Pilot Light

Those two madmen, Powers and Blaylock are back, with a recently unearthed and touched up short story thought lost to the ages. "Pilot Light" is vintage William Ashbless, complex to the point of incoherence, with a good eighteen footnotes added by the poet refuting and clarifying the changes made by Powers and Blaylock to his sacred words. Also included in this small form hardcover chapbook are an introduction by Powers and an afterword by Blaylock.

SF vets Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock present a lost short story by their fictional poet, William Ashbless, with Powers providing a pseudo-scholarly introduction and Blaylock an afterword. Ashbless himself gets the last word in a postscript. Humorous annotations often occupy more of the page than the actual text of the fairly cryptic story, which alternates between narrator Sikorski's recollections of childhood and a failed romance in the past and his current encounter with the enigmatic Colonel Wick. This slight, entertaining diversion is enhanced by Gahan Wilson's illustrations, particularly one of a sturgeon.
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