The shelves are groaning here at Casa DiFi beneath the weight of innumerable newly minted small-press books. So without further procrastination, here’s the latest installment of our regular survey.

Anyone who has seen the surreal French animated film Fantastic Planet (1973) will have a good idea of the kinds of off-kilter excitements to be found in Rachel Armstrong’s The Gray’s Anatomy (Serpent’s Tail, trade paper, $15.00, 240 pages, ISBN 1852426357). Blending Stanislaw Lem, Doris Lessing, and Barrington Bayley into a heady brew, Armstrong tells the story of a human-alien cosmos revamped by a new paradigm of physics, outdoing even quantum concepts in its outré implications. On the planet Rune 66, whose inhabitants resemble the classic UFO Gray aliens, one individual named the Chronicler manages to transport himself to a "time planet," a kind of interzone where human bodies lie in stasis. The Chronicler’s experiments with these weird beings–Homo sapiens and beyond–are broadcast psychically back to Rune 66, altering the destiny of the entire planet. Armstrong employs a deadpan, quasi-scientific affect that makes the narrative all the stranger. This book definitely earns a place in the library of SF oddities.

How exciting to discover an early fantasist overlooked in the canonical history of SF! Such is the thrill provided with the publication of Paul Scheerbart’s The Gray Cloth (MIT Press, hardcover, $24.95, 143 pages, ISBN 0262194600). Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a polymathish member of the German avant-garde with a fixation on, among other things, glass architecture. Viewing this new technology as offering utopian possibilities, Scheerbart wrote several narratives that sought to embody his vision of the idyllic future. The Gray Cloth, issued in 1914, was his magnum opus. Cloth follows the career of one Edgar Krug, master of glass architecture in the mid-twentieth century, as he flits about the globe in his private airship with his wife, Clara, herself an accomplished musician on the "tower organ." A combination of Bluebeard, Donald Trump, and Rupert Murdoch, Krug demands that his wife dress always and only in shades of gray, so as to better serve as a foil to his highly colored glass buildings. But after encountering the half-mad ruler of some islands off Oman, a Chinese eccentric named Li-Tung, Krug relents and lets color back into his marital life. Through a series of business triumphs and catastrophes we follow Krug in a tale whose prose and plot read like a melding of the works of Hugo Gernsback and Alfred Bester. Until you have experienced such scenes as the party thrown by Li-Tung, where "a hundred women of all races on earth danced a colorful serpentine dance on . . . majolica parquet," you haven’t fully understood the kind of weird gropings toward what would become genre SF that the early twentieth century churned up. And thanks are owed to John A. Stuart for his in-depth annotations and captivating translation.

Dark Regions Press has issued a remarkable little novelette by Ken Wisman entitled Eden (chapbook, $4.95, 48 pages, ISBN 1-888993-24-3), which tells the tale of a group of life-artificers set down on a virgin planet with the goal of building an esthetically pleasing subcreation out of living matter. But the originator of the project, Calif De’Alsace, does not reckon with a rogue artist named Amendi, whose idea of beauty involves grotesques and blood. Narrated in part by a woman named Alepha, this tale combines the eccentricities of David Lindsay with the far-future ambiance of Olaf Stapledon. And Wisman’s first-person prologue and epilogue, which speak seemingly "truthfully" of the role a nameless psychedelic drug played in the composition of this story, add a further level of delicious unreality to the whole affair.

Did you know that the official currency of Hell is the Canadian dollar? That’s just one of the bizarre tidbits about the infernal realm unveiled in Brett Savory’s The Distance Travelled (Prime, hardcover, $30.00, 102 pages, ISBN 0-9668968-5-8), which reads like a madcap combination of Joe Lansdale and C. S. Lewis–if you can wrap your mind around that! One of Hell’s more hapless inhabitants, an ex-tough guy named Stuart, finds himself coerced by some of Hell’s less scrupulous citizens into abetting a breakout into the world of the living. What with flying pigs, the Lake of Sorrows, and the Flame Pit Thing, the path to freedom is far from smooth. Stuart’s several nasty new deaths do not contribute to success either. With a kind of South Park sensibility, Savory proves that rude, redneck humor will flourish even where the temperature is "four billion, one million, six hundred and fifty-two thousand, four hundred and twenty-one point seven degrees Celsius."

Two horror novels on hand exhibit uncommon restraint and ingenuity. First comes Island Life (Barclay Books, trade paper, $15.95, 245 pages, ISBN 1931402205) by William Meikle. A lonely island in the Scottish Hebrides, sparsely tenanted, is host to an archaeological expedition intent on opening on old barrow. But the scientists are not prepared for a surviving colony of murderous monsters led by a mad Atlantean priest named Calent. As the released creatures swamp the island, slaughtering livestock and people alike, the humans find themselves first trying to understand the threat, then combat it with few resources save their courage and wits. A female innkeeper named Anne, her grown daughter Meg, and a researcher named Duncan prove to be pivotal to meeting the threat. Meikle has an engaging, sturdy prose style. And his familiarity with the terrain and culture of his setting contributes to a lively tale, where the inevitable bloodshed has more of an old-fashioned Richard Matheson feel to it than a Stephen King texture.

Tom Piccirilli’s The Night Class (ShadowLands Press, hardcover, $34.95, 247 pages, ISBN 1930595026) is a beast of a different color. Its academic setting–a nameless college where the hushed-up murder of a student is merely the tip of a bloody iceberg–couldn’t be further removed from the Hebrides, yet Piccirilli’s talent renders this familiar venue just as exotically interesting as Meikle’s. Our protagonist, Caleb Prentiss, boasts a collection of helpful oddball friends who nonetheless cannot aid him in his obsessive quest to discover the secrets that underlie his school. The ridiculous Professor Yokver, a senile Dean and his wife, brutish security guards–Caleb must run a gauntlet of these figures, all while a case of bleeding stigmata threatens to overwhelm him. In equating education with a deliberate descent into madness, Piccirilli may have revealed a secret that will mark him for elimination by the SAT people everywhere.

PS Publishing continues to pour forth novellas of outstanding merit (available in limited hardcover format, as well as the paperback versions cited here). Three are on hand this time.

In Diamond Dogs (trade paper, $14.00, 111 pages, ISBN 1-902880-26-9), Alastair Reynolds combines the Byronic brio of Zelazny with the frosty intellectual prowess of Martin Gardner to form a tale of blood and brainpower. On a world named Golgotha, a single alien artifact–the Blood Spire–challenges a party of explorers to solve its mysteries, or die trying. Our viewpoint character is Richard Swift, a wealthy expert on alien psychologies (all in theory, since Reynolds’s universe hosts no actual aliens). Along with four others, Swift is co-opted by one Roland Childe into taking part in the assault on the Spire, and by the tale’s end he finds himself transfigured both bodily and mentally. This passion play about the seduction of intellectual puzzles, stoked by overweening pride, offers nonstop thrills.

In his previous two novels, Adam Roberts has shown himself concerned with harsh environments, wartime conditions, and the fate of innocents smashed between them. These themes figure into his newest, Park Polar (trade paper, $14.00, 109 pages, ISBN 1-902880-28-5). In a dystopic future, where an overpopulated globe is ruled by Companies so generic they are identified only by numbers, the arctic and antarctic wildernesses are being exploited as refuges for genetically engineered animals. Our protagonist, Dr. McCullough, trying to establish a colony of snow kangaroos, finds herself at the center of fatal treachery among the small crew of her fellow scientists. Like John Campbell’s "Who Goes There?" without aliens, this chilly excursion into the psychoses of isolated individuals lays bare the existential terrors confronting humanity.

Ken Macleod’s The Human Front (trade paper, $14.00, 75 pages, ISBN 1-902880-30-7) provides various satisfactions of many stripes. The tale begins as a straightforward uchronia, and there’s much pleasure to be had in MacLeod’s evocation of the jarring yet mundane touchstones of his alternate history. In this timeline, WWII devolved into a global battle between communists and imperialists, a war still raging into the 1960s and 1970s. John Matheson, whom we first encounter as a child, grows up to become a communist partisan fighting in the hills of Scotland. But when he manages to bring down one of the USA’s strange UFOish bombers, his tale broadens out into a truly multiversal saga with cosmic frissons. MacLeod’s trademark political savvy gets a good workout here, but he never lets his poly-sci get in the way of good ol’ sci-fi wonderment.

With Any Time Now (Cosmos Books, trade paper, $15.00, 161 pages, ISBN 1587153289), Chris Butler delivers a charming timeslip romance that is also reminiscent of Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963). Our heroine, Kate Chapman, is living a lonely life after the death of her husband Patrick some years prior in a terrorist bombing. Onto her doorstep one day lands a mysterious stranger named Joe, who proves to be a time-traveler from the year 2205. Joe and Kate fall in love, but the very firm Kate works for–Scholman Research, affiliated with the military–becomes aware of Joe and wants his secrets. Add in a neighborhood maniac named George Hurley who conceives a grudge against Kate, and the recipe is complete for suspense. Butler’s writing is quietly effective, and his easygoing dialogue among the supporting cast provides a naturalistic feel to this tale of paradoxes and cross-temporal love.

With utmost ease, I can picture Chris Amies’s Dead Ground (Big Engine Press, trade paper, £8.99, 222 pages, ISBN 1-903468-01-9) as a classic B&W film from 1931, the year in which the action of this novel takes place. Young artist Allen Delmar, eager yet innocent member of an archaeological expedition to the Polynesian islands known as the Condals, might be played by Alan Ladd. The gruff and obsessive leader of the expedition, Cosima Garton, could be brought to life by a starchy Katherine Hepburn. The besotted representative of British authority on the islands might be a good role for David Niven. Monty Woolley could pull off the mysterious Doctor Shand. And the exotic young native girl would surely go to Ida Lupino. But whatever your imaginary cast, this tale of demonic transgressions and heroism possesses enough H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson verve and verisimilitude to capture your imagination. Faced with an angry rampaging god who turns his followers into nonhuman killers, Allen must go native, under the tutelage of his Polynesian paramour Ata, and the results are truly thrilling.

Curiously enough, we have here a second book involving a visitor to a haunted isle and his hostile reception by the locals, but this time set much closer to home (my home, anyway). Joseph Citro’s Lake Monsters (University Press of New England, trade paper, $14.95, 248 pages, ISBN 0-58465-110-5) concerns the relocation of Harrison Allen, failed businessman, to Friar’s Island in Vermont’s Lake Champlain. Allen has fixated on the notion of finding "Champy," the monster reputedly living in the Lake, as a means of remaking his life into something more glamorous. Aided by his newfound lover, schoolteacher Nancy Wells, Allen begins to discern an old supernatural mystery amongst the townspeople that is much more disturbing than his cryptozoological prey. Citro’s insidiously beguiling style is as dangerously attractive as deadly nightshade, and this tale, which creatively echoes HPL’s "The Dunwich Horror," easily joins the ranks of classic New England chillers.

Manly Wade Wellman possessed a quiet dignity, a sly wit, an infallible ethical compass, and a fertile sense of invention. All these qualities are on display in the latest volume of his collected works, Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales (Night Shade Books, hardcover, $35.00, 300 pages, ISBN 1892389215). These eight stories, several at novella length, chronicle mostly smalltown, backwoods weirdnesses, although "Black Drama," with its New York City beginning and Hollywood background, brings to mind some of Fritz Leiber’s cosmopolitan scenarios. A simple preacher named Jaeger stars in a handful of the pieces, while the more worldly Judge Pursuivant dominates the rest (save for one story that features neither, "For Love of a Witch," and has never been previously reprinted in over sixty years). Wellman could make even a pack of killer rabbits creepy, as in "The Dreadful Rabbits," and these stories–lovingly assembled by John Pelan, with a nostalgic introduction by Stephen Jones–hold as much enchantment today as they did during Wellman’s pulp heyday.

Does Jack Vance have any acolytes today, or is he too much the nonpareil to inspire followers? Michael Shea emulates Vance, and Gene Wolfe has declaimed his own fealty to the Dying Earth books. But not many other authors spring to mind as adherents to Vance’s meticulous and vibrant style of fantasy.

One final name allied to Vance’s, however, should be known to all discerning readers: World Fantasy Award-winner Jeff VanderMeer. Over recent years, VanderMeer has been focusing his major fictions on his intriguing city of Ambergris, where a race of aboriginal fungoid creatures plague the ultra-sophisticated human inhabitants of the eerie metropolis by the River Moth. Published in small editions, the Ambergris stories have been hard to track down until now. City of Saints and Madmen (Cosmos Books, trade paper, $15.00, 220 pages, ISBN 1587154366) collects the four main entries in the series, three novellas and a short story.

"Dradin, In Love" tells of the fateful infatuation of Dradin the priest for a woman only half-glimpsed. "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, by Duncan Shriek" is a mock-historical text on the founding of the city. "The Transformation of Martin Lake" follows the ups and downs of one of Ambergris’s most famous artists and his music-composer nemesis. Finally, "The Strange Case of X" takes a metafictional stance on the creation of Ambergris, as we interview a man who claims to have invented the whole world.

VanderMeer owes allegiance to other masters besides Vance, including Borges and Nabokov, and his prose reflects the high standards of his mentors. His sentences are beautifully crafted, somber yet gripping. The level of particularity with which VanderMeer invests his creation is high, and the reader is soon able to see the very cobbles of the Religious Quarter, or mentally shop the aisles of Hoegbotton and Sons. Wandering the dangerous streets of Ambergris is akin to inhabiting a waking dream, and VanderMeer deserves many more visitors to his subcreation, which this edition will hopefully draw.

Subtitled "A Triskaidecollection of Queer and Weird Stories," Steve Berman’s Trysts (Lethe Press, trade paper, $13.00, 148 pages, ISBN 159021000X) delivers dark fantasy of varying degrees of gay eroticism. His prose somber, melancholy, and polished, Berman achieves subtle effects in a nighted palette reminiscent of this description from the opening story: "The shades of dark gray and black were all new, perhaps had never even been named before." From the Poesque "The Resurrectionist" to the Lovecraftian "Path of Corruption," Berman reinvigorates old tropes with a modern queer sensibility. Several stories take place in a deracinated urban venue known as the Fallen Area, and this homage to the Bellona of Delany’s Dhalgren (1975) proves effective and enticing.

Although Élisabeth Vonarburg’s Slow Engines of Time (Tesseract Books, trade paper, $11.95, 186 pages, ISBN 1895836301) was released in the year 2000, I’m just catching up with it now, and I’m very grateful I finally did. This strong collection–whose stories were published, with a single exception, between 1979 and 1986–reveals Vonarburg to be an important, albeit unacknowledged part of the cyberpunk revolution, its non-American wing, so to speak. Her five grimly beautiful tales of the near-future city Baïblanca, the capital of Euroafrica on a drowning Earth, evoke such fellow travelers as Delany, Ballard, Coney, and Gibson, while the three stories focused on the Centre, a jumping off spot for multiversal explorers, summon up thoughts of Le Guin and Bishop. But Vonarburg has an unmistakable style and set of themes all her own, dealing mainly with female protagonists who are outsiders to the systems they reluctantly endorse, and her world-weary yet hopeful sensibilities offer a much-needed alternative fierce voice in SF’s chorus.

The noirish world of Greg Gifune, on display in Heretics (Delirium Books, trade paper, $20.00, 215 pages, ISBN 1929653182), is filled with confused souls leading mistake-filled lives that lead to blood and damnation. Not the most enticing of worlds, by my lights, but Gifune’s skills at least do honor to his vision, as he crafts well-made tales that all function as one-way slippery slopes to wretched endings. In "Restoration," a good cop who makes one fatal mistake is plagued by guilt and a ghost until he is pushed over the final edge. This stern Calvinism imbues such narratives with a ghastly force.

Piercing ghost stories, classic high fantasy, surreal excursions, postmodern fairytales–all these types of stories and more (including several items original to this volume) can be found in Mary Soon Lee’s Winter Shadows and Other Tales (Dark Regions press, trade paper, $11.95, 148 pages, ISBN 1888993235). Lee writes with disarming simplicity yet manages to capture complex emotions within her compact stories. Echoes of Fritz Leiber and Tanith Lee resound here and there, but a story such as "Conversation Pieces," where a woman is plagued by the vociferous demands of her common possessions, bears the hallmarks of only one person, the accomplished Mary Soon Lee.

A lively sword-and-sorcery tale opens up James Dorr’s Strange Mistresses (Dark Regions, trade paper, $12.95, 198 pages, ISBN 1888993227), but this story represents just one arrow in Dorr’s literary quiver. Contemporary spook yarns, historical fantasies of many lands and eras, oriental fables–all these and more benefit from Dorr’s skilled touch. In a piece such as "The Candle Room," where a modern white witch’s waxy magic opens up her lover to danger, Dorr manages to balance both darkness and light. Additionally, in a selection of poems, he reveals himself to be a fine versifier as well.

The sea runs like a dark motif through many of the accomplished tales in Brian Hopkins’s Salt Water Tears (Dark Regions, trade paper, $12.95, 198 pages, ISBN 1888993219). Whether it’s the mangrove swamps of "Crocodile Gods," where a suspenseful contest between a wo-man and a beast plays out, or the ocean across which the pirate Captain Laguerre ferries a mysterious woman in "Wisteria," the elemental mysteries of the depths inform Hopkins’s neatly wrought chillers. Even the tawdry glitz of Fort Lauderdale is transformed, in a story such as "Sand King," into immemorial creepiness.

Darrell Schweitzer has had a string of strong story collections appear over the past couple of years, a topic he addresses in the afterword to his latest, The Great World and the Small (Cosmos Books, trade paper, $16.00, 171 pages, ISBN 1587153459). Filled with humor and pathos, plunging across the stylistic map from Lord Dunsany to Conan Doyle, from Ron Goulart to T.H. White, this book collects stories mostly from the nineties, and consequently reflects Schweitzer’s established, mature skills. But even the trio of stories from the seventies that revolve around an unkillable sorcerer named Etelven Thios show the author to be a fellow well acquainted with the genre’s history, and also able to make old dogs sit up and do new tricks.

In the grand tradition of Gregory Benford, Arthur Clarke and, yes, Jack London, Bud Sparhawk delivers stirring tales of the rigors and challenges to be faced on the frontier of the solar system. Dancing with Dragons (Wildside Press, trade paper, $15.95, 253 pages, ISBN 1587154315) collects four long stories from Analog, plus one original, all set in a common future where human activity around Jupiter and its satellites involves dealing with Europa-quakes and Jovian storms. Sparhawk’s characters are all bold and courageous, without being unreal supermen, and he has a flair for conveying widescreen action.

Here’s a unique concept for a book: four authors who form a kind of clubby cabal of dedicated journeymen eager for wider exposure will pool their efforts into a single volume, a kind of joint assault on the ramparts of horror fiction publishing. The result is 4 x 4 (Delirium Books, trade paper, $18.00, 185 pages, ISBN 1929653204), a decidedly splatterpunkish assemblage of eight stories, some solo outings, some shifting collaborations among Michael Oliveri, Geoff Cooper, Brian Keene, and Michael T. Huyck, Jr. Rude and vigorous, brawling and nasty, these stories exhibit a shared sensibility somewhere on the pop spectrum near the rock groups Korn and Limp Bizkit. Keene’s "Earthworm Gods" is actually somewhat restrained in its depiction of a rainy apocalypse, and the story most to my own tastes. But the others deserve a fair amount of commendation for their bloody bravado.

British editors L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims exhibit a sensibility I like. Old-fashioned yet not blind to contemporary trends, they have a gift for selecting timeless tales that range across the map of creepiness. Their books do not pander, insult or outrage, but instead simply deliver subtle chills and shivers. Their new series is entitled Darkness Rising, and volumes I and II are now available from Cosmos Books. The stories in Volume I, Night’s Soft Pains (trade paper, $12.00, 142 pages, ISBN 1587154064), are generally shorter than those in Volume II, Hideous Dreams (trade paper, $12.00, 177 pages, ISBN 1-58715-445-5), but otherwise the books are much alike. New writers consort with more-established ones, and each author carves out a small parcel of spookiness. In Volume I, I particularly enjoyed "Old Lady Cat-Trash" by Rain Graves and Mark McLaughlin, an excursion into Southern Gothic nastiness. One standout from Volume II was Rhys Hughes’s "The Century Just Gone," which finds two sleazy true-crime freaks meeting justice in an appropriate manner. And the excellent Victorian reprints in each volume–"Marriot’s Monkey" by Howard Jones and "The Black Statue" by Huan Mee–tie these books into a long and proud lineage of ghostly narratives.

Several SF poets, employing a variety of styles, arrive with new books this roundup. The prodigious and powerful Bruce Boston alone has three: Quanta (Miniature Sun Press, chapbook, $8.00, 64 pages, ISBN 0-9676666-1-9) is especially notable for Boston’s informative forewords and an autobiographical essay, "The Making of a Speculative Poet." My favorite poem here is, admittedly, one of the slighter ones: "Old Robots Are the Worst," where humor leavens a portrait of cyber-decrepitude. In Far Pale Clarity (Quixsilver Press, broadside, $4.00, ISBN 0961576804) traverses several vivid surreal landscapes colored by shifting hues of emotion. And White Space (Dark Regions Press, trade paper, 90 pages, ISBN 1-888993-20-0) functions almost as a sampler of Boston’s astonishing output, with entries ranging from horror to SF to contemporary. "My Wife Returns As She Would Have It" affectingly recounts an epiphanical experience related to the sad passing of Boston’s spouse, Maureen. Longtime readers of this magazine will easily recognize the byline of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, whose poetry graced these pages in their earliest days. Now assembled in Improbable Bestiary (Wildside Press & Zadok Allen: Publisher, trade paper, $15.00, 158 pages, ISBN 1587154722), MacIntyre’s formalistically accomplished poems exhibit a lighthearted air of pleasure in their composition. Something like "The Bump in the Night" shows a positively Seussian flair for wordplay. And several short stories are included as lagniappe. Finally, Linda Addison’s Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes (Space & Time, trade paper, $7.00, 56 pages, ISBN 0917053133), a strong sophomore effort, contains such gems as "The Morpheus Calculation," which postulates a redemptive apocalypse in shimmering, subtle lines.

Artists Boris Vallejo and his accomplished ex-pupil Julie Bell possess such similar bravura styles that it’s only natural they should share a book–or in fact, two. From Thunder’s Mouth Press arrives, first, Superheroes (trade paper, $24.95, 160 pages, ISBN 1560253398), which features over 170 images of characters from the universe of Marvel Comics. Originally issued as trading cards, these colorful, action-heavy paintings now benefit from large-scale reproduction and knowledgeable captioning by author Nigel Suckling. Anyone familiar with the canonical representations of such characters as the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange will relish the panel-busting reinterpretations offered here. Sketchbook (hardcover, $34.95, 160 pages, ISBN 1560253479) discloses a gentler side to the duo, for among the archetypical struggling barbarians and cavorting centaur maidens we find some contemplative nature studies. Filled with textual insights into their creative processes, this book should inspire the budding artist as well as enchant the dedicated fan of the Frazetta School of Painting.

Recently here I praised a book focusing on the career of comics artist Carmine Infantino. Now we have a similar volume devoted to Gil Kane, a name linked with the Silver Age of DC Comics as firmly as Infantino’s. Gil Kane: The Art of the Comics (Hermes Press, trade paper, $29.99, 185 pages, ISBN 0971031126) does not feature as many color plates as the Infantino volume, but even the B&W art is arrestingly beautiful. Daniel Herman’s text–a tad on the stuffy side, but scrupulously supportive and detailed, nonetheless–follows Kane from his earliest work in the 1940s right up to the final drawings he did nearly on his deathbed. (Kane died in January 2000.) The portrait of the artist that emerges is a touching one, limning a humble creator always half doubtful of his own stature. The book closes with an interview with Kane, and his final comment therein–although a little disjointed–stands as one of the best descriptions of artistic devotion I’ve yet seen: "It’s like some intricate effort and years after everyone’s lost interest in looking at it you’re still stuck with working it through and find that it keeps evolving and evolving enough to keep your mind and personality occupied to the point where it becomes, besides from your family, my chief preoccupation."

Classy graphic novels arrive this time from two firms with large programs and backlists that demand your attention. Raptors III (NBM, trade paper, $10.95, unpaginated, ISBN 1561632988), by the team of Dufaux and Marini, continues the saga of warring vampire clans in current New York. Brother and sister Drago and Camilla battle alone against the plans of their undying peers to reduce all of humanity to cattle. One highlight: an aerial swordfight between Drago and a mysterious newcomer named Akeba that parallels the wonders of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Erotic and bloody by turns, this sumptuously rendered urban nightmare is proving to have legs as long as Camilla’s. Meanwhile, in another corner of the NBM multiverse, a sexy, tough-gal elf named Meg–who fancies wearing a derby, a thong bikini and backless chaps that reveal her pert bare butt–is risking her life as a bounty hunter in the thrillingly hilarious Far West (trade paper, $13.95, unpaginated, ISBN 156163297X). Richard Moore provides both script and B&W art, both of which are never cluttered or fussy, but rather a refinement of conventional mainstream comics styles. Meg’s partner is a non-anthropomorphic intelligent bear named Phil (Phil has a little trouble holding his shotgun, and won’t disgrace himself by running on all fours in mud), and together they make a delightful hash out of all the Old West clichés. NBM’s third offering is Amnesia (trade paper, $9.95, 64 pages, ISBN 1561632961), by John Malloy. Black and white art reminiscent of Ben Katchor’s, mingled with photomontages, conveys a surreal tale involving Chloe, a journalist, and her subject, Ike Reuben, renaissance man, who suffers from a strange kind of narcolepsy that brings him into contact with otherworldly visitors. The melancholy tone of their odd interactions is brought to a seemingly tragic ending, which is torqued toward hopefulness by its epilogue.

Humanoids Publishing USA is a branch of the French firm Les Humanoïdes Associés, and consequently focuses on European art in impeccable translations. From Cloud 99: Memories Part One (hardcover, $14.95, unpaginated, ISBN 1930652003) by an artist-writer named Yslaire is a Pynchonesque tale of an elderly psychologist named Eva Stern who begins to receive strange angelic transmissions over the internet, transmissions which seem to sketch a hidden history of the twentieth century revolving around her long-missing brother, Frank. The effectively moody art recalls that of Bill Sienkiewicz, and is alluringly enigmatic. Further installments of this tale will be much anticipated. Created by the legendary Moebius, Humanoids’ ongoing series, The Metabarons, is now in the masterful hands of scripter Alexandro Jodorowsky and artist Juan Gimenez, whose distinctive style bears a keen debt to Moebius’s. The first volume, Path of the Warrior (trade paper, $14.95, 160 pages, ISBN 193065247X), recounts the origin of the powerful Metabarons clan on the backward mining planet Marmola, while the second, Blood and Steel (trade paper, $14.95, 136 pages, ISBN 1-930652-24-0) pursues the fate of subsequent generations. A titanic space opera reminiscent of Herbert, van Vogt, Asimov, Lem, and Cordwainer Smith, this insanely detailed opus–both the half-limned backstory and the dense artwork provide endless fascinations–is certainly the richest SF work in the history of comics. When you factor in the merits of The Incal, a linked series, then Jodorowsky and Gimenez surely deserve to sweep all the plaudits the SF genre has to offer.

Barclay Books, 6161 51st Street, St. Petersburg, FL 33715. Big Engine Books, POB 185, Abingdon, OX14 1GR, United Kingdom. Cosmos Books, POB 301, Holicong, PA 18928. Dark Regions Press, POB 1558, Brentwood, CA 94513. Delirium Books, POB 338, North Webster, IN 46555. The Fortress of Words, 1705 Leestown Road, #1201, Lexington, KY 40511. Hermes Press, 2100 Wilmington Road, Neshannock, PA 16105. Humanoids Publishing <www.humanoids-publishing.com>. Lethe Press, 102 Heritage Avenue, Maple Shade, NJ 08052. Miniature Sun Press, POB 11002, Napa Valley, CA 94581. NBM <www.nbmpublishing.com>. Night Shade Books, 501 South Willamette Street, Newberg, OR 97132. PS Publishing, 1 Hamilton House, 4 Park Avenue, Harrogate, England HG2 9BQ. Quixsilver Press, POB 746, Biglerville, PA 17307. Prime, POB 36503, Canton, OH 44735. Serpent’s Tail, 255 West 108th Street, Suite 9D1, NY, NY 10025. ShadowLands Press, POB 2366, Centreville, VA 20122. Space & Time, 138 West 70th Street, 4B, NY, NY 10023. Spilt Milk Press, POB 421, South Bound Brook, NJ 08880. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 161 Williams Street, 16th Floor, NY, NY 10038. University Press of New England, 23 South Main Street, Hanover, NH 03755. Wildside Press, POB 301, Holicong, PA 18928.