Other Inspirational Reading

• Stunning, lyrical novel about places, memory, time, and fairies. Read it through, then re-read it for maximal effect -- it's quite a different novel the second time through.

• A 4-volume series interweaving the life of a modern confused and washed-up academic named Peirce Moffett with Giordano Bruno, John Dee, and a number of complex and interesting people in something very like our modern world. It's hard to explain, as always with Crowley. Love and Sleep is, in my opinion, Crowley's masterpiece (thus far), but he tells me that volume 4 is coming soon and I'm waiting with bated breath on that one. AEgypt is very good; Daemonomania I found painful to read, not because it isn't good but because it's the darkest part of the cycle (I presume). When #4 comes out, I will read the whole thing cover to cover repeatedly, and I promise you that the whole will be one of the great statements rethinking magic, the occult, and fantasy in literature.

Hughart, Barry. The Bridge of Birds. Del Rey, 1985 (reissue). Also The Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen.

• Hilarious and wonderfully written fantasies set in a mythological Tang China. Extraordinary sources for the art of Faking It. If you don’t know these, go get ‘em now — they’re brilliant. The Sinological in-jokes are just icing on the cake.

Powers, Tim. Last Call. Perennial, 1996 (reissue). Also Anubis Gates, Expiration Date, Declare.

• Powers writes the novels which inspire things like Unknown Armies. Weird, creepy, and violent, they generally deal with magic below the surface of the ordinary (or semi-ordinary) world. Last Call is particularly useful here, because although it’s set in modern Las Vegas, the issue of Tarot cards as a kind of meta-mechanic for magic is central to the plot. The alternate rules for Assumption are inspired by Last Call.

Rohmer, Sax (pseud.). The Mystery of Fu-Manchu. A nice omnibus edition is The Fu Manchu Omnibus vol. 1. London: Allison and Busby, 1996.

• Several editions, and quite a number of sequels. Set quite a bit later, in the 1920s, but all sorts of useful for Limehouse and insidious Chinamen. Classic pulp, so don't go overboard.

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 22 Dec 2004