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    Metamorphosis
    Metamorphosis
    Metamorphosis
    Ebook52 pages39 minutes

    Metamorphosis

    By James P. Blaylock

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    About this ebook

    METAMORPHOSIS is collection of three short stories, written by three young students in collaboration by James P. Blaylock for a class taught by Tim Powers, who provides the introduction.

    Mirrors, shadows, and secret rooms: the houses in which we dwell are sometimes much stranger than they seem to be, as are the people we think we know. Here are three stories of haunted places that stand waiting for you to enter, their windows shuttered, but their doors unlocked.

    REVIEWS
    Coauthored by Blaylock and a trio of his high school students, these three reflective short-short stories employing Blaylock's signature nostalgic prose are individually strong in technique, but weakened by thematic similarities. The eccentric hero of Adriana Campoy's lighthearted "Stone Eggs" uncovers an entryway into a fantastic world while house-sitting for his uncle. In Brittany Cox's well-written but unexciting "P-38," Anderson revisits his imperfect childhood by assembling a model airplane from his father's former shop. Alex Haniford's "Houses" hurtles toward darkness when Michael returns home for his mother's funeral and accidentally unearths the chilling secret behind his father's spiraling dementia. While Tim Powers offers a short foreword and William Ashbless (Powers and Blaylock's joint nom de plume) provides a whimsical afterword, readers will recognize both as padding and be left wanting more real content. (Apr.)
    Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
    Release dateAug 13, 2013
    ISBN9781625670557
    Metamorphosis
    Author

    James P. Blaylock

    James P. Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded ­– along with Powers and Jeter – as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and Philip K. Dick Award, he currently directs the creative writing programs at Chapman University. Blaylock lives in Orange CA with his wife. They have two sons.­

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    • 4/5
      This was a volume that I received in a grab bag of books from Subterranean Press, and since it was the smallest volume I received in the box, I decided to read it first off. The premise is interesting: the three stories included in the volume are collaborations by Blaylock with three of his students from a creative writing class that he teaches. Each story deals with a man who finds his perception of reality slightly shifted for just a moment, where he is able to perceive a world that may or may not be associated with our own. All the stories are well told, but the problem I have with the stories is that they may be too well told to be from the minds of high school students, and it's hard to determine where their ideas and writing would be distinguished from that of Blaylock. I'm not trying to disparage the writing of the three high school students in any way; I just wonder exactly how much influence Blaylock had over their writing.Overall, a handsomely produced little volume and the added autographs from all five writers made for a nice surprise!

    Book preview

    Metamorphosis - James P. Blaylock

    ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

    NOVELS

    The Elfin Ship

    The Disappearing Dwarf

    The Digging Leviathan

    Homunculus

    Land Of Dreams

    The Last Coin

    The Stone Giant

    The Paper Grail

    Lord Kelvin’s Machine

    The Magic Spectacles

    Night Relics

    All The Bells On Earth

    Winter Tides

    The Rainy Season

    Knights Of The Cornerstone

    Zeuglodon

    The Aylesford Skull

    COLLECTIONS

    Thirteen Phantasms

    In For A Penny

    Metamorphosis

    The Shadow on the Doorstep

    NOVELLAS

    The Ebb Tide

    The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

    WITH TIM POWERS

    On Pirates

    The Devil in the Details

    Copyright © James P. Blaylock 2009

    All rights reserved.

    Cover art by Dirk Berger.

    Published as an e-book in North America by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD., in 2013.

    ISBN: 9781625670557

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    Title Page

    Also by James P. Blaylock

    Epigraph

    From the Catacombs by Tim Powers

    Stone Eggs with Adriana Campoy

    P-38 with Brittany Cox

    Houses with Alex Haniford

    Haunted Places: An Afterword by James P. Blaylock

    A Note from William Ashbless

    About the Author

    Are you sure you are not your own father?—or, excuse me, your own fool?

    —GEORGE MACDONALD, Lilith

    From the Catacombs

    by Tim Powers

    THESE THREE STORIES are collaborations between James Blaylock and three students at the Orange County High School of the Arts, known as OCHSA. He and I both teach there.

    Blaylock is the head of the Creative Writing department—my boss—and our attitudes toward fiction writing are pretty similar: take your story seriously, make it intriguing and accessible and entertaining to readers, and work at getting it published. The ceiling of the basement room I generally teach in is papered with rejection slips the students have received, and they’re always adding more—and many of them have already made professional sales, too.

    There aren’t actually any chairs or desks in that basement room, just pillows and beanbags and an extensive library that stretches away into other subterranean chambers. The Creative Writing department is in a converted 19th-century church, complete with choir lofts, and tall stained-glass windows, and this catacomb basement which Blaylock took over.

    I’ve taught fiction writing at a lot of places—at various colleges, and the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University, and the Writers of the Future Workshop in half a dozen cities—but I’ve got to say I’ve seen the brightest and most promising writers at OCHSA.

    Even as I write that, it seems peculiar—high school students?

    Well, I guess these aren’t typical high school students. We get to choose from among a lot of applicants, based on samples of their writing, and they come from all over the southern California area, sometimes with long commuting—and they’re powerfully motivated. By the time we first meet them they’re generally already impressively well-read and writing their heads off.

    I like to think that Blaylock and I, and the other creative writing instructors, all of whom have professional credits, are leading these students away from—well, from majoring in creative writing in college, among other things. I hope they’ll major in anything else—literature, history, anthropology, engineering!—and write fiction on the side, learning the writing craft from their widespread reading and their experiences. Lester del Rey once said that "to know

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