If The High House and its successors might be described as a tribute to or celebration of the masters that came before it (while crafting its own personality and its own expression), The Back of the Beyond sees all of its antecedents dissolved into a fine and rich loam out of which (Tolkien once described the creative process as producing out of “the leaf-mould of the mind”) Stoddard’s current expression rises in full bloom.

The “call outs” to the classic works of mythopoeic literature, in this one, aren’t as pronounced as they are in The High House (though we believe we detected a few). We say the same now for Stoddard’s latest original work (this one not precisely related to The High House “universe”) The Back of the Beyond. In short, The High House (and its sequels, The False House and Evenmere) reference (often in a form that today we call “Easter eggs”) those foundational fantasies, while simultaneously synthesizing them into its own original expression deserving of a place on the shelf right in among the beloved volumes it celebrates. We ended up using as models works gathered around or before Tolkien’s most notable publications, and many of those productions were printed or reprinted within Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.Īnd it was precisely this series - or favorite works from this line - that Stoddard channeled into his late-century creation. We had been publishing Mooreeffoc Magazine: Fiction in the Mythic Tradition, and, while doing so, we were specifying the kind of material we wanted to publish. What we should clarify is that, chronologically, in terms of years of publication, Stoddard’s The High House was our most notable find composed after the works of those two most esteemed Inklings. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, which was when we were much younger. It was the most numinous novel we had read since… well, since encountering J.R.R. The book was The High House, by James Stoddard. We were so excited about it that we were prepared to force it as a gift on anyone who expressed the remotest interest in reading it.

This review is jointly composed by Gabe Dybing and Nick Ozmentīack in 1998 there appeared a book that we bought more than once.

The Night Land by James Stoddard