Search Worlds Without End

A woman returns to wreak end-of-the-world vengeance on her Pennsylvania hometown

Disfigured since birth, Joanie Musser has endured decades of taunts and torments from the "normals" in Hoadley, Pennsylvania. Her only friend is a boy named Barry Beal, who has an ugly birthmark on his face. A few days after Barry lends her $500 and his welder's mask, Joanie disappears.

Cally Wilmore, a vaguely discontented mother of two and the wife of the local funeral director, sees Joanie first: a breathtaking blond apparition galloping through town on a white steed.

Rebel and resident cynic Gigi Wildasin senses that something peculiar is happening. The cicadas are crying out of season--modern-day locusts who swarm the town bearing dead children's faces--and a blacksnake appears next to the most beautiful and erotic naked man anyone has ever seen. Cally and Gigi, along with Shirley Danyo and her lover, Elspeth, all ride horses to escape their everyday lives, unaware that they are the Four Horsewomen of doom. A familiar stranger has come to Hoadley with a terrible purpose, and for the inhabitants of this struggling coal-mining community, it seems that Judgment Day is nigh.

An allegorical novel about small-town prejudice and the secrets that fester beneath the surface, Apocalypse is also about the power of love to triumph against all odds.

The young virgin Cerilla has been brought to the Sacred Isle as consortfor one hourof the Summer King Arlen before he is to be gruesomely sacrificed in the Winter-King ritual. Trying to escape, Cerilla meets Arlen and they fall in love. Arlen's companion Lonn offers to trick the priestesses and take Arlen's place, allowing the lovers to flee. Lonn's gift has its price, however, as his spirit follows the runaways through harsh and fantastic lands to the home they establish beyond the Mountains of Mystery. When Lonn, in the shape of Cerilla's new baby, announces he will claim her as his own bride, Cerilla consults the Oracle and abandons the babe. Later, she risks Arlen's love and tracks the baby to the Afterworld, braving the Goddess's wrath but eventually earning her protection.

Winner of the Word Weaving Award for Excellence: The stories and poems in this fantasy collection explore the enchanted realms of the imagination--and our universal need for love and acceptance.

The title character of "The Boy Who Plaited Manes" is a nameless mute at a royal stable who teaches his abusive noble master an unforgettable lesson. Gage undergoes a transformation in the "Bard" as he strums a silver harp and dreams of horses and a lost love. In "Bright-Eyed Black Pony," the reclusive sorcerer Wystan devises a plan to help a despairing young prince. Pregnant wife Lin Burke has just moved to a backwater coal town in Pennsylvania and is about to meet her very unusual neighbor in "Primal Cry." The title story is told in two parts: "Chance" and "The Golden Face of Fate." As Lord's Warden, it is the orphaned bastard Chance's job to keep the vast forest of Wirral safe from poachers, spies, and the occasional murderer. But other creatures dwell here. They are the Denizens, whose tiny faces disappear in the blink of an eye, and who are never spoken of by name. They see and know all, including the truth about Chance's love for the beautiful, unattainable Lady Halimeda--and the final, terrible secret of Wirral.

Other pieces feature female wolves, dog-kings, and sun kings. In poems and prose of grief and atonement, hope, healing, and lost faith, Springer mines the magic that makes us human.

Table of Contents:

• Chance - (1987) - novella
• The Golden Face of Fate - novella
• The Wolf Girl Speaks - (1982) - poem
• The Boy Who Plaited Manes - (1986) - shortstory
• The Bard - shortstory
• Bright-Eyed Black Pony - (1985) - shortstory
• Come In - (1982) - poem
• The Prince Out of the Past - (1985) - shortstory
• Amends: A Tale of the Sun Kings - (1983) - shortstory
• The Dog-King of Vaire - (1982) - shortstory
• We Build a Shrine - poem
• Primal Cry - novelette

Once upon a time there was a middle-aged woman whose husband dumped her the month after their twentieth anniversary...

Divorced, overweight Buffy Murphy is not a happy camper. One April afternoon, she walks into the woods... and meets a talking bullfrog. He asks her to kiss him so he can transform back into his princely self. This being modern-day Pennsylvania, Buffy figures she's better off with a talking amphibian than a cheating husband, so she takes him home. The fun really starts when her rebellious teenage daughter, Emily, kisses him.

Suddenly, Emily and her handsome prince have vanished into the land of Fair Peril, an enchanted realm that can only be accessed through a portal in the local mall. Aided by a gay librarian named LeeVon and hindered by her fairy-godmother-in-law, Fay, Buffy shuttles back and forth between the real world and Fair Peril. Does Emily really want to be rescued, or does she just need someone to love her? It's up to Buffy to figure out the key to reclaiming her daughter--and maybe herself, as well.

Going through a messy mid-life crisis, forty-year-old wife and mother Larque Harootunian gets carried away with her latest doppelganger--herself at age ten--who helps transform her into a young, strong, courageous, and gay man.

A hip contemporary fable of love, music, and magic. A rock star with wings has hit the pop music charts. The world blithely believes it's a rock-and-roll gimmick, but a few know that Volos is a real honest-to-god angel. Deadly complications arise as dark forces set out to clip Volos's wings.

In this feminist-inspired fantasy, a rejected wife starts seeing birds everywhere, including the sleek, cobalt-blue parakeet staring back at her in the mirror.

After being dumped by her husband of twenty-seven years, losing her house, and selling her jewelry at auction, Sassafras "Sassy" Hummel takes the only job she's qualified for: maid at a luxury hotel. As if her life weren't surreal enough, a bird poops on her head while she's cleaning a suite. But Sassy's sure she's really gone off the deep end when, instead of her reflection in the mirror, a tiny blue parakeet stares back at her. Now she's seeing birds everywhere: cranes, crows, hornbills, a quacking, green-headed duck, a quail, and something red and blue that bobs as it flies past. Sassy's only friend is Racquel, the owner of Plumage, the hotel's upscale boutique. Racquel isn't the preening, froufrou, silk-and-sequins-enamored lady she seems to be. Soon Sassy and Racquel are traveling into an uncharted land where Sassy just might find out who she is and what she really wants.

Plumage is a wise, witty, and poignant novel about a woman whose life is for the birds... until she discovers her wings, and her world takes flight.

Hugo, Nebula and WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1986. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 13 (1987), edited by Arthur W. Saha, The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 40th Anniversary Anthology (1989), edited by Edward L. Ferman, and Horses! (1994), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Chance and Other Gestures of the Hand of Fate (1987).

Raised in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania by her grandpap, Bobbi Lee Yandro has been seeing things that aren't there for years. Afraid she's going "all the way crazy" like her institutionalized mother, she receives an unexpected gift for her almost-sixteenth birthday: a box of her dead father's journals. Wright Yandro was killed in Vietnam when Bobbi was a baby, but the poems he left behind stir something inside her, awakening visions of wild horses. When her grandfather buys her a black mustang with eyes of blue fire, she instinctively knows its name is Shane.

On the day the vet arrives to castrate Shane, Bobbi helps the horse escape. Soon she and Shane are fugitives on a journey that takes Bobbi far from Canadawa County to a village deep in the mountains. Here she meets Hazel Fenstermacher, also known as the Hex Witch of Seldom. Hazel introduces Bobbi to the Twelve of the Hidden Circle, who include a king, a sorceress, a poet, a trickster, and a dark hero. But one of them is out to steal Shane's soul, for he is no ordinary horse. As Bobbi uncovers the secrets of the Circle, she must employ her special gifts to save Shane and shape her own future.

In the ancient moors of Scotland, the king of Calidon lies on his deathbed, cursed by a ring that cannot be removed from his finger. When a mysterious fey stranger appears to save the king, he also carries a secret that could tear the royal family apart.

The kingdom's only hope will lie with two young men raised worlds apart. Aric is the beloved heir to the throne of Calidon; Albaric is clearly of noble origin yet strangely out of place.

The Oddling Prince is a tale of brothers whose love and loyalty to each other is such that it defies impending warfare, sundering seas, fated hatred, and the very course of time itself. In her long-awaited new fantasy novel, Nancy Springer (the Books of Isle series) explores the darkness of the human heart as well as its unceasing capacity for love.

Bitter enemies, the nations of Deva and Vashti shared no history, no customs, no laws. They all worshipped the horse god Suth, but the rituals and magics of one people were the heresies of the other. Two nations that shared only one thing - the curse of the nameless one. Prince Kyrem, King Auron, and an orphan named Seda must find the love and magic to challenge the hatred of generations to save their world.

Welcome to Isle, a land of fantasy that existed long before there were such things. Surrounded by vast oceans and dotted with thick forests, Isle was a land in which all beings lived together. There were gods and ghosts dwelling with the Old Ones, the wise ancient ancestors. During this period, The Book of Suns began its life, though little was known about its contents. The mighty marriage between Sun and Moon begins an adventure never seen before.

In the Kingdom of Isle, where the Sun Kings reign with the power of the Book of the Suns, Hal and Alan are given a mission. They must use the ancient strength of wisdom to destroy the evil that plagues the kingdom. The two blood brothers venture throughout the land fighting the many forms that this evil takes so they can arrive at their destiny.

Crown Prince Trevyn completes a quest during which he is enslaved and freed, studies to become a sorcerer, visits the land of elves, and returns home to save his kingdom.

Frain and Tirell, princes of Melior, ventured together into mysterious regions of Vale in search of an army and the hope of victory. For his father's murder of the gentle, beautiful Mylitta, Tirell's spirit ached with a black hatred. And nothing, not Frain the healer, not a beautiful virgin goddess, not his plundering sword could soothe the prince's raging pain -- until all gentleness itself had been laid to waste!

This is an epic odyssey to the far reaches of passion, the wilds of love, loyalty and war. This is the story of two princes, and a woman -- and the dark presence that would haunt them all.

Young Dair, changeling son to King Trevyn of Isle, is called by a mysterious vision to share his destiny with a strange wandering youth known as Frain. But when the gentle, wolf-human Dair finds his bond brother, the curse of a dark enchantment and the search for a lost love has claimed Frain's injured heart. Now Dair must journey with him, for only together would they unveil the prophecy and know the peace hidden with their web of fate.