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There was a Ned Kelly. He lived and breathed and fought for what he believed to be right – according to the historians. According to others he was no more than a bushranger, a vicious criminal who paid the just penalty for his crimes on the gallows.

But what if he had lived. What would have been the consequences for Australia – and the world?

In Rolltown, Reynolds has turned his productive imagination towards the growing phenomenon of mobile living in America. Taking us decades into the future, he tells the story of a world where people have taken to the road en masse, in huge mobile “towns” composed of hundreds or even thousands of inhabitants, attempting to deal with a hostile and over-organized world.

This is the story of a strange and terrible world of the future. A world where children live without parents and family. There is no sense of the past in this world, no sense of history except in the mind of Lothar. Some say he is crazy; others only know that the Elders do not approve of his peculiar ways and that all conversations with him are forbidden. Dal is somehow attracted to Lothar, tolerating his impatience as he tells of past times that he has constructed in his mind from the scrapbooks he has hidden away in his cubicle.

He held the power of life after the world’s end! In four days the world was coming to an end! The exploding sun would burn every living thing on Earth to a cinder! In Simsville, it was Bill Easson who got the job of picking those fit to escape. He had to choose ten people – men, women, or children – out of its desperate, hysterical three thousand. Whom should he pick – the beautiful, the bold, or the clever? Did they really have a chance to reach a new world in the rickety, jerry-built, inadequate space boat that would be given them? Would cold and hostile Mars welcome them?

The Panarch of Pao is dead and Beran Panasper, his young son and heir, must flee the planet to live and avenge his father’s death. It is at the secret fortress on the planet Breakness that Beran discovers the dreaded truth behind the assassination of his father-and much more. The people of Pao are a docile lot, content to live in harmony with the rest of the cosmos, but the scientists at Breakness seek to alter the psychology of the Paonese for their own purpose-and Beran holds the key to their audacious plan. Beran will return to Pao, transforming his home world beyond his teacher’s wildest dreams. But though he has been fashioned into a man of Breakness, Beran’s heart is of Pao. And he brings to his world the seeds of change that will save Pao…or destroy it.

Under the trackless sands of the Sahara lies Zanthodon. That vast subterranean realm is the final homeland of the one-time masters of the world’s surface – great dinosaurs, mighty jungles, and the living bands of primitive peoples from Neanderthals to Ancient Minoans and even Barbary Pirates!

It was into the cruel hands of those feared corsairs that Eric Carstairs’ beloved cave-maiden, Darya the Cro-Magnon princess, had fallen. It was his mission to save her, as well as to keep his caveman friends and his professor guide from the innumerable dangers spawned in the unmapped wilds of the Underground World

The barrenland lay on the face of the world like a sore, nearly round, more than three hundred miles in circumference. It had been there so long that it was endured, as were the twisted monsters that wandered out of the barrenland and killed.

Conrad, living on the edge, had visions of a time when the barrenland was a rich region full of powerful, magical people-people who travelled to other worlds. He was ruled by a burning need to know what none could tell him: the explanation of the mysterious visions which had plagued him all his life.

Then he met Jervis Yanderman, a soldier who knew of these visions. Yanderman was convinced there was an island in the barrenland where people still clung to life.

And Yanderman knew that a man had come out of it . . . within living memory!

First published in 1964.

The universe is dying; at the End of Time the last remnants of Humanity live amoral lives of decadence, constantly seeking new diversions and sensations. So when Mrs Amelia Underwood is mysteriously transported to the End of Time Jharek Carnelian decides to fall in love with her, but when Amelia returns to her own period of history, Jherek follows her and finds himself plunged into the strange world of Victorian London.

Dis was a planet, a wasteland, a world of death where living was dying and dying was much better than living.

Dis was a scorching desert, its people crude, barbaric, backward and miserable – and they would become seven million blackened corpses unless Ihjel stopped the H-bombs. But Ihjel had forseen his sudden death, and only one man could take his place – Brian Brandd, Champion of Champions and master of a secret power.

Thomas Blades has been released from his time as God-King in the alternative world he fought and ruled over. His descendants rule and fight but he cannot bear to return and meddle in their lives.

Judith Moffett returns to the future with this moving tale of the Hefn occupation of Earth and how it affects the planet’s native humans – two in particular: Pam Pruitt, a talented young woman from Kentucky, and Liam O’Hara, whose unique friendship with the Hefn Humphrey saved his life. The two teens journey to a special place in remote Kentucky, Hurt Hollow, where the painter Orrin Hubbell and his wife, Hannah, found a way to live in peace with the planet during the twentieth century. The prospects of living peacefully seem distant for Pam and Liam, both of whom must find peace with themselves as well as with the Hefn Directive. The marvelous events that befall them en route to Kentucky and in the Hollow itself beautifully depict the subtle ways in which the world shapes them, and the stunning ways in which they change the world.

As guardian of the Universe’s freedom from the domination by the Cyclan, Earl Dumarest is ruthlessly hunted by their agent, Cyber Broge, as he searches for the fortune necessary to finance his epic quest for Terra – the planet of his birth. Hunter and fugitive, predator and victim, Earl Dumarest lands on the planet Zakym.

ZAKYM – a cadaverous, twin-sunned world where the spectres of the dead daily claim the lives of the living; a decadent world that threatens to explode with the unparalleled violence of civil war and broken taboos.

ZAKYM – home of the beautiful, haunted Lavinia whose soul is claimed and condemned by a power-crazed madman.

Both Lavinia and her planet are doomed until a man appears who promises to be their saviour. Dumarest is the only person capable of challenging the terrifying menace of the Cyclan and the terrors of Zakym. But can even he triumph against such foes?




(First published 1977)

The world situation has become so confused that a young American living on Negative Income Tax finds himself drafted into an international espionage assignment by no less than 5 opposing interests. It is a story of humour and adventure that will be hard to forget.

A remote, crumbling house; four sisters; and the secrets that imprison them…

‘Before Gillian Flynn, there was Lesley Glaister’ Harper’s Bazaar

‘Frightening yet eerily beautiful … Lesley Glaister is adept, original and mature’ Hilary Mantel

In a remote, crumbling house in the Fens live four sisters – Agatha, Milly, and Ellen and Esther – identical twins so closely linked as to be almost one person. They have lived there all their lives, trapped still by the fear of their dead father, who governs his daughters’ lives from beyond the grave. And then there is George, another inhabitant, imprisoned in the cellar.

Little by little, macabre events come to light: events that transform an idyllic country childhood into a world of eccentric isolation.

‘Eerie and satisfying – a horror story told with tenderness’ Sunday Times

Mixing the mundane with the metaphysical, the pairings of the everyday and the extraordinary in this collection of short fiction yield supernatural results-a young musician perceives another world while drinking coffee, a fairy chronicles his busy life in a sandcastle during the changing tide, a demonic 16th-century chess set shows up in a New Jersey bar, and Charon, the boatman of hell, takes a few days vacation. Storylines both conventional and outlandish reveal humdrum routines as menacing, or imaginary worlds as perfectly familiar. Allusions to authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne reinforce the fantasy tradition in these tales, while understated humor and moments of sadness add a quirky unpredictability. Also included is the previously unpublished novella, “Botch Town,” a coming-of-age story about a boy on Long Island whose family and friends live ordinary lives under threats both real and imagined. Each story is followed by a brief afterword that details its genesis.

DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES…Except to Harry Keogh, Necroscope. And what they tell him is horrifying.

In the Balkan mountains of Rumania, a terrible evil is growing. Long buried in hallowed ground, bound by earth and silver, the master vampire schemes and plots. Trapped in unlife, neither dead nor living, Thibor Ferenczy hungers for freedom and revenge.

The vampire’s human tool is Boris Dragosani, part of a super-secret Soviet spy agency. Dragosani is an avid pupil, eager to plumb the depthless evil of the vampire’s mind. Ferenczy teaches Dragosani the awful skills of the necromancer, gives him the ability to rip secrets from the mind and bodies of the dead.

Dragosani works not for Ferenczy’s freedom but world domination. he will rule the world with knowledge raped from the dead.

His only opponent: Harry Koegh, champion of the dead and the living.

To protect Harry, the dead will do anything – even rise from their graves!

The Golden Age is a haunting, mysterious story – a strange Gothic novel of the future. The holocaust is over; Oxford seems to be the capital of the habitable world; and a poet-ruler appears to live out a future tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.

It has become a world in which the devil can materialise monstrosities through barriers of time and place, where death has been the monarch and beauty remains a memory in the mind of only a few. The scientists, the priests, soldiers and politicians have all failed; perhaps only the poets can save mankind.

DRACULA?

A mere figment of superstition, a thing that could not exist.

SABELLA?

A very real person, an enticing girl of flesh and warmth – who detested the sunlight, who required the blood of young men to feed upon, who was all that Dracula was said to be except never one of the “undead.” Sabella was alive, sensual and dangerous.
She lived on Nova Mars, a colony of Earth and very much like the world we know. She knew what she was and her very existence was a peril to the all-too-human population of that world.

AN ACCIDENT IN TIME…

Duncan Reid was snatched out of the twentieth century from a cruise liner in the mid-Pacific. Oleg Vladimirovitch came from Novgorod in medieval Russia. Udin was a Hun barbarian who lived by cunning and the axe. Erissa had been a sacred priestess in a lost continent. And a mistake in a time-experiment by a race from the far future had thrown these four unlikely comrades together, pulling them through a warp in the fabric of space and time to a world which was ancient history.

The strange alliance that Duncan and his comrades formed in that unfamiliar world was to take on a significance that none of them could have foreseen. For not only their own future, but they very future of the world they had found was at stake…

‘One citizen of your planet shall go to the capital of the Federation of Worlds. He shall live there for thirty days. If your representative can survive and demonstrate his ability to exist in a civilized society with creatures whose outward appearance and manner of thinking differ from his own, you will pass the test. You will be permitted to send your starships to other planets of the galaxy.

‘If he fails the test, if prejudice, fear, intolerance or stupidity trip him up, then you world will be sealed of from the stars for ever!’

This was the ultimatum from space. The task before the world then was – who shall go? What man or woman could be found to take this frightening test for the whole of humanity and be certain not to fail?




(First published 1961)

It’s 1920s Chicago, and Louise and Evvie, who have known each other since school, share an apartment. Worldly Evvie, a painter and dancer – supposedly married at seventeen and then divorced – is living on her alimony. Louise is a successful advertising copywriter and in love with her boss. Flouting the Prohibition, they party and enjoy a drink, and like the company of men. They’re independent, making their own way in the world, beyond the confines of marriage and motherhood.

But Louise’s life is rudely interrupted by the brutal murder of Evvie – a crime that involves family, friends and Chicago itself.

Before the Glory of Greece, Crete ruled the known world – and kept it enslaved by black magic! The evil of Minos held sway, protected by three unconquerable walls. First is the fleet that they call the wooden wall. Then there is a giant of living brass – he is the second wall. Then there is another barrier about the power of Minos, the Wall of Wizardry. Theseus, the tall Achean, the man they called Captain Firebrand, vowed to scale and destroy all three, and to rid the world of the evil yoke of Crete. But Minos had other defences besides the walls, and many ways to attack as well . . .

Trullion – World 2262 of the Alastor Cluster – was a beautiful waterworld of fens, mists, idyllic islands set in clear oceans whose teeming richness provided food for the taking. The Trill were a carefree, easy-living race. But violence entered their lives during the raids of the galactic pirates known as the Starmenters. And there was also the planetwide game of hussade, when the Trill’s ferocious passion for gambling drove them to risk all – even life itself – on the hazardous water-chessboard gaming fields. Their prize? The virginal body of the beautifu sheirl-maiden, the body any Trill is willing to die for.

Max Harborn and his wife Eva, the first space explorers to visit Mars, discover an almost dead world of endless deserts. Lifeless, that is, except for a few curious Martian moths, paradoxically existing in the absence of vegetation and water. Two of the living moths are brought back to Earth, along with samples of rocks, sand, and atmosphere. But once back on Earth, the two moths, male and female, escape from captivity, and begin breeding at a prodigious rate. The alien grubs are capable of eating almost anything, and soon the world is imperilled by a horrifying destructive plague of the Martian moths…