Thanks to a series of remixed omnibus collections issued recently by Baen Books, James Schmitz (1911-1981) has been experiencing a second, posthumous career. The author, while never a superstar of the genre, remains–as John Clute phrases it in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993)–"warmly remembered . . . [for] demonstrating, modestly and competently, that the template of space opera could provide continuing joy."

Joy is an apt word to describe the emotions attendant upon reading Schmitz’s whimsical masterpiece, The Witches of Karres. Originally appearing as a novelette in the December 1949 issue of Astounding, Schmitz’s story about three psionically gifted young females and their hapless adult guardian met with immediate acclaim. For nearly twenty years, fans asked Schmitz to expand this work into a full-fledged novel, but he claimed such an elaboration to be an impossible task. In 1965, however, editor Sterling Lanier at Chilton convinced Schmitz to accept a contract and a monetary advance for the expansion, and, by 1966, the enlarged version of the tale miraculously appeared.

Set in a somewhat off-the-shelf future history where a generally featureless galactic empire is bordered by various lesser realms described in more pungent detail, Schmitz’s tale derived its charm and allure not from brilliant, original ideation or killer plotting, but rather from the winsome likeability of its characters. Captain Pausert, our hero, is both a competent, ethical man and a bit of a self-conscious bumbler. He can never manage a proper takeoff in his trading ship, the Venture; is dumped by his fiancée; and generally finds himself a square peg in a round hole on Nikkeldepain, the world of his birth. When he rescues three young girls from slavery on the world Porlumma, he finds–with a mixture of gratitude and horror–that his life has been yanked out of its boring groove. Maleen, Goth, and "the Leewit" are children of the mysterious planet Karres, doing a kind of wanderjahr far away from home. They each possess miraculous powers of the mind, relying on taps into the cosmic force known as "klatha." Pausert himself seems to have leanings that way, and we learn later that his great-uncle Threbus is himself a "witch" of Karres. Unfortunately for Pausert and his charges, the klatha realm has its own mischievous lifeforms known as "vatches," which can be sensed as they intrude into the human sphere with an intuition known as "relling." One big vatch in particular has it in mind to strew Pausert’s path with obstacles as a form of play. And as if that weren’t enough, the menace of the Worm World threatens to destroy the whole galaxy. Only Pausert and his witches stand in the way.

Schmitz’s expansion was seamless with the original, and ended with a completely satisfying conclusion. And yet, trailing lines of plot seemed to hint at further adventures in store for Pausert and crew. But in the fifteen years of life remaining to him, Schmitz never followed up.

Now, almost sixty years after the original novelette, arrives a "sequel by other hands," in the form of The Wizard of Karres (Baen Books, hardcover, $22.00, 313 pages, ISBN 0743488393). It took three writers to match Schmitz’s inspiration–Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint, and Dave Freer–but I am happy to report that they do a very, very credible job. They are all plainly enthusiasts of the book, and know it inside out. Moreover, they pick up almost all the old threads deftly, while knotting new ones to them. They explain some lingering mysteries from the first book. They maintain the retro sensibility without being campy. They fuse their separate voices into one, and that one voice echoes Schmitz tolerably well. And they convey an attitude of having immense fun with their tale, in the manner of Schmitz himself. This sequel does honor to the original and gives us as much opportunity to enjoy favorite characters in new adventures as we are ever likely to have.

The new book picks up precisely where the old one left off, and with a bang. Captain Pausert, Goth, and the Leewit, along with their crew of two rogues–Hulik do Eldel and Vezzarn–have contracted to ferry a Nartheby Sprite named Hantis and her companion, the grik-dog named Pul, from the hinterlands to the Empress’s court. The Sprite is on a mission to prevent another galactic tragedy, a plague of body-possessing Nanites. But the Nanites have already infiltrated the Empire’s military and secret service, and are determined to stop Pausert and company by any means possible. Additionally, the successors of the pirate Agandar, whom Pausert killed in the first book, are after the Venture as well. Toss in a little uncatchable vatch who’s more trouble than any big one, and the stage is set for a rollicking ride.

Because this basic plot of flight and chase is not complicated enough to sustain a book of the desired length, a long "snake’s hand" (to employ John Crowley’s term for a novelistic detour) in the middle is needed. For roughly a hundred pages, Pausert and friends go undercover in a traveling interplanetary circus. We meet a lot of colorful new characters and there’s plenty of action and suspense. Yet the milieu is a familiar one, from Laumer and Brown’s Earthblood (1966) through Vance’s Showboat World (1975) to Longyear’s Circus World (1981). I’m not sure Schmitz would have admitted of such a long detour, but once it’s accepted as a given, it can be entertaining.

The action picks up once the circus is abandoned, and some vatchly time-travel intervenes. The three authors fill in the history of the Nartheby Sprites in fine science-fantasy fashion, generate some neat chronal paradoxes, and provide a rousing conclusion to the Nanite plague.

Do the characters feel authentic in their new adventures? That’s what really matters in such a book. Yes, they do. Although Goth and the Leewit do not progress much beyond their portraits as first conceived by Schmitz, that’s okay. Captain Pausert, being the titular character, undergoes more of a deepening. Toward the end of the book, the witches and burgeoning wizard find themselves ironically again on Porlumma, where all their travels once began. There are still wanted posters up for Pausert from his prior visit, but now "the stern-visaged, planar-faced Aron [Pausert’s pseudonym] bore no resemblance at all to the images of the cheerful criminal Pausert." He’s come down a long road, and shows it.

Bravely, the authors also maintain the erotic subtext of Witches. Goth, a twelve-year-old, is in love with Pausert and steadfastly determined to marry him. This adolescent-adult romance –for whatever reason a kinky feature of certain SF, such as Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer (1957)–perfectly encapsulates the mix of sophistication and naiveté that both Witches and Wizard revels in.

It’s hard now to convey the excitement we all felt, circa 1974-78, reading the short stories of John Varley. Picture the thrills and hype attendant today upon encountering the work of Ted Chiang, Greg Egan, or Charles Stross. Add those sensations together, and multiply by an X factor necessary to reflect the smaller, more concentrated mediascape that science fiction then inhabited. Do that, and you’ll have a glimmer of the buzz young Varley generated.

I well recall my own early encounters with Varley’s work–much of it appearing in the pages of F&SF, much of it in this very magazine–starting with his first sale, "Picnic on Nearside," in 1974. I was half-repelled, half-seduced by his stories. They all seemed too weird and wild: at once slick and raw, serious and comic, tragic and optimistic, a paradoxical mass of opposites. Too similar to real life, in fact, to be wholly comforting like so much escapist SF. Then there was the subject matter, much of which revolved around either sex or mankind’s diminished status in the cosmic pecking order, two areas known to evoke readerly trepidations. Moreover, Varley appeared on the tail of the New Wave/ Old Wave controversies, and couldn’t be easily pigeonholed as a partisan of one camp or another. He seemed to straddle the divide, part Heinlein, part Spinrad, and that was confusing as well.

But what no one could deny was that he had a unique, fiery voice and vision. This was a writer who had something to say and had forged, from the get-go, a vibrant and instantly recognizable personal style with which to utter his truths.

Now, thirty years after his debut, we have a perfect chance to reassess Varley’s work in the form of The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction (Ace, trade paperback, $16.00, 532 pages, ISBN 0441011950). This book contains a massive sampling of his best-known, finest stories, along with five previously uncollected ones that stand up well in this august company. The whole assemblage is primo material, proving that Varley knew all along what he was doing, dragging semi-reluctant readers such as myself into new territories that were vital expansions of SF’s remit, necessary for the genre to remain healthy.

Many of these stories inhabit Varley’s famous future history known as the "Eight Worlds" sequence, in which humanity lives on various "steel beaches" around the solar system after having been exiled from Earth by aliens. Varley’s proclamation of this scenario as a utopia of sorts is surprising at first, but soon borne out by the stories themselves. In these pieces, humanity still faces testings and problems and setbacks, but the species has turned the disaster of expulsion from Earth into a silver lining, exfoliating into many new and surprising cosmic niches. From the symbiotic pairs living around Saturn in "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance," to the sex-swapping Lunarians in "Options," Varley’s future citizens exhibit a brio and zest that belies their status as permanent expatriates. These stories add up to one of the best and most hope-inspiring portraits of mankind’s indomitability and adaptability within the genre.

Outside this sequence, Varley proves himself masterful as well. Such award-winners as "The Persistence of Vision," a sensitive and alluring depiction of disabled humans creating an otherworldly culture, and "Press Enter," a scary tale of cybernetic paranoia, propel the reader breathlessly through their lengths. Several stories involving the same protagonist, detective Anna-Louise Bach–"The Barbie Murders," "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo," and "The Bellman" (the last-named seen in these pages not too long ago)–fuse mystery-writing and science fiction seamlessly. Varley even pulls off a rare fantasy or two, with "Good Intentions" and "The Flying Dutchman."

Idiosyncratic as Varley is, it’s obvious now in retrospect who we should chart as his forebears. Samuel Delany and Theodore Sturgeon for their emotional immediacy, and Heinlein for his lived-in "future mimesis," of course. A closer contemporary who seems allied is James Tiptree, for her blunt and necessary cruelty concerning the workings of an uncaring universe, as channeled by Varley in the fate of a young girl in "Foxtrot Charlie." (Varley even mentions that people assumed for a time that he was the real person hiding behind the Tiptree pen-name.) Exemplifying the burgeoning fascination of 1970s SF with feminism, Varley seems to have learned a bit from Joanna Russ as well.

But more fascinating is to chart Varley’s influence outward. A cover blurb from William Gibson by itself would lead us to retroactively postulate Varley as a proto-cyberpunk. And the stories themselves adequately confirm this, what with their all-seeing Central Computers and frequent jacking-in rituals. The future-tech in these tales remains surprisingly au courant, despite the frequent mention of magnetic tape as a data-storage medium. Plainly now, something like Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985) seems unthinkable without Varley’s ground-breaking work. Some of Varley’s more gonzo moments and hippie attitudes point toward Rudy Rucker’s work as well. And every current postmodern space opera that features a spunky female pilot owes scads to Varley’s female protagonists.

I should mention that all these exceptional fictions are buttressed here by some friendly and generous introductory material constituting a slim autobiography of sorts. Never one to seek a high public profile, Varley finally steps forth to share both personal and literary anecdotes, and proves himself to be as charming in that regard as are his stories.

Varley continues to write, of course, focusing on such fine recent novels as The Golden Globe (1998) and Red Thunder (2003). But the era of his debut, when he so perfectly encapsulated all the exciting potential of a genre in change, is gone, alas. Those of us who were lucky enough to live through it can recapture the excitement in this volume, while younger readers can experience excellent stories that have withstood the test of time. Unluckily for them, however, they will not share in any of the potent nostalgia.

In hindsight, the publishing program known as the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which flourished from 1969 to 1974 under the editorship of Lin Carter, was a seminal moment in the establishment of the fantasy genre. Publishing some sixty volumes, including older core texts by William Morris, Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, and others, as well as newer works, this line of books proved that the earlier success of Tolkien was no fluke, that there was an umbrella term called fantasy–separate from science fiction–which could shelter many different types of non-mimetic literature, and that an eager audience existed for such novels. Unfortunately for the field at large, however, Lin Carter’s catholic tastes and inclusive attitude were swamped by the waves of Tolkien imitators who shortly followed. The many different flavors of fantasy–Peake and Eddison, Hodgson and Mirrlees–were nearly expunged, and commodified fantasy ruled.

In other words, the history of the fantasy genre to date has ironically replicated the plot of The Lord of the Rings itself, omitting the happy ending. The heterogeneous forces of good and light were crushed under the fetid weight of the homogenous tide of profitable repetitiveness.

But lingering in the wreckage there were always survivors who recalled with fondness and aspiration the exotic glories that had perished. China Miéville and his New Weird movement, for one, represent nothing less than an attempt to restore the ancient kingdoms of authentic arcane diversity that once existed in the literature of the fantastic. Many of this small band of crusaders imprinted as youths on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy titles and modeled their fictions not on Tolkien’s but on the canon as preached by Lin Carter.

Recently, a new writer named James Stoddard showed exactly what could be accomplished along these lines with his two-book series The High House (1998) and The False House (2000). Deliberate and loving homages to the Ballantine authors, Stoddard’s books stood out from the pack thanks to their unique settings, characters, themes, and plots.

Now comes one of the first books to pick up from where Stoddard–unfortunately little heard from in several years–laid down his grimoire. No, I’m not about to review Gene Wolfe’s excellent duology, The Knight and The Wizard (both 2004), which also seeks to effect a similar rehabilitation/restoration of fantasy. The author of today’s book is John C. Wright, known primarily for his recent SF trilogy The Golden Age (2002-2003), which exhibited many mythic overtones and a far-future technology that could pass for magic in certain lights. These hints should have led us to predict that Wright might eventually move in the direction of fantasy.

The Last Guardian of Everness (Tor, hardcover, $25.95, 332 pages, ISBN 0312848714) is one of the few books I’ve seen in a while to come with its own author credo on the back dustjacket. There, Wright explicitly states his desire to produce a kind of fantasy that clothes eternal desires and truths in contemporary garb, citing Neil Gaiman and Roger Zelazny as models. Within this fine book–the first of a series–we will indeed see echoes of those two writers, to be sure, but also many clear traces of everyone from William Morris to H.P. Lovecraft.

Wright’s premise is this: on the coast of Maine stands Everness, the High House, a nexus where the realm of dreams intersects with the waking world. For several centuries the Waylock family has been charged with inhabiting the High House and guarding the portal through which many nightmares would like to invade the Earth. At the current time, old Lemuel Waylock and his grandson Galen are the last guardians of this tradition. Peter Waylock–Lemuel’s son, Galen’s dad–has abdicated his responsibilities.

One night Galen hears the tolling of a dream bell that is portended to signal the final battle betwixt the empires of dreams and wakefulness. His grandfather is dubious about the validity of the signal, and does nothing. Galen is forced to venture deep into the territory of dreams, in search of the imprisoned spirit of Azrael de Gray, a traitor to the human cause who yet holds key information. While in the realms of Morpheus, Galen is trapped, Azrael gets loose on Earth, and the battle begins.

Drawn into the fight are two mortals who are more than they seem: Wendy and Raven Varovitch, husband and wife. Wendy possesses fairy blood, while Raven has been blessed by Prometheus himself. When their paths cross that of the Waylocks, they find themselves soldiers in a war whose existence they never suspected.

Wright does several impressive things here, all in a prose style that is simple yet resonant. First, he boldly assembles a hodgepodge, slapdash mythos that lacks the scholarly consistency of, say, Tolkien’s, but which simply feels right and which allows for spectacular "special effects." It’s hard to diagram all the various factions among the supernaturals or assign logical places to them, but that’s hardly the point when Wright’s busy describing storm elementals tearing up the skies over Everness, or hordes of shape-changing seals swarming ashore to topple the walls of the last redoubt. We always see the players vividly, even if we’re not always sure what side they’re on, especially in the case of an elf named Tom of the Lantern.

The same can be said of Wright’s fabulous dream geography, which is the best of its sort since Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1955), an obvious influence. The sights and spectacles Galen encounters during his sleep journeys are riveting and fanciful, without being necessarily one hundred percent lucid. But that, after all, is the nature of dreams.

Finally, Wright invests his human characters with sparkling, charming, empathy-inducing personalities. From the wounded warrior Peter Waylock to the pixilated Wendy to the uxorious Raven–and even including the tormented Azrael de Gray himself–Wright’s protagonists display a full range of emotions and thoughts while yet shadowing forth their mythic templates.

Wright’s book offers much more than sheer weirdness and non-stop action, however. Rife with ethical and spiritual and moral issues, this novel truly seeks to use the fantasy form in deep and uplifting ways. The speech on page 302 by the Shining One constitutes some wise teachings that would not be out of place in an ancient tome by a Tibetan sage.

Like C.S. Lewis of old and Jona-than Carroll of late, Wright has the gift for conveying glimpses of otherworldliness through cracks in the pavement of reality.

First off, let’s establish the gold standard for tales of the faery kingdom. I’d nominate John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981), Yeats’s "The Stolen Child," and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin (1977) as a shortlist of exemplary works that embody and radiate those virtues and pleasures we should expect from stories involving the fey. All three exhibit a kind of melancholy wisdom often tinged with rueful humor. All three evoke a multitudinous world running in parallel with ours. All three speak to ancient dreams yet remain contemporary. All three seek to blend opposites: mankind and nature, loss and gain, naiveté and experience, day and night, and so forth in the great catalog of dichotomies. Any new faery tales should emulate these models, in aspirations if not necessarily in form.

By this gold standard–let’s assign it the value of ten on a scale of one to ten–the new original anthology by noted editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling rates, on the average, about a seven point five. Quite a respect-able score as such projects go.

The book is The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm (Viking, hardcover, $19.99, 528 pages, ISBN 0670059145), and the first thing to note about it is the care and attention and generosity with which it has been assembled. Striking illustrations by Charles Vess grace the beginning of each contribution. A preface, introduction, and bibliography establish a useful scholarly context for this type of tale. Story notes by the authors themselves illuminate the narratives. And the author biographies are comprehensive. The whole forms a handsome package indeed, a book that reminds one of how a little extra attention can turn a simple book into a splendid treasury.

Before discussing the (greater) merits and (lesser) defects of the seventeen stories and three poems, let me briefly describe them.

Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, and Nan Fry contribute the poetry: respectively, "The Boys of Goose Hill," "The Faery Reel," and "How to Find Faery." The first evokes an ecstatic dance, the second a torn heart, and the third the transformation of the mundane into the exotic.

Delia Sherman’s "CATNYP" tracks fairies loose in the New York public library system. "Elvenbrood" by Tanith Lee describes a thwarted fairy abduction of a contemporary teenager. Katherine Vaz’s "Your Garnet Eyes" is set in Brazil, and deals with a fairy of the sea. One of three Asian fairy tales, Gregory Frost’s "Tengu Mountain" finds a traveler beguiled by ghouls, while Kelly Link imports Eastern European legends to America in "The Faery Handbag."

Steve Berman finds fey pickpockets on the loose in Victorian London in "The Price of Glamour." In the second oriental offering, "The Night Market" by Holly Black, we meet a love-besotted Filipino tree spirit. Bruce Glassco’s "Never Never" riffs on Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), with Captain Hook as the abused protagonist. "Screaming for Faeries," by Ellen Steiber finds modern teens plagued by little people, while Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s "Immersed in Matter" is set in a pretechnological past and examines the plight of a fairy lad who loves mortal horses. "Undine," by Patricia McKillip, describes a water elemental trapped by her lover’s political preoccupations.

In "The Oakthing," by Gregory Maguire, an elderly woman faces the assaults of World War One with only a diminutive tree creature for companionship. Hiromi Goto’s "Foxwife" rounds out the trio of far-east tales by recounting what happens when a poor fisherwoman accidentally invades a fairy wedding. A.M. Dellamonica’s "The Dream Eaters" is a futuristic noir about dream-stealing fairies. Bill Congreve presents an Australian slant on the kingdoms of elfin with his "The Shooter at the Heartrock Waterhole," in which a hunter slays a native sprite. Jeffrey Ford’s "The Annals of Eelin-Ok" invents a new type of fairy, one that inhabits sand castles only. Finally, Emma Bull’s "De la Tierra" is a cyberpunkish account of an assassin of fairies in modern Los Angeles.

I think you’ll detect from the brief thumbnails given that Datlow and Windling have worked hard to present a variety of viewpoints and themes and tones and moods in this collection. We meet fairies in the past, the present and in the future. We get tales with happy endings and with sad. We alternate between stories that inhabit the minds of humans encountering fairies, and fairies encountering humans. We hear from writers with legendary track records and from newer voices as well. All in all, then, it would seem that this volume is incredibly heterogeneous. And yet in the end, to my ear, there’s much of a sameness to 90 percent of the stories, and that sameness derives from the language employed and the limited symbolic or narrative role of the fairies.

First, the language. Most of the writers here adopt one of two styles. Either they are relentlessly contemporary–Link, Sherman, Lee, Steiber, Dellamonica, Bull, Congreve –or they fall into a kind of Anderson-Grimm simplified "old-fashioned" prose–Frost, McKillip, Black, Hoffman, Goto. Fairy-tale-speak, this latter style might be called. Both of these modes seem incapable alone of delivering the kind of impactful experience I alluded to with my gold-standard examples. Those who val-iantly apply idiosyncratic styles– Maguire, Glassco, and Vaz–don’t quite hit the mark either, but at least they provide a welcome change from the others. In Vaz’s case, however, the floridity of the prose–I counted seventeen elaborate figures of speech in the first eight paragraphs of her tale–nearly overwhelms the narrative.

As for the more important matter of how the fairies are treated as plot tokens and symbolic effigies, I don’t find the same level of compelling realism that I find in the gold-standard books. The fey here are mostly either used for special-effects value, or as symbolic stand-ins (the Steiber story is particularly egregious in its use of fairies as symbols of teenage sexual awakening). They’re merely tropes. At best, they’re exotic, outlaw personages akin to, say, Tarzan. Now, Tarzan could be majestic and alluring, but in the end he was merely human, lacking the preternatural aura of the gold standard fey tales. The way fairies are used here are entertaining, amusing, and dramatic–but they simply don’t receive the kind of treatment that evokes the frissons of Little, Big.

The one story that redeems all this and illustrates the difference between inspired genius and mere craftsmanship is Jeffrey Ford’s. This mini-saga recounting the entire life-span of one member of a new kind of fairy tribe, a race that inhabits the most temporary and forgettable structures of an oblivious mankind, encapsulates in a mere twenty-five pages the complete pathos of a Lord Dunsany novel. Ford’s afterword reveals that he, to some degree, actually believes in fairies as a representative facet of the cosmos, not as mere ornaments or plot devices. It’s this faith in the essential reality of fairies that irradiates his work, and reveals what the other stories, to lesser or greater degrees, are missing.

The cute petite trim size of Chris-topher Moore’s The Stupidest Angel (William Morrow, hardcover, $14.95, 275 pages, ISBN 0060590254), along with its deliberately banal, goofy cover, might lead the unsuspecting reader to believe that he or she is confronting one of those joyous seasonal fables that proliferate a month or three before the holidays. Even the subtitle– "A heartwarming tale of Christmas terror"–could be construed by the non-ironically inclined as a Reader’s Digest-style tagline for a wholesome saga of obstacles overcome on the path to a sugary Yule. But any reader so unwitting will instead find in this volume one of Moore’s typically demented gonzo comedies, a book that can stand with the film Bad Santa (2003) and any number of episodes of The Simpsons for sheer bad-tasteful, low-living, unsentimental, satirical fun.

Anyone who recognizes Moore’s byline, of course, will be prepped for what’s inside the innocuous covers. Since his debut with Practical Demonkeeping in 1992, down to 2003’s Fluke, Moore has produced seven novels in total, each almost more funny than the last. Besides being a master of comedy–ranging from subtly witty to deadpan to gross-out–Moore is conversant with and respectful of the tropes of fantasy, horror and SF, employing them with brio and panache. Fluke, in fact, rivaled Rudy Rucker for sheer mindbendingness.

This latest book, his eighth, is, I think, not quite the full-throttle successor to Fluke. It’s slighter in substance and effect, breaks no new ground, and in fact recycles characters from previous books. (But then again, Moore has always done that, giving older characters walk-on roles in newer books, thus granting his oeuvre the cohesion of a shared universe.) The Stupidest Angel feels like a holding move before the release of a more substantial work, much in the manner that Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) served as a placemarker between V. (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). That said, the novel is still a robust, solid piece of craftsmanship, delivering all the kicks its minimalist frame can sustain.

We return here to the setting of Pine Cove, California, a venue first encountered in The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove (1999). Pine Cove is the kind of town where the supernatural intersects with the eccentrically human, to unpredictable results. Our principal protagonists today are pothead constable Theo Crowe and his clinically insane but generally medicated wife, Molly Michon, ex B-movie queen. The time is five days before Christmas, and all hell is about to break loose, thanks to a visit from the intelligence-impaired cherub of the title, Raziel, who happens to hail from Moore’s novel about Christ, Lamb (2002). But before any extra-mundane fireworks, there’ll be a murder, several failed love affairs, much drinking of alcohol and smoking of pot, Christmas-tree theft, and an appearance by a man and his pet fruit bat: Tucker Case and Roberto from Island of the Sequined Love Nun (1997).

In short, there’s enough incident to fill three lesser novels, with all of the interlocking subplots recounted in Moore’s patented blend of laugh-out-loud one-liners and rueful mock chastisements of the culture’s excesses. But if you can’t laugh at a zombie who proclaims that brains seasoned with gunpowder taste "peppery," then you’re not Moore material.

The cleverest thing Moore does here, however, is to subtly and lovingly parody various Xmas classics. The way Theo and Molly sacrifice to buy each other semi-imperfect gifts recalls, of course, O. Henry’s "The Gift of the Magi." The whole "evil developer" riff harks back to It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). And the ritual celebration known to the Pine Cove folks as "Lonesome Christmas," with its improbably huge pine tree, echoes A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) in wickedly skewed fashion. In its own mocking, jeering way, this book actually captures the real spirit of Christmas–a time of regrets, bumblings, longings, disappointments, and stress that somehow often coheres into fondly remembered magic–better than many a "serious" volume. Touched (inappropriately) by an angel, indeed!