The twelfth essay in my Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series, which looks at Fletcher Pratt's The Blue Star (1952), an impressive, short novel of "rational" fantasy about power, gender, and why you should not cheat on your witch girlfriend.
Author: sonofsagan
Reading “Will-O-the-Wisp” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Will-O-the-Wisp (1976) is the author's tenth novel and is set in seventeenth-century Devon. It is a critique of Puritan moralizing against love, sexuality, and the body, and is surprisingly good!
Genre Fantasies: 2025 in Review
A brief recap of 2025 on the Genre Fantasies blog.
Reading “The Not-World” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Not-World (1975) is the author's ninth novel and is set in eighteenth-century Bristol. It's not very good but articulates Swann's typical themes nicely in the context of the rise of capitalist, colonialist modernity.
Reading “How Are the Mighty Fallen” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s How Are the Mighty Fallen (1974) is the author's eighth novel and his most (in)famous for the “controversy” of telling a queer story about the biblical King David. Also, Goliath is a Greek Cyclops.
Reading “Wolfwinter” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Wolfwinter (1972) is the author's seventh novel, one of his best, and a deeply moving meditation on love and choice set in the forests of sixth-century BCE Italy.
Reading “Green Phoenix” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Green Phoenix (1972) is the author's sixth novel, a partial retelling of the story of Aeneas that deals heavily with gender relations and sexual violence.
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: Reading “The Mezentian Gate” by E.R. Eddison (Zimiamvia 3)
The eleventh essay in my Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series, which looks at E.R. Eddison's final novel in the Zimiamvia trilogy, The Mezentian Gate (1958).
Reading “The Goat Without Horns” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Goat Without Horns (1971) is the author's fifth novel, an attempted Gothic satire set in the colonial Caribbean. It is not very good and pretty damn racist. Also, the narrator is a talking dolphin.
Reading “The Historian” by Elizabeth Kostova
In which I return to Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian (2005), a literary fiction vampire novel about historians fighting against Dracula across three generations—which once meant so much to me and which I now find both frustrating and disappointing.
Genre Fantasies 