"Night of the Jabberwock" - Out Of Print Again!

Well, this is annoying.

I had hoped to do a podcast review of Fredric Brown's wonderful "Night Of The Jabberwock," but I find it has gone out of print again, despite my having just picked up a copy in a Dublin bookstore.

That's too bad. Brown is best known for his marvelous science fiction - "Martians Go Home" comes to mind - and his fantasy work,  but he also wrote mysteries. "Night of the Jabberwock" is a marvelous mystery which defies adequate description. It sounds like a fantasy, but it's not - it's a cross between a classic mystery story and a hard-boiled thriller. And just when you think you have figured out what's really happening, along comes another unexpected surprise.

The story in a nutshell (or at least the setup for it): the narrator, Doc Stoeger, is the editor of a small-town newspaper, who begins by lamenting the fact that there is never any real news in his newspaper when it appears on Friday. Doc is also a fan of Lewis Carroll - the author of the Alice in Wonderland books, among other works.

On this particular Thursday night, the night the paper is "put to bed" for publication the next day, Doc arrives home to find a strange little man waiting for him. The man claims to be a member of a mysterious group called "The Vorpal Blades" - readers of Carroll's "Jabberwocky" will recognize the reference - and he invites Stoeger to a post-midnight meeting of the group which he says will demonstrate that Carroll was writing, not imaginary fantasies, but about real terrors. But before (and after) that meeting can happen, Doc Stoeger is going to be inundated with fantastic events, not to mention plunged into a series of dangerous adventures, that promise to make the next day's newspaper a gold mine of hard news - if Doc can survive the night. And yet, one by one, the stories threaten to fade away (or have to be withheld)...or do they?

Let me stress again that this is a mystery (and thriller; there's a LOT of action, including three murders). It's not a fantasy; there are rational explanations for everything I've described. This book has long been a favorite - and I hope you can find a copy, whether through one of Amazon's dealers (using my links above), through your own second-hand mystery book store, or - if you're lucky - through your local library. It is more than worth your while, particularly if you're at all partial to Lewis Carroll.