Search Worlds Without End

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared in the collection The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011). The story can also be found in The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012, edited by Paula Guran. It is included in the collection Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017).

After Many a Summer borrows its title from a line in Tennyson's famous poem "Tithonus." An elegiac appeal for death on the part of the titular figure from myth, a man who was granted the everlasting life he had originally begged from the gods, only to have their gift turn to ashes in his mouth, only, as Tennyson wrote, to become someone whom "only cruel immortality consumes."

What does this have to do with homelessness, troubled movie production companies, kidnapped heiresses, prophecies delivered by taxidermized heads, and a Los Angeles County rendered with such masterful, lived in, bone deep attention to physical detail that to read the opening is to feel the heat from cracked asphalt rising through your shoes and to taste cheap fortified wine grown warm in the sun cloying your tongue? Can all these seemingly disparate things be connected, cohered, clarified?

Of course they can.

Conrad is a down on his luck screenwriter who takes a very strange assignment that leads him to encounter a kidnapped heiress after delivering her ransom--a hundred-year-old mummified head fond of cryptic utterances. Nothing goes Conrad's way, though, because nothing, no matter how bizarre, is what it seems.

As a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Andrew Hale finds himself caught up in a secret, even more ruthless war. Two decades later, in 1963, he will be forced to confront again the nightmare that has haunted his adult life: a lethal unfinished operation code-named Declare.

From the corridors of Whitehall to the Arabian desert, from post-war Berlin to the streets of Cold War Moscow, Hale's desperate quest draws him into international politics and gritty espionage tradecraft -- and inexorably drives Hale, the fiery and beautiful Communist agent Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, and Kim Philby, mysterious traitor to the British cause, to a deadly confrontation on the high glaciers of Mount Ararat, in the very shadow of the fabulous and perilous Ark.

Gregorio Rivas is retired from the Redemptionist trade - at thirty-one, he's no longer willing to risk his life rescuing new recruits from the savage religion of the Messiah Norton Jaybush, no longer eager to track the caravans of the faithful through the mutated wildernesses of Los Angeles. Once he was the best Redemptionist for hire - once he even tracked a victim right up to the walls of the Messiah's perilous Holy City in Irvine - but that's all over now.

Or it was - until he's approached to perform one last Redemption. And this time the victim who has been brainwashed and carried away by the brutal faith is his long-lost first love, Urania.

And so Rivas sets out to save her, beginning a violent pilgrimage that will take him through the landscape-of-the-damned which is 22nd Century California, and into the very heart of the Jaybush cult - and finally to the nightmare city of Venice, and the fabulous, feared castle at the core of it... Deviant's Palace.

What do you do if the man you've vowed to kill dies before you can kill him?

In college, Tom Holbrook worshipped Shasta DiMaio from afar, but she married the arrogant John Atwater -- and Atwater eventually murdered her.

All that's left for Tom is revenge. He has devoted the rest of his life to finding Atwater and killing him -- but when he finally finds him, Atwater is in a bag in the Los Angeles County morgue.

How do you kill a man who has already died?

Twenty tales of science fiction and fantasy from the two-time World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Award winning author of The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides.

Twenty pulse-pounding, mind-bending tales of science fiction, twisted metaphysics, and supernatural wonder from the two-time World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Award winning author of The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides.

A complete palette of story-telling colors from Powers, including acclaimed tale "The Bible Repairman," where a psychic handyman who supernaturally eliminates troublesome passages of the Bible for paying clients finds the remains of his own broken soul on the line when tasked with rescuing the kidnapped ghost of a rich man's daughter. Time travel takes a savage twist in "Salvage and Demolition," where the chance discovery of a long-lost manuscript throws a down-and-out book collector back in time to 1950s San Francisco where he must prevent an ancient Sumeric inscription from dooming millions in the future. Humor and horror mix in "Sufficient unto the Day," when a raucous Thanksgiving feast takes a dark turn as the invited ghosts of relatives past accidentally draw soul-stealing demons into the family television set. And obsession and vengeance survive on the other side of death in "Down and Out in Purgatory," where the soul of a man lusting for revenge attempts to eternally eliminate the killer who murdered the love of his life. Wide-ranging, wonder-inducing, mind-bending--these and other tales make up the complete shorter works of a modern-day master of science fiction and fantasy.

Table of Contents:

• Foreward: Paths Through Dark Woods - essay by David Drake
• Introduction: The Powers Effect - essay by Tony Daniel
• Salvage and Demolition - (2013) - novella
• The Bible Repairman - (2006) - short story
• Appointment at Sunset - (2014) - novelette
• The Better Boy - (1991) - novelette, with James P. Blaylock
• Pat Moore - (2004) - novelette
• The Way Down the Hill - (1982) - novelette
• Itinerary - (1999) - short story
• A Journey of Only Two Paces - (2011) - short story
• The Hour of Babel - (2008) - short story
• Where They Are Hid - (1995) - novella
• We Traverse Afar - (1993) - short story, with James P. Blaylock
• Through and Through - (2003) - novelette
• Night Moves - (1986) - novelette
• A Soul in a Bottle - (2006) - novelette
• Parallel Lines - (2010) - short story
• Fifty Cents - (2003) - novelette, with James P. Blaylock
• Nobody's Home: An Anubis Gates Story - (2014) - novella
• A Time to Cast Away Stones - (2009) - novella
• Down and Out in Purgatory - (2016) - novella
• Sufficient Unto the Day - (2017) - short fiction

From the award-winning author of Hide Me Among the Graves, Last Call, Declare, and Three Days to Never, comes a phantasmagoric, thrilling, mind-bending tale of speculative fiction in which one man must uncover occult secrets of 1920s Hollywood to save his family.

In the wake of their Aunt Amity's suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline's return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this haunted "House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills" that is a conduit for the supernatural.

A trio of academics have just entered a deserted California cemetery late at night, bringing with them a number of arcane devices aimed at achieving an equally arcane purpose. These three men, professors in the "Consciousness Research" department at Cal Tech University, have come together to perform a seemingly impossible task. Their goal: to open a door between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and to capture the ghost of the recently deceased scientist Armand Vitrielli. For their own desperate reasons, they hope to avail themselves of the secrets Vitrielli left behind at the time of his death.

Their experiment, naturally, fails to come off exactly as planned. A door between the worlds does, in fact, open, letting in something -- someone -- completely unexpected, and setting in motion a chain of events that will reverberate throughout the world.

This is a ghost story. It is a story about werewolves, and things that go bump in the night. It is a story of an ill-fated land, the pathless moors of Northern England so well chronicled in Wuthering Heights. And it is the story of a real family whose destiny it is to deal with this darkly glamorous and dangerous world.

When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England.

But Emily's father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago--and it is taking possession of Emily's beloved but foolish and dissolute brother. Curzon must regard Emily's family as a dire threat.

In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to take their souls as well as their lives.

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared as a limmited edition chapbook and was rerpinted in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, April 1988. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection (1987), edited by Gardner Dozois, L. Ron Hubbard Presents the Best of Writers of the Future (2000), edited by Algis Budrys, and The Century's Best Horror Fiction 1951-2000 (2012), edited by John Pelan. It is included in the collections Night Moves and Other Stories (2001) Strange Itineraries (2005), and Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017).

Collected here at last is all of Tim Powers' short fiction. Though known as a novelist, Powers has over the years written some powerful short stories -- here are "Night Moves" and (written in collaboration with James P. Blaylock) "The Better Boy," both finalists for the World Fantasy Award; here too is "Where They Are Hid," previously available only in an expensive limited edition, now out of print.

In his short stories Powers explores the same kind of territory as he does in his novels -- in these pages you'll find the wildly inventive plots, the fascinating characters, and the vivid intrusion of the supernatural into the real world , that have earned Powers an enthusiastic readership in a dozen countries.

Contents:

• Introduction by James P. Blaylock
• "Night Moves"
• "The Way Down the Hill"
• "Where They Are Hid"
• "The Better Boy"
• "We Traverse Afar"
• "Itinerary"
• Story notes by Tim Powers

The first in Subterranean Press' plans to bring to light some unduly neglected works by noted poet William Ashbless, this new chapbook contains "Slouching Toward Mauritius," a piratical short story written more than 25 years ago but never published, along with a lengthy pirate poem, "Moon-Eye Agonistes." Ashbless' notorious compatriots Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock have contributed an introduction and afterword, respectively, to put the pieces in their proper historical perspective.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (2001) - essay by Tim Powers
• Introduction - (2001) - essay by James P. Blaylock
• On Pirates - (2001) - interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
• Slouching Toward Mauritius - (2001) - shortfiction by James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers [as by William Ashbless ]
• Moon-Eye Agonistes - (2001) - poem by James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers [as by William Ashbless]

The story of John Chandagnac who sails to Haiti to recover his father's lost plantation and enters a Caribbean pirate empire ruled by Blackbeard, a child of voodoo whose spirit is infested with ghosts. The hero is pressed into piracy and sorcery as Blackbeard searches for the Fountain of Lost Youth.

This omnibus of Tim Powers' first two novels was produced for the 2004 Arisia convention at which Powers was Guest of Honor.

Table of Contents:

• "The First Concrete Evidence" (2003) essay (in the NESFA edition only)
• The Skies Discrowned (1976) novel
• An Epitaph in Rust (1976) novel

Richard Blanzac, a San Francisco-based rare book dealer, opens a box of consignment items and encounters the unexpected: there, among an assortment of literary rarities, he discovers a manuscript in verse, an Ace Double Novel, and a scattering of very old cigarette butts. These commonplace objects serve as catalysts for an extraordinary -- and unpredictable -- adventure.

Without warning, Blanzac finds himself traversing a "circle of discontinuity" that leads from the present day to the San Francisco of 1957. Caught up in that circle are an ancient Sumerian deity, a forgotten Beat-era poet named Sophie Greenwald, and an apocalyptic cult in search of the key to absolute non-existence.

One of the frequently referenced items in this story is an Ace Double published in, or just before, 1957 with Seconds of Arc on one side and What Vast Image on the flip side. Both stories are by Daniel Gropeshaw. Later in the story, we learn the author name is an anagram, and a pseudonym, for Sophia Greenwald. While Salvage and Demolition author Tim Powers often weaves his stories around established facts, Sophia Greenwald and her stories are apparently fictional.

Page 6 of the Subterranean Press edition has a black and white photograph of the contents of a cardboard box that includes a copy of the Ace Double Seconds of Arc by "Daniel Gropeshaw." The cover on the book shown in the photograph is the same as the one for the story A Man Called Destiny in the Ace Double D-311. The photograph also shows the book's spine with What Vast Image being visible as the other title, though the artist forgot to flip it. Page 13 describes the flip side of the fictional Ace Double as "green and yellow -- giant lizards chasing men in a jungle with What Vast Image in lurid lettering across the top." This description does not match the flip side of Ace D-311. Assuming it's not entirely fictional, the author may be describing the cover of The Mind Monsters on the Ace double G-602 or Eye of the Monster on the Ace Double F-147.

Strange Itineraries takes you on an unforgettable excursion into the strange and dangerous worlds of Tim Powers. Vengeful and cooperative spirits, mutant tomatoes, and the ever-mysterious Ether Bunnies roam these pages, treading paths both frightening and droll. This fully retrospective Powers collection also features three collaborations with James Blaylock, author of The Paper Grail and The Last Coin.

Table of Contents:

• In Which Corner of the Compass Is Ago? - essay by Paul Di Filippo
• Itinerary - (1999) - short story
• The Way Down the Hill - (1982) - novelette
• Pat Moore - (2004) - novelette
• Fifty Cents - (2003) - novelette (with James P. Blaylock)
• Through and Through - (2003) - novelette
• We Traverse Afar - (1993) - short story (with James P. Blaylock)
• Where They Are Hid - (1995) - novella
• The Better Boy - (1991) - novelette (with James P. Blaylock)
• Night Moves - (1986) - novelettes

WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1991. The story is included in the Tim Powers collections Night Moves and Other Stories (2001) Strange Itineraries (2005), Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017), and the James P. Blaylock collection Thirteen Phantasms and Other Stories (2000).

This short story originally appeared as a limmited edition chapbook 2006. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One (2007), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Urban Fantasy Anthology (2011), edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale. The story is included in the collections The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011) and Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

2012 World Fantasy Award Winner

In his first new collection since 2005, Tim Powers, the master of the secret history, delves into the mysteries of souls, whether they are sacrificed on the pinnacle of Mount Parnassus or lodged in a television cable box.

With two new stories and short fiction only previously available in limited editions, the cornerstone of the collection is a postscript to his harrowing novel of the haunting of the Romantic poets, The Stress of Her Regard. After Byron and Shelley break free of the succubus that claimed them, their associate, Trelawny, forges an alliance with Greek rebels to reestablish the deadly connection between man and the nephilim.

Meanwhile, in a Kabbalistic story of transformation, the executor of an old friend's will is duped into housing his soul, but for the grace of the family cat. A rare-book collector replaces pennies stolen from Jean Harlow's square in the Hollywood Walk of Fame--and discovers a literary mystery with supernatural consequences. In a tale of time travel between 2015 and 1975, a tragedy sparked by an angel falling onto a pizza shop is reenacted--and the event is barely, but fatally, altered.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Tim Powers
• The Bible Repairman - (2006) - short story
• A Soul in a Bottle - (2006) - novelette
• The Hour of Babel - (2008) - short story
• Parallel Lines - (2010) - short story
• A Journey of Only Two Paces - short story
• A Time to Cast Away Stones - (2009) - novella

What does the famous Herzwesten beer have to do with saving the entire western world from the invading Turkish armies? Brian Duffy, aging soldier of fortune, is the only man who can rescue the world from evil--if only he can figure out why the beer was so important to a mysterious old man called the Fisher King, and why his dreams are plagued with images of a sword and an arm rising from a lake . . .

In the slum known as the St. Giles rookery in 19th century London, the beggar guild run by Horrabin the Clown is the last resort of the down-and-out. Horrabin is rumored to maim his people to make them more effective mendicants, and when dimwitted beggar Isaac Fairchild is summoned by the clown, he fears the worst.

But in the subterranean chamber known as the Nursery, Fairchild learns that Horrabin's purpose is to greatly increase his intelligence, by grafting his rudimentary mind into the group mind shared by Horrabin's gang of Spoonsize Boys - alchemically-hatched homunculi, two-inch-tall men employed by the clown for subtle thefts and assassinations.

Fairchild yearns to be able at last to think clearly, understand conversations - read books! - but there's a cost.

In this bizarrely entertaining metaphysical thriller, 12-year-old Daphne Marrity and her father find themselves embroiled in an almost incomprehensibly complex international conspiracy (with supernatural overtones) when Daphne steals a videotape labeled "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" from her grandmother's house. Suddenly, the Israeli secret service seems to be after them, and the two are swept into an adventure that involves, among other things, time travel, assassins, and a shrunken talking head.

WFA nominated novella. It originally appeared as a limmited edition chapbook. The story is included in the collections Night Moves and Other Stories (2001), Strange Itineraries (2005) and Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017).

When Brother Thomas tries sky-fishing from the monastery roof he knows he is breaking the law, but the few risks seem a small price to escape the stifling boredom of his cloistered life. What he doesn't understand is why his insignificant brush with the law makes him the object of a massive manhunt and triggers off such a dramatic chain of events. Certainly he achieves his aim and finds the excitement he craves - but in the process the lives of everyone around him change as well.

His crime: unwilling witness to a political assassination. So the new régime condems Frank Rovzar to slavery in the uranium mines of the Orestes system. But Frank eludes his captors and, like all outlaws, flees to Understreet - a vast subterranean city and a haven for all wanted men. Frank is quickly drawn into Understreet way of life - earning his living as forger, thief, killer. But he never loses sight of his main ambition - to see the rightful government restored.

For the first time in his esteemed career, Tim Powers returns to the setting (and a central character) from his landmark time travel novel, The Anubis Gates.

Tracking the murderer of her fiancee through 19th century London's darkest warrens, Jacky Snapp has disguised herself as a boy -- but the disguise fails when, trying to save a girl from the ghost of her jealous husband, Jacky finds that she has made herself visible to the ghosts that cluster around the Thames -- and one of them is the ghost of her fiancee, who was poisoned and physically transformed by his murderer but unwittingly shot dead by Jacky herself.

Jacky and the girl she rescued, united in the need to banish their pursuing ghosts, learn that their only hope is to flee upriver to the barge known as Nobody's Home -- where the exorcist whose name is Nobody charges an intolerable price.

Brendan Doyle is a twentieth-century English professor who travels back to 1810 London to attend a lecture given by English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is a London filled with deformed clowns, organised beggar societies, insane homunculi and magic. When he is kidnapped by gypsies and consequently misses his return trip to 1983, the mild-mannered Doyle is forced to become a street-smart con man, escape artist, and swordsman in order to survive in the dark and treacherous London underworld. He defies bullets, black magic, murderous beggars, freezing waters, imprisonment in mutant-infested dungeons, poisoning, and even a plunge back to 1684. Coleridge himself and poet Lord Byron make appearances in the novel, which also features a poor tinkerer who creates genetic monsters and a werewolf that inhabits others' bodies when his latest becomes too hairy.

Enchantingly dark and compellingly real, the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Last Call is a masterpiece of magic realism from critically acclaimed author Tim Powers.

Set in the gritty, dazzling underworld known as Las Vegas, Last Call tells the story of a one-eyed professional gambler who discovers that he was not the big winner in a long-ago poker game . . . and now must play for the highest stakes ever as he searches for a way to win back his soul.

Los Angeles is filled with ghosts - and half-ghosts, and ghost hunters, and ghost junkies - chasing each other in a mad quest for immortality. As a series of disasters strikes Los Angeles, a young boy inhales the last breath of Thomas Edison, and becomes a precious prize in a deadly hunt for the elusive vital spark. Brimming with the wild imagination and heart-stopping escapades that won Tim Powers the World Fantasy Award, Expiration Date is an exuberant and inventive tale from one of fantasy's most original talents.

A young woman possessed by a ghost has slain the Fisher King of the West, Scott Crane. Now, temporarily freed from that malevolent spirit, she seeks to restore the King to life.

But Crane's body has been taken to the magically protected home of Pete and Angelica Sullivan, and their adopted son, Koot Hoomie. Kootie is destined to be the next Fisher king, but he is only thirteen years old--too young, his mother thinks, to perform the rituals to assume the Kingship. But not too young, perhaps, to assist in reuniting Scott Crane's body and spirit, and restoring him to life.

When Michael Crawford discovers his bride brutally murdered in their wedding bed, he is forced to flee not only to prove his innocence, but to avoid the deadly embrace of a vampire who has claimed him as her true bridegroom. Joining forces with Byron, Keats, and Shelley in a desperate journey that crisscrosses Europe, Crawford desperately seeks his freedom from this vengeful lover who haunts his dreams and will not rest until she destroys all that he cherishes.

London, winter of 1862, Adelaide McKee, a former prostitute, arrives on the doorstep of veterinarian John Crawford, a man she met once seven years earlier. Their brief meeting produced a child who, until now, had been presumed dead. McKee has learned that the girl lives—but that her life and soul are in mortal peril from a vampiric ghost. But this is no ordinary spirit; the bloodthirsty wraith is none other than John Polidori, the onetime physician to the mad, bad, and dangerous Romantic poet Lord Byron. Both McKee and Crawford have mysterious histories with creatures like Polidori, and their child is a prize the malevolent spirit covets dearly.

Polidori is also the late uncle and supernatural muse to the poet Christina Rossetti and her brother, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. When she was just fourteen years old, Christina unwittingly brought Polidori's curse upon her family. But the curse bestowed unexpected blessings as well, inspiring Christina's poetry and Gabriel's paintings. But when Polidori resurrects Dante's dead wife—turning her into a horrifying vampire—and threatens other family members, Christina and Dante agree that they must destroy their monstrous uncle and break the spell, even if it means the end of their creative powers.

Determined to save their daughter, McKee and Crawford join forces with the Rossettis, and soon these wildly mismatched allies are plunged into a supernatural London underworld whose existence goes beyond their wildest imaginings. Ultimately, each of these disparate individuals—the sensitive poet, the tortured painter, the straitlaced animal doctor, the reformed prostitute, and even their Artful Dodger–like young daughter—must choose between the banality and constraints of human life and the unholy immortality that Polidori offers.

Sweeping from the mansions of London's high society to its grimy slums, the elegant salons of the West End to the pre-Roman catacombs beneath St. Paul's Cathedral, Hide Me Among the Graves blends the historical and the supernatural in a dazzling, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride—a modern horror story with a Victorian twist.

Something weird is happening to the Los Angeles freeways--phantom cars, lanes from nowhere, and sometimes unmarked offramps that give glimpses of a desolate desert highway--and Sebastian Vickery, disgraced ex-Secret Service agent, is a driver for a covert supernatural-evasion car service. But another government agency is using and perhaps causing the freeway anomalies, and their chief is determined to have Vickery killed because of something he learned years ago at a halted Presidential motorcade.

Reluctantly aided by Ingrid Castine, a member of that agency, and a homeless Mexican boy, and a woman who makes her living costumed as Supergirl on the sidewalk in front of the Chinese Theater, Vickery learns what legendary hell it is that the desert highway leads to--and when Castine deliberately drives into it to save him from capture, he must enter it himself to get her out.

Alternate Routes is a fast-paced supernatural adventure story that sweeps from the sun-blinded streets and labyrinthine freeways of Los Angeles to a horrifying other world out of Greek mythology, and Vickery and Castine must learn to abandon old loyalties and learn loyalty to each other in order to survive as the world goes mad around them.

Why did Cecil B. DeMille really bury the Pharoah's Palace set after he filmed The Ten Commandments in 1923?

Fugitives Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine find themselves plunged into the supernatural secrets of Los Angeles--from Satanic indie movies of the '60s, to the unqiet La Brea Tar Pits at midnight, to the haunted Sunken City off the coast of San Pedro... pursued by a Silicon Valley guru who is determined to incorporate their souls into the creation of a new and predatory World God.

Sebastian Vickery has learned something about UFOs that he shouldn't have--and Naval Intelligence, desperate to silence him, orders his old partner, Agent Ingrid Castine, to trap him.

But Castine risks career, liberty, and maybe even life, to warn Vickery--and now they're both fugitives, on the run from both the U.S. government and agents of the Russian GRU Directorate, which has its own uses for the UFO intelligence.

With the unlikely aid of a renegade Russian agent, a homeless Hispanic boy, and an eccentric old Flat-Earther, Vickery and Castine must find an ancient relic that spells banishment to the alien species, and then summon the things and use it against them--in a Samson-like confrontation that looks likely to kill them as well.

Sweeping from the Giant Rock monolith in the Mojave Desert to a cultist temple in the Hollywood Hills, from a monstrous apparition in the Los Angeles River to a harrowing midnight visitation on a boat off Long Beach Harbor, Stolen Skies is an alien-encounter novel like no other.