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In the seventies, Red Sonja writer Frank Thorne and Wendy Pini used to perform a show, "Red Sonja and the Wizard," at comic conferences. No record of these legendary shows were thought to have survived, however—until this film, shot by an audience member at 1978's San Diego Comic Con, surfaced on YouTube.

"Recovering this is, for us, the equivalent to Robert Ballard's locating the Titanic," says Pini. "The quality is, alas, 1978-era Super-8 film taken under difficult conditions - but it EXISTS!"

The unlikely hero in Ned Vizzini's young adult fantasy novel, The Other Normals is Perry Eckert, a 15-year-old boy with divorced parents, an alcoholic older brother, and few friends. He is terrified of girls. While other boys his age are developing into young men with deepening voices and growth spurts, Perry's body stubbornly refuses to kickstart the puberty process. He's teased at school, and has been given the nickname Tiny Pecker. Because his life sucks, it's not surprising that Perry frequently retreats into a fantasy world fueled with sword & sorcery roleplaying games. But because he has almost no friends, Perry plays the games by himself.

As the saying goes, nothing's so bad that it can't get worse, and when summer rolls around, Perry's parents ship him off to a summer camp for 8 weeks. The kids at the camp dislike Perry even more than the kids at his school, and they either shun him or pick on him. And when the camp staff takes away the gaming manual he'd brought along, Perry has nothing to look forward to.

The remaining 350 pages of The Other Normals would be depressing if not for the fact that a red skinned humanoid with yellow hair and a tail runs past a window that Perry happens to be looking out of. Perry goes outside and meets the creature, who speaks English and is addicted to smoking pebbles, which make him stoned. The creature's name is Mortin Enaw, and Perry learns that Enaw comes from another dimension. Enaw leads Perry into the woods and he activates the portal (made from mushrooms connected to a car battery) that allows them to enter the World of the Other Normals. Perry finds himself in a real sword and sorcery world, just like the one in his confiscated gamer's manual. He also learns that his assistance is needed to save the World of the Other Normals. This appeals to him, because he would rather battle loathsome half-men/half monsters on a strange planet than deal with the shunners, bullies, and girls at camp. Unfortunately for Perry, his assignment requires him to return through the portal to Earth to kiss one of the girls at the camp. What follows is an enjoyable adventure story that moves back and forth between Earth and Enaw's world as Perry attempts to control escalating situations on both sides of the portal.

Vizzini's story reminded me of Rudy Rucker's novels, which often have silly, almost cartoonlike, nonhuman characters, but portray human relationships, struggles, and desires in a realistic and engrossing way.

I interviewed Ned Vizzini on Gweek in September 2012. Listen to it here.

The Other Normals

Terry Pratchett's latest novel, Dodger, isn't a Discworld book, except, well, it kind of is. Nominally, this is an historical novel, a fictionalized account of the fictionalized person who inspired Mr Charlie Dickens to create his much-beloved character The Artful Dodger. But as the story unfolds, the parallels between the early Victorian London of Dickens (and Mayhew) and the Ankh-Morpork of Pratchett's Discworld novels become sharper and clearer, so that by the end, we're reading a story that really could be set in either one of those fantastical places, and what's more, there's a kind of vividness to Dodger that comes, I think, from its proximity to the origin of Pratchett's inspiration, a cask-strength version of what makes Pratchett so addictive and so loved.

Dodger tells the story of a young street-urchin, a "geezer" who is known throughout the tenements of central London as a dashing and fearless character. Dodger is a "tosher," a young man who scrounges in the sewers of London for coins and jewels and little bits and pieces that wash up, and he worships the Lady, a deity descended from the Roman goddess Cloacina, the patron of the sewers the Romans carved out beneath Londinium. He is fearless, noble, but also lightfingered, with a cheeky propensity for making off with anything that isn't nailed down or buttoned firmly in a gentleman's coat-pocket.

Dodger starts one night in the sewers, when Dodger hears the cries of a woman in distress from above. While in Discworld, this distress might be hinted at and painted in vague, impressionistic strokes, here it is as vivid as Dickens: the woman whose rescue Dodger leaps to is being horribly beaten by a gang of thugs, whom Dodger lashes out at, dealing out fast and furious blows until they run off. As he tends to the woman, he meets Charlie Dickens and Henry Mayhew, the first of two historical personages to make an appearance in the pages of Dodger (others include Queen Victoria, Benjamin Disraeli, and Sweeney Todd).

So begins the story of Dodger's coming of age. He and the woman he rescues fall in love, but the men who hunted her are still chasing after her, driven by a great imperial house of Europe whose king would see her dead. Against this backdrop, Dodger must both beat the assassins and thugs on his trail, and also find his true love's way clear of the deadly intrigue, all the while mixing in the alien environs of high society -- and journalistic circles -- whom he is introduced to by Dickens.

Dodger features some of Pratchett's most engaging characters yet -- which is saying something! -- inasmuch as these people are allowed to experience and react to the mercilessly cruel world of Victorian London, which Pratchett is fearless about describing. This isn't a book for the squeamish, but then, neither is Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, which Pratchett describes as the genesis for this novel in an author's afterword.

Which is not to say that Dodger lacks the humor that makes Pratchett so beloved. This is a book that is every bit as funny as any Discworld novel, and includes Pratchett's signature trick of hiding the gravity of the world in absurdity, a very serious pill wrapped up in a fluffy, sweet confection.

What's more, Dodger features the most satisfying climax and denouement of any Pratchett novel of my recollection, a thunderous final chord that lingers and stretches. It's a masterwork from a treasure and hero of a writer, and it will delight you.

Dodger

I wrote about Sailor Twain, Mark Siegel's beautiful, haunting serialized graphic novel when it began. Since then, the story of a New York steamship captain who is haunted by his love for a mermaid has run its course, and today it has been published in a single, handsome hardcover volume from FirstSecond.

Sailor Twain tells the story of Captain Twain of the Lorelei, which plies its trade up and down the Hudson valley, while the ship's owner, a dissolute Frenchman, seduces the wives of the gentry in the owner's cabin. Captain Twain's own beloved wife is wasting with some unspecified disease on land, and he works to raise money to send her to specialists. He's a good man, beset with tragedy, and he has forgotten how to write the poetry he once loved.

And then comes the day when he spies a mermaid clinging to the deck of the Lorelei, gravely wounded. He pulls her from the sea and into his cabin, and everything changes for Sailor Twain. The poetry comes back, and at his request, she never sings for him, never puts him under her siren spell. But still, he is hers.

Out spills a mystery, a story about seduction and duty, mythology and gender, dreams lost and dreams forgotten, and the lure of magic and wonder. Siegel's illustrations are charcoal drawings that fearlessly mix highly detailed, realistic depictions with cartoons, impressionistic smears, and caricature, and they are moody and grey and dreamlike, the perfect match for the story.

This is a stupendous work, a beautiful and sad and lovely thing. If you don't believe me, go read it online for free and see for yourself.

Sailor Twain

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There is the long-awaited sequel to Cat Valente's debut novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and it delivers on all the promise of that book, which is one of the strongest fantasy novels for young readers I've had the pleasure of getting lost in.

September, the young heroine of Circumnavigated, is back in the mundane world when she chases a green wind across the Nebraska prairie and returns to her beloved Fairyland. But it's not Fairyland as she remembered it: her shadow -- lost on a previous adventure -- has become the Hollow Queen of the Underworld, and is using her minion, the terrible Alleyman, to steal all of Fairyland's shadows and with them, Fairyland's magic. Equipped with a magic ration-book and a few scant adventurer's supplies, September runs to the Underworld for a series of Adventures, in an attempt to foil her shadow's evil and restore the natural order to Fairyland above.

But this is a Valente novel, so nothing is at seems. There's as much Phantom Tollbooth here as there is Narnia, a disorienting but familiar sense of story-ness as September travels slantwise through the underworld, shot through with menace and heroism. You never know what's coming next in Fell Beneath, and the most roundabout and whimsical turns always come back around to the main story and its payoff.

As masterful as the first novel, and with a reprise of Ana Juan's illustrations, this is a most worthy sequel. I'm also excited to note that there's an unabridged, DRM-free MP3CD audiobook edition, because this is one of those fairytales, like Gaiman's Stardust, that you want to have read aloud to you.

If your fancy is tickled by this, don't miss Deathless, Valente's fantasy for adults about the Siege of Leningrad.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There