Del Rey, Bantam, Ace

This is about books that were exotic and cheap. American fantasy novels that had gaudier, tackier, more glorious colours than had the books in British shops. Some of these books never came out in this country at all. The only place they could be got was in remainder shops. Stacked twenty deep with a hole punched in the top right hand corner of the cover. They smelled of wood pulp and a weird damp smell. The smell of ships’ holds, maybe. They brought with them a whiff of Atlantic cold and dark. Like books brought up from the bottom of the sea. The pages’ edges were stained with green and yellow ink sometimes.

Del Rey, Bantam and Ace Fantasy novels. In the late eighties, early nineties, there was a bookshop on the corner of the market place in Darlington. It had stripped pine floorboards and loads of stuff you’d never want to buy: romances and picture books about babies and the Royal family and stuff. But there was a central table with stacks of imported paperbacks. Fantasy, horror, sci-fi. From Del Rey, Bantam and Ace. 70p a pop. It was a chance to sample writers you’d never heard of. It was a glimpse of a vast array of genre fiction. Those lists in the front and backs of these books were mind-boggling. Those alluring and crazy blurbs about books you hoped to see remaindered too.

Four of my favourites are scanned above. I’ve read Jonathan Carroll’s ‘The Land of Laughs’ five, maybe six times. A man obsessed with a kids’ book writer – a writer of strange picture books, rather like Gorey or Sendak - sets off to complete his set of first editions and ends up with far more than he bargained for. We get a journey into dark Americana, a true small town experience with touches of twisted Gothic fantasy and some lovely, unshowy reflections on the craft of writing and biography. Something pulls me back to this book every couple of years or so. I’ve read other Carrolls and some come close to having the same charm for me, but not in the same way.

‘Tea with the Black Dragon’ is a San Francisco-based fantasy techno-thriller, underscored by Chinese mythology and an air of genteel strangeness and good humour. Another one I’ve read repeatedly – and I was delighted to find there was a sequel, too.

I loved Jon De Cles’s ‘The Particolored Unicorn’ back in 1991 or whenever it was I first read it. It’s a freewheeling picaresque fantasy romp, with lots of comedy and mad invention. A bit like ‘The Princess Bride’, in a way. When I reread it last summer I found his website and discovered that he was just about to publish the sequel, all these years later, and I was cockahoop.

And then David and Leigh Eddings’ Belgariad series, with which I was obsessed the summer I was fifteen. I would buy one every day, running out of book at the end of each night and having to dash out the next day for the next in the sequence. This, the second one, is still my favourite: with all that sinister stuff with the snaky queen in the southern swamplands… and the frightening sequence when the young hero Garion kills one of the baddies simply with his touch… burning him into dust and making him realise what powers he really has. Those Eddings books were very soapy, and that was why I liked them – all the aunts and uncles and characters you could recognise.

These books come from a time when there was less fantasy, generally, in UK bookshops. Now you can barely get moved for it. I feel a bit blasé about goblins and mermaids and quests that begin with tattered old maps and end in dark towers. Perhaps it seems a bit easy to get hold of these days.

I preferred it when fantasy was darkly comic, sometimes sinister and hard to get hold of, rather than earnest, ubiquitous, and family friendly.