Bad Magic - Hardcover

Zielinski, Stephan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312878621 ISBN 13: 9780312878627

Publisher: Tor Books, 2004

Synopsis

Magic is real. Strange forces and uncanny creatures abound. Cosmic evil is loose in the world--especially around San Diego--along with transcendent evil, primordial evil, simmering evil, objective evil, and specific evil.

In sheer self-defense, most of the human race long ago taught themselves to shut their magical Third Eye, blinding themselves to this supernatural world around them. As protection goes, it's not 100% effective, but it's still pretty good: If you can't see them, they can't see you.

Fortunately for the rest of us, a few people can deal with the weirdness. In San Francisco, a motley group of adventurers have banded together to fight evil. They're an uncanny mix of alchemists, thaumaturges, necromancers, and totemists, working their wildly different magics in a milieu where thaumaturgy is a laboratory science and raw pain can be kept in a flask of liquid nitrogen. They know they don't know what they're doing. And they have to save a world that doesn't know it's under attack from forces that they wish were beyond comprehension.

Poised, headspinning, and richly inventive, Bad Magic shows us what people really see when their third eye opens.

About this title

About the Author

Stephan Zielinski was born in Buffalo, New York and raised in California. He has attended clown school and the University of California at Berkeley, and written statistics code on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Bad Magic is his first novel.

Reviews

As in the movie Men in Black, most people are mercifully unaware of the horrors that surround them in first-time author Zielinski's wacky occult fantasy. It's up to Al Rider and his cohorts, who operate out of San Francisco and are aware of and willing to use their third eye, to confront vampires, ghosts, zombies, zombie dogs (not to be confused with thin dogs) and a host of other undead creatures anxious to take over the world. While the humor is often scattershot and undisciplined, the author shows some genuine wit. One redundant, rapid-fire dialogue exchange could have been taken from Joseph Heller's Catch 22. When the heroes run on water, they do the "Sea of Galilee boogie." A recipe for preparing thin dog dinner makes a deliciously gruesome aside. But Zielinski doesn't play it strictly for laughs. At the start, Rider steals "invisibility" from a homeless woman for use as a cloak. "It will crumble at sunrise; the street person is, in part, defined by her invisibility, and so it must return to her." An appendix features a windy treatise, full of scholarly references, by a Miskatonic University professor. The final item, "the author's top ten rejected bio blurbs," will provoke more than a few smiles.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Bad Magic

"Creedon, we've got to get out of here!" Rider scrabbles towards the cockpit. "The keys! Where are the damn keys! Who turned off the goddamned engine?!" He dithers and waves his hands. The engine turns over. The boat blunders forward, heading west.

"Duck."

Rider is something of a chowderhead, but he and his friends have trained for many hours to acquire the "duck" conditioned reflex. A kamikaze sea urchin sails over his head, squeaking.

Thibaut takes the wheel. "Destroyer approaching, Mr. Rider." He heels the wheel hard to port.

"Wrong way, Creedon! Not sou--" A shell hits off the starboard bow. "Never mind. Just warn me next time, okay?"

"RESISTANCE IS FUTILE," booms the destroyer's P.A. system. Rider can hear the Muzak oozing from the destroyer: a gutted, bleached, and deflavored "Yellow Submarine." Tracer rounds find the yacht and pieces of superstructure are chipped into the ocean.

Rider rummages in his pack. He can't see the labels in the dark but he can feel the Braille. "Yak butter...Virgin's blood...Grandma's fruitcake..." A rocket shatters the yacht's radar boom.

"Gorgon dung...Yttrium needles...Sacramental ouzo...I have got to get a system one of these days...Mandrake..." Another shot hits the water off the port stern.

"Wicker lingam...Nixon buttons...Schrödinger's cap...Aha! Where's the damn can opener?"

Rider gashes his thumb in his haste to open a king-sized can of Chicken of the Sea. Seizes a line, takes a deep breath, and jumps overboard. Bounces off the hull a few times. Begins letting his breath go to moan certain bass notes in a language that predates mankind.

Something huge and black hits the water nearby ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312878621
• ISBN 13: 9780312878627
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256