladder of Swords, by Gilbert Parker

Haunt Sweet Home, by Sarah Pinsker

Major Arcana, by John Pistelli

Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

Inverted World, by Christopher Priest

The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve

On Strike Against God, by Joanna Russ

The Female Man, by Joanna Russ

The Gipsy in the Parlour, by Margery Sharp

Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg 

The New Atlantis, edited by Robert Silverberg

Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford 

The English Air, by D. E. Stevenson

The Sleep of Reason, by Michael Swanwick

Naomi, by Junichiro Tanizaki

Angel, by Elizabeth Taylor

Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Fellowship of the Ring, by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Two Towers, by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Perilous Realm, by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Wings of the Morning, by Louis Tracy

The Small House at Allington, by Anthony Trollope 

The Last Chronicle of Barset, by Anthony Trollope

Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope

The Eustace Diamonds, by Anthony Trollope

Miss Mackenzie, by Anthony Trollope

The Fixed Period, by Anthony Trollope

The Curious Case of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief, by Lisa Tuttle 

The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

The Children of Llyr, by Evangeline Walton

The Elfland Prepositions, by Henry Wessells

A Philosophy of Thieves, by Fran Wilde

Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell

Endangered Species, by Gene Wolfe

Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, edited by Richard Wolinsky

Reclaimed SF Site Review: Deep Secret, by Diana Wynne Jones

Here's another review I did for the late great science fiction site SF Site, which gave me a huge leg up in my book reviewing career. This was one of my earlier reviews for them, from 1999, when Tor published the first US edition of Deep Secret, which first appeared in the UK in 1997. The review is as it appeared then, reflecting my relative newness back then to her work, and failing to note that she died in 2011 after a remarkable career.

Seldom recently have I simply enjoyed reading a book as much as I enjoyed Diana Wynne Jones' Deep Secret. Jones employs a mixture of engaging characters, interesting fantasy concepts, and a light touch with serious undertones, to create a novel that is infectious and absorbing. This is not new with her: I just discovered her work last year, and the YA novels Howl's Moving Castle and Charmed Life (which has certain similarities to Deep Secret) affected me in similar ways. Deep Secret, I should say, was marketed in the US as an adult novel, although I would imagine it would be appreciated by younger readers. (And to be sure, Jones' YA novels are certainly good fare for adults, and I have seen Deep Secret called YA anyway.)

Right from the beginning we know something is up, as narrator Rupert Venables is called away to the Koryfonic Empire, to give his stamp of approval as a Magid to a legal proceeding there. Koryfonic Empire? Magid? We are told that the Multiverse consists of worlds arranged in a sort of infinity figure, with one half (including Earth), negative magically (this is the Naywards half). These worlds tend not to believe in magic, and magic is harder to do there. The other (Ayewards) half are positive magically: for instance, creatures such as centaurs can exist there. The Koryfonic Empire is very important, as it occupies the exact middle of the infinity sign. And Magids are a variety of wizard, with the duty to subtly influence events on whatever worlds they are responsible for in the appropriate direction. Rupert is Earth's junior Magid, and he is fresh from helping out in Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, when he gets sent to the Empire.

Rupert is soon engaged in two succession problems. His mentor has died, and he must select a new Magid from among several human candidates. In addition, the Koryfonic Emperor is assassinated, and Rupert has to try to track down the proper heir -- a process complicated by the previous Emperor's paranoia, which caused him to hide away his heirs so they wouldn't try to take over before their time. Even so, Rupert has an unexpectedly hard time tracking down the various Magid candidates. Even the young Englishwoman, Maree Mallory, who should be easy to find, is surprisingly difficult to get in touch with. And when Rupert finally does meet her, he doesn't like her at all, and crosses her off his list.

An alternate narrative path starts to follow Maree, which ought to be a clue to any reader that Rupert may have a harder time avoiding her in the long run than he thinks. Maree's father has cancer, and she's gone to live with her Uncle, a fantasy writer. But her Aunt and she don't get along at all. Plus her boyfriend has dumped her, which complicates her veterinary studies. (He's another student.) And then she gets these annoying letters from Rupert...

Rupert finally decides to weave a spell (a working) to bring the various candidates (except Maree, whom he thinks he's already rejected) together, where he can find and interview them. The real world result of this is that they are all brought to a Science Fiction convention. (It seems to be an Eastercon, actually.) A convention at which (you guessed it), Maree's uncle is to be Guest-of-Honour.

As we should expect, the convention, the interviewing of the Magid candidates, and the question of the Koryfonic succession are all intertwined. Much of the action is superficially light in tone, including some funny bits involving the difficulty of navigating the hotel's corridors. But at the same time the concerns are deadly serious, and Jones doesn't cheat us there: real mistakes are made, people are really hurt and killed. So it's not just a light-hearted romp, and though it's often funny, Deep Secret is not a comedy.

What it is, is a thoroughly involving book. Jones is one of those natural storytellers: her books compel reading. The characters are real, and very likable. The plot is exciting, and resolved logically. The magical system is lightly sketched, but what we see is interesting and well drawn. The resolution is largely what we expect, but it also involves satisfying surprises. This book kept me up late at night, and made me eager for each chance to read another chapter.

It's not perfect: the overall setup, although interesting, is a bit strained, and a bit too lightly sketched, which reduced the immediacy of some of the events. And structurally there is a slight burp: the book ends, more or less, followed by an odd sort of coda, which fills us in on an earlier event that was missed in the main narrative. But Jones finds a way to round up that coda nicely, without causing too muffled an end to things. And I came away from this book a satisfied customer. Highly recommended. And hopefully, the publication of this novel in the United States is a harbinger of more Diana Wynne Jones to come, since her earlier works are not so easy to find in the New World.