We are having a run of authors right now on First, Last, Everything. This time it's Nick Larter.

Nick Larter lives and works in Ennis, County Clare. In a career criss-crossing four continents, he has worked as a professional consultant in areas as wide-ranging as moon-base design, information security, chemical weapons inspection, cosmonaut training, border control and orbital mechanics. A lifelong science fiction and fantasy fan, gamer and convention-goer, he began writing fiction in 2010. His other hobbies include chess, cooking with seaweed, insects and wild mushrooms, and vanishing into the nooks and crannies of the Burren. His first published book is a new collection of fairy stories for adults, called Irish Tales. He inhabits Twitter @thremnir.

As I’m writing this, I’m looking at the description of what First, Last, Everything is about that Dave posted on the FB page.  It’s helping me narrow down options, as it makes clear firstly that we’re looking for a fantasy book and secondly that it’s one that I bought.

I was reading and buying adult titles by age 12 or 13, but it was almost exclusively SF: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Verne, Wells.  On the fantasy side I’d read all of Alan Garner’s and Tove Jansson’s stuff, as well as Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by then, but they were all loaners or library books.  I’m 99.99% certain that the first fantasy book I bought with my precious hoarded pocket money, aged 13 or so, was E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros.

Even today, it’s considered a difficult book by some, being written in Eddison’s own particular brand of cod-Elizabethan.  But at that age, with a kid’s quickness of mind, and having already been force-fed a trencher-load of Shakespeare at school, I just dived right in, sink or swim.  I swam delightfully.

Eddison is the third corner of that triptych of great UK fantasy writers whose careers straddled WW II, alongside Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.  I’m astonished that today his works have still not been adapted for TV or for the movies, since in that way, any possible language barrier could be removed for an appreciative modern audience.

The Worm Ouroboros is a book I’ve re-read many times since.  It’s a joy.  It’s has the simplest of plots, telling of the war between Witchland and Demonland, and is full of epic quests, battles, and larger-than-life characters, the hook being [SPOILERS] that the victors at the end, bored with having no-one to fight anymore, resurrect their enemies so that they can do it all over again.  This is where the title comes in of course, the dragon biting on its tail being a symbol for eternity, or for death and rebirth. 

It would have been another pretty strong candidate for my Everything choice.

My choice here is The Dryad by Justin Huntly McCarthy.  I say choice in the sense that I’ve read a couple of novella length fantasies since (Alexander Grin’s feelgood, fairytale-like Crimson Sails, and Jen Sheng, M.M. Prishvin’s semi-autobiographical magic-realist fable, set in Manchuria after the Russo-Japanese war), but I wanted to go for a full length work.

The review of The Dryad on my blog, begins thus:-

One suspects that there are few historical fantasy novels set in the fourteenth century Duchy of Athens, but this is not the most surprising thing about Justin Huntly McCarthy’s accomplished and engaging work, The Dryad. First of all, though written by an Irishman, and with a publication date (1905) at the height of the Celtic Revival, there is not a single Celtic allusion anywhere in the book. Secondly, and even more intriguing, is the great principal character that McCarthy conjures up: the eponymous heroine, the immortal Argathona – one third Wonder Woman, one third Arwen Undómiel, yet pre-dating either by three decades, give or take, and one third Lyanna Stark – it just goes to show that there truly is nothing new under the sun.

You can read the rest of my review here: https://thremnir.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/a-review-of-justin-huntly-mccarthys-the-dryad/

I had initially intended to go with E.R. Eddison’s Zimiamvian trilogy here[1] which I’m always pushing, to anyone who’ll listen, as “Game of Thrones meets Downton Abbey.”  But then I realised that a work by Eddison was going to be my ‘First’ so I’ve decided to choose something different, to keep a bit of variety. Candidates included George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes, and Deirdre by James Stephens.  But I’m going to go for John Crowley’s Little, Big - a once towering behemoth that seems to have become a little forgotten of late.

Little, Big’s urban fantasy type theme of people living at the boundary between our world and the faerie realm and interacting with them, seems commonplace today but it was utterly groundbreaking when it came out in 1981.  In a fictionalised New York (city and state), the book chronicles the story of several generations of the Drinkwater family, their country house of Edgewood and the urban Old Law Farm, built on a city block, against the background of a power struggle between a faerie instauration and the second coming of Frederick Barbarossa.

I’ve read the book several times – you always find something new.  The book also popularised the idea of memory mansions, which became, as a result, a staple topic for con panels in the mid 1980’s. The scene with the changeling trudging up the stairs towards the fireworks store, while snacking on a handful of red hot coals from the fireplace, scared the living daylights out of me, and still does.

[1] Or if we’re sticking with a single book, the opener, Mistress of Mistresses.

I think this is a first; three selections that I have not heard of before. Nick work, Nick! And, I have to say that all three covers are beautiful!

Remember, if you want to take part I’ll post your entry. Just drop me a line on Twitter or via email to dave@dpwoolliscroft.com and I’ll send you some simple instructions.