Search Worlds Without End

In Jonathan Carroll's surreal masterpiece, Bathing the Lion, five people who live in the same New England town go to sleep one night and all share the same hyper-realistic dream. Some of these people know each other; some don't.

When they wake the next day all of them know what has happened. All five were at one time "mechanics," a kind of cosmic repairman whose job is to keep order in the universe and clean up the messes made both by sentient beings and the utterly fearsome yet inevitable Chaos that periodically rolls through, wreaking mayhem wherever it touches down—a kind of infinitely powerful, merciless tornado. Because the job of a mechanic is grueling and exhausting, after a certain period all of them are retired and sent to different parts of the cosmos to live out their days as "civilians." Their memories are wiped clean and new identities are created for them that fit the places they go to live out their natural lives to the end.

For the first time all retired mechanics are being brought back to duty: Chaos has a new plan, and it's not looking good for mankind...

WFA nominated novella.

More like a novella, this work follows Ingram York who has a friend, Michael Billa. Michael is the sort of friend whose funny tales and charm can pull you out of the lowest depths and make life good once more. Along comes Clinton Deix, a friend of Michael's, who tells Ingram that most of those stories are lies. It isn't long before Ingram doesn't know who to believe, and what most confuses and upsets him is that both say they are old school chums. But Michael is in his late thirties while Clinton is still fifteen...

On a trip to Italy, a woman stuck in a crumbling relationship discovers the city she loves holds a secret that could change her life...

This story was originally published on Tor.com on June 26, 2023. Read it for free at Tor.com.

This novelette originally appeared in Conjunctions 56: Terra Incognita: The Voyage Issue, Spring 2011. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection The Woman Who Married a Cloud: Collected Stories (2012).

World Fantasy Award winning and Stoker Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1987. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection (1988), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Dogtales! (1988) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections The Panic Hand (1995) and The Woman Who Married a Cloud: Collected Stories (2012).

She was the first to fall. As she walked the dog one night, it saw something off to the side and bolted.

A couple is concerned when their dog behaves increasingly bizarrely: first to their chagrin, and, eventually, to their alarm...

Read the full story for free at Tor.com

Graham Patterson's life has hit a dead end. His career as a comedian is failing. The love of his life recently broke up with him and he literally has no idea what to do next. With nothing to lose, he buys a new car and hits the road, planning to drive across country and hopefully figure out his next moves before reaching California.

But along the way Patterson does something his old self would never have even considered: he gets tattooed by a brilliant tattoo artist in North Carolina. The decision sets off a series of extraordinary events that changes his life forever in ways he never could have imagined. Among other things, Patterson is gifted with the ability to see in real time three different lives that are available to him. The choice is his: The life he is leading right now, or two very different ones. In all of them there is love or fame and of course danger because once he has chosen, there is no telling what will happen next.

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in Omni, February 1989. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection (1990), edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's to Now (2009), and Hauntings (2013), edited by Ellen Datlow. It is included in the collections The Panic Hand (1995) and The Woman Who Married a Cloud: Collected Stories (2012).

A fantasy about a woman bequeathed an odd gift by a former lover who broke up with her, then died--his handwriting. Why did he do this and what does it mean? Find out in Jonathan Carroll's Played Your Eyes.

The full story can be read for free at Tor.com.

An artist's work attracts the eye of Andrey Porgee, a notorious gangster, who becomes her best customer. But when he commissions a painting based on a childhood photograph, the artist lives in fear of his reaction to the final product.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com

The Crow's Dinner is master novelist Jonathan Carroll's debut essay collection, and that is very good news. Gathering together hundreds of entries that initially appeared on the website Medium, The Crow's Dinner is at once a wide-ranging spiritual autobiography and an annotated guide to what Carroll calls "The Map of Me."

Beginning with an appreciation of "The Invisibles," those insignificant moments we overlook at our peril, The Crow's Dinner encompasses an extraordinary range of incidents, ideas, and images that cumulatively illuminate the inner and outer weather of a major American artist. This generous volume contains fragments of autobiography, reflections on the nature of creativity, vivid recreations of chance encounters, and provocative meditations on the complexity--and unpredictability--of human relationships. It is a book filled with colorful vignettes, unexpected bursts of whimsy, and observations filtered through an utterly unique sensibility. Witty, compassionate, open at all times to the "momentary magic" of existence, it is a work of singular beauty that is unlike anything you have ever read.

Since the publication of his first novel, The Land of Laughs, in 1980, Jonathan Carroll has repeatedly offered us new and startling ways of looking at our familiar world. With The Crow's Dinner, he speaks to us in direct, unmediated fashion about the things that matter most: love, lust, books, dogs, food, friendship--and the transforming power of the imagination. The result is an intimate, one-of-a kind tour of a lively, unfettered mind. Like the best of Carroll's fiction, The Crow's Dinner is a book that matters.

A man falls in the snow, hits his head on a stone curb and dies. A ghost that's been sent to take his soul to the Afterlife arrives just as he falls. But something strange occurs: the man doesn't die. The ghost is flabbergasted. This is unprecedented. Going immediately to its boss, the ghost asks, what should I do now? The boss says, we don't know how this happened but we're working on it. In the meantime, we want you to stay with this man and watch to see if he does anything that might help us figure out what's going on.

Unhappily, the ghost agrees. It is a ghost, not a nursemaid. The last thing it wants to do is hang around watching a human being walk through his every day. But a funny thing happens?the ghost falls truly madly deeply in love with the man's girlfriend and things get complicated. The Ghost in Love is about what happens to us when we discover that we have become the masters of our own fate. No excuses, no outside forces or gods to blame?the responsibility is all our own. It's also about love, ghosts that happen to be gourmet cooks, talking dogs, and picnicking in the rain with yourself at twenty different ages.

It's tough being a ghost on an empty stomach.

Have you ever loved a magical book above all others? Have you ever wished the magic were real? Welcome to The Land of Laughs. A novel about how terrifying that would be.

Schoolteacher Thomas Abbey, unsure son of a film star, doesn't know who he is or what he wants--in life, in love, or in his relationship with the strange and intense Saxony Gardner. What he knows is that in his whole life nothing has touched him so deeply as the novels of Marshall France, a reclusive author of fabulous children's tales who died at forty-four.

Now Thomas and Saxony have come to France's hometown, the dreamy Midwestern town of Galen, Missouri, to write France's biography. Warned in advance that France's family may oppose them, they're surprised to find France's daughter warmly welcoming instead. But slowly they begin to see that something fantastic and horrible is happening. The magic of Marshall France has extended far beyond the printed page... leaving them with a terrifying task to undertake.

The Loud Table by Jonathan Carroll is an sf-fantasy about four elderly men who regularly hang out. One of the men is worried that he's getting Alzheimer's, but the truth might be even more discomforting.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Compared frequently to Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carroll is, in the worlds of Pat Conroy, an absolute original. The Panic Hand assembles in one volume the shorter works of this master, including the World Fantasy Award-winning tale Friend's Best Man and the short novels Uh-Oh and Black Cocktail.

Table of Contents:

• Mr. Fiddlehead - (1989) - shortstory
• Uh-Oh City - (1992) - novella
• The Fall Collection - (1989) - shortstory
• Friend's Best Man - (1987) - shortstory
• The Sadness of Detail - (1989) - shortstory
• Waiting to Wave - (1993) - shortstory
• The Jane Fonda Room - (1982) - shortstory
• A Quarter Past You - (1989) - shortstory
• My Zoondel - (1988) - shortstory
• Learning to Leave - (1992) - shortstory
• The Panic Hand - (1989) - shortstory
• A Bear in the Mouth - (1989) - shortstory
• Postgraduate - (1984) - shortstory
• Tired Angel - (1989) - shortstory
• The Dead Love You - (1989) - shortstory
• Florian - (1989) - shortstory
• The Life of My Crime - (1992) - shortstory
• A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings - (1994) - shortstory
• A Flash in the Pants - (1995) - shortstory
• Black Cocktail - (1990) - novella

Nominated for a 2012 Bram Stoker Award and a 2013 British Fantasy Award: Thirty-eight extraordinary stories from award-winning author Jonathan Carroll

For more than thirty years, Jonathan Carroll's writing has defied genre conventions. Known for his novels--including The Land of Laughs, Bones of the Moon, Sleeping in Flame, and many other compelling and often surreal stories--Carroll has also created an eloquent body of short fiction. The Woman Who Married a Cloud brings his stories together for the first time. In the title story, a matchmaking effort goes awry and leads one woman to a harrowing moment of self-discovery. In "The Heidelberg Cylinder," Hell becomes so overcrowded that Satan sends some of his lost souls back to Earth. And in "Alone Alarm," a man is kidnapped by multiple versions of himself. By turns haunting, melancholic, and enchanting, Carroll's richly layered stories illuminate universal experiences, passions, and griefs. Described by NPR's Alan Cheuse as "so richly imaginative, so intellectually daring," The Woman Who Married a Cloud is essential reading for Carroll fans and short-story lovers alike.

This ebook contains an exclusive illustrated biography of the author including rare images from his personal collection.

Table of Contents:

• Mr. Fiddlehead - (1989) - shortstory
• Uh-Oh City - (1992) - novella
• Second Snow - (2001) - shortstory
• The Fall Collection - (1989) - shortstory
• Friend's Best Man - (1987) - shortstory
• The Sadness of Detail - (1989) - shortstory
• Waiting to Wave - (1993) - shortstory
• The Jane Fonda Room - (1982) - shortstory
• A Quarter Past You - (1989) - shortstory
• My Zoondel - (1988) - shortstory
• Learning to Leave - (1992) - shortstory
• The Panic Hand - (1989) - shortstory
• A Bear in the Mouth - (1989) - shortstory
• Postgraduate - (1984) - shortstory
• Tired Angel - (1989) - shortstory
• The Dead Love You - (1989) - shortstory
• Florian - (1989) - shortstory
• The Life of My Crime - (1992) - shortstory
• A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings - (1994) - shortstory
• A Flash in the Pants - (1995) - shortstory
• Black Cocktail - (1990) - novella
• Crimes of the Face - (1996) - shortstory
• Fish in a Barrel - (1999) - shortstory
• A Gravity Thief - (2001) - shortstory
• The Great Walt of China - (1999) - shortstory
• The Stolen Church - (2009) - shortstory
• Alone Alarm - (1996) - shortstory
• Asleep in Wolf's Clothing - (1997) - shortstory
• The Language of Heaven - (1999) - shortstory
• The Heidelberg Cylinder - (2000) - novella
• Elizabeth Thug - (2010) - shortstory
• Home on the Rain - (2005) - novelette
• Vedran - (2010) - shortstory
• Water Can't Be Nervous - (2012) - shortstory
• East of Furious - (2011) - novelette
• Nothing to Declare - (2008) - shortstory
• Let the Past Begin - (2010) - shortstory
• The Woman Who Married a Cloud - (2012) - novelette

WFA and Hugo Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1992. The story is included in the collections The Panic Hand (1995) and The Woman Who Married a Cloud: Collected Stories (2012).

For Joe Lennox, successful young writer, Vienna provides a refuge from the tragedy of his brother's death, until he starts up a friendship with the eccentric India Tate and her magician husband Paul. Gradually Joe falls in love with India, but Paul finds out - before he suddenly drops dread. And now Joe has two deaths on his conscience and another voice calling from beyond the grave...

Cullen James is a young woman whose life dictates her dreams-and whose dreams control her life.

In her first dream, she found the perfect man-and the same thing promptly happened in life. Now, she has begun to dream dreams set in Rondua, a fantasy world of high adventure, full of tests of her courage and strength. Slowly and quietly, her dream world is spilling over into her New York City reality and beginning to threaten everything she loves in life. Her friends are gathered to help her-but even her newfound courage may not be enough.

Walker Easterling is a retired actor turned successful screenwriter living in the Vienna of strong coffee, fascinating friends, and mysterious cafes. When he falls in love with Maris York, a beautiful artist who creates cities, his life becomes alive in fantastic and unsettling ways. As Walker's love for Maris grows, his life gets more and more bizarre-he discovers he can see things happening just before they happen, and at the same time feels an incredibly strong tug from his past-so a friend steers him to Venasque, an odd little man reputed to be a powerful shaman. Venasque helps Walker discover and unravel his many interconnected past lives, and it is soon clear that an unresolved conflict from these past lives has resurfaced, and now threatens to undo Walker and Maris's love.

Weber Gregston and Philip Strayhorn are best friends. They were at college together; they struggle as nobodies in Hollywood together. Weber soon becomes the most acclaimed director of his generation. Phil is unrecognised for years, and then makes a series of notorious horror films. He has everything; love, fame, money.

Then he takes a gun and blows his head off. Why? Weber hopes the answer is on the video tapes that Phil has left him. But when he plays them, he finds messages from beyond the grave. Step by step, Weber learns that the evil Phil portrayed in his last film is not just slasher gore. He has created something which threatens his friends' lives. And if Weber doesn't put it right, and fast, that evil will extend far beyond a handful of people in Hollywood.

Exploring love and cruelty, creation and ambition, A Child Across the Sky is a brilliant tale of wonder and fear. It is also one of the most important novels of fantastic fiction in recent years.

Harry Radcliffe is a brilliant prize-winning architect---witty and remarkable. He's also a self-serving opportunist, ready to take advantage of whatever situations, and women, come his way. But now, newly divorced and having had an inexplicable nervous breakdown, Harry is being wooed by the extremely wealthy Sultan of Saru to design a billion-dollar dog museum. In Saru, he finds himself in a world even madder and more unreal than the one he left behind, and as his obsession grows, the powers of magic weave around him, and the implications of his strange undertaking grow more ominous and astounding....

Cult favorite Jonathan Carroll has surpassed himself with his first mainstreamnovel. After Silence is an electrifying, unforgettable novel that unfolds with the logic of a Greek tragedy. Carroll writes with uncompromising honesty about how secrets gnaw and kill when truth is just as devastating.

Four strangers' lives are turned upside down when death comes for a visit

At first it seems like an ordinary dream. Talkative Englishman Ian McGann meets a long-dead acquaintance and asks him questions about the afterlife. But when he awakes, a thick pink scar stretches across his chest. Each subsequent night, as he dreams of death, he asks more questions, understands less, and awakens with increasingly gruesome injuries. When he meets an American traveler in Sardinia and tells him of his experience, the stranger begins having matching dreams--with the same painful results. Across the globe, a former TV icon struggles with leukemia, and a movie star falls in love with an HIV-positive photographer. All are flirting with death, and the more they struggle to understand the mysteries of the afterlife, the more they realize the world is not nearly as simple as they once believed.

Bestselling author Sam Bayer is stuck. Burned out from his third divorce, bored with the formulaic rut his writing has fallen into, and unable to deliver the manuscript for which he has been paid a stratospheric advance, he is desperate for inspiration. But a chance visit to his hometown of Crane's View, New York, sparks his imagination. Soon he immerses himself in an unsolved case of murder that took place when he was a teenager--Sam himself had discovered the body of the victim, a beautiful and wild teenage girl named Pauline. At the same time he is drawn into an explosive affair with a gorgeous but seriously loopy fan with the improbable name of Veronica Lake.

As Sam learns the disturbing facts about his lover's past, Pauline's murderer reappears--not only endangering Sam but putting his beloved fifteen-year-old daughter in jeopardy as well. Not knowing whom to trust, Sam has to brace himself for the truly unexpected resolution to this decades-old mystery.

Miranda Romanac is a successful thirtysomething woman in today's modern world, yet she feels alone and adrift on the sea of her life. At her high school reunion she makes a shattering discovery that further undermines her already shaky sense of who she is and where she is going. When she meets the remarkable Hugh Oakley, her life takes a 180-degree turn for the better--but at what price?

When they move to a house in the country to start a new life together, the reality Miranda had once known begins to slip away. Miranda is haunted by alarming, impossible visions and strangers whom she feels certain she has known, although they are all from other times and places. As these phantom lives consume her own and begin to affect all that she knows and loves, Miranda must learn the truth to reclaim it. But sometimes the hardest truth to accept is the knowledge of who we really are.

From the moment a three-legged dog limps into the life of Police Chief Frannie McCabe and drops dead at his feet, McCabe finds himself in a new world of disturbing miracles. His small town of Crane's View, New York has long been a haven of harmony and comfort--but now he finds himself afflicted by the inexplicable, by omens that converge to throw his life into doubt. And what he does over the next few days may have consequences for the whole world....

Vincent Ettrich, a genial philanderer, discovers he has died and come back to life, but he has no idea why, or what the experience was like. Gradually, he discovers he was brought back by his true love, Isabelle, because she is pregnant with their child - a child who, if raised correctly, will play a crucial role in saving the universe.

But to be brought up right, the child must learn what Vincent learned on the other side - if only Vincent can remember it. On a fathers love and struggle may depend the future of everything that is.

By turns quirky, romantic, awesome, and irresistible, White Apples is a tale of love, fatherhood, death, and life that will leave you seeing the world with new eyes.

For connoisseurs of imaginative fiction, the novels of Jonathan Carroll are a special treat that occupy a space all their own. His surreal fictions, which deftly mix the everyday with the extraordinary, have won him a devoted following. Now, in Glass Soup, Carroll continues to astound....

The realm of the dead is built from the dreams--and nightmares--of the living. Octopuses drive buses. God is a polar bear. And a crowded highway literally leads to hell.

Once before, Vincent Ettrich and his lover, Isabelle Neukor, crossed over from life to death and back again. Now Isabelle bears a very special child, who may someday restore the ever-changing mosaic that is reality. Unless the agents of Chaos can lure her back to the land of the dead--and trap her there forever.