Books in series
#1
The Digging Leviathan
1984
Southern California—sunny days, blue skies, neighbors on flying bicycles…ghostly submarines…mermen off the Catalina coast…and a vast underground sea stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Inland Empire where Chinese junks ply an illicit trade and enormous creatures from ages past still survive. It is a place of wonder…and dark conspiracies. A place rife with adventure—if one knows where to look for it. Two such seekers are the teenagers Jim Hastings and his friend, Giles Peach. Giles was born with a wonderful set of gills along his neck and insatiable appetite for reading. Drawing inspiration from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Giles is determined to build a Digging Leviathan. Will he reach the center of the earth? or destroy it in the process?
#2
Homunculus
1986
In 1870s London, a city of contradictions and improbabilities, a dead man pilots an airship and living men are willing to risk all to steal a carp. Here, a night of bangers and ale at the local pub can result in an eternity at the Blood Pudding with the rest of the reanimated dead.
#3
Lord Kelvin's Machine
1992
Determined to avert the doom of his beloved wife, scientist and detective Langdon St. Ives sees his only hope for doing so in Lord Kelvin's time machine, but the diabolical Dr. Ignacio Narbondo has other plans for the invention. Reprint.
#4
The Ebb Tide
2009
A flaming meteor over the Yorkshire Dales, a long-lost map drawn by the lunatic Bill Cuttle Kraken, and the discovery of a secret subterranean shipyard beneath the River Thames lead Professor Langdon St. Ives and his intrepid friend Jack Owlesby into the treacherous environs of Morecambe Bay, with its dangerous tides and vast quicksand pits. They descend beneath the sands of the Bay itself, into a dark, unknown ocean littered with human bones and the remnants of human dreams. In this tale of murder, infamy, and Victorian intrigue, the tides of destiny shift relentlessly and rapidly as the stakes grow ever higher and the pursuit more deadly....
#5
The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs
2011
An outbreak of violent madness at the Explorers Club, the coincidental murders of a recluse scientist in North Kent and a lighthouse keeper on the chalk cliffs below Brighton, and the mysterious disappearance of Alice St. Ives, lead Langdon St. Ives, Jack Owlesby, and their resolute friend Tubby Frobisher into the very heart of danger, where they discover the great secret of the chalk cliffs at Beachy Head and a looming threat to the collective sanity of mankind.
#6
Zeuglodon
2012
A skeletal hand clutching an iron key lies hidden within a mermaid's wooden sarcophagus; a hand-drawn map is stolen from beneath the floorboards an old museum; an eccentric sleeping inventor dreams of a passage to the center of the hollow earth, and by dreaming of the passage, brings it into being....
Pursued by kidnappers thinking of riches and murder, Katherine Perkins and her two cousins, junior members of The Guild of St. George, must descend into the depths of the hollow earth in order to return the Sleeper to his ancestral home on the shores of Lake Windermere. But to awaken him might mean the end of his dream, the closing of the Windermere Passage, and the three intrepid explorers marooned in a savage land forgotten by time itself....
Zeuglodon, set in the world envisioned in James Blaylock's The Digging Leviathan, is a landscape of color, mystery, and adventure, in which reality and fantasy are shifting currents, and nothing is quite what it seems to be.
#7
The Aylesford Skull
2013
It is the summer of 1883 and Professor Langdon St. Ives - brilliant but eccentric scientist and explorer - is at home in Aylesford with his family. However, a few miles to the north a steam launch has been taken by pirates above Egypt Bay; the crew murdered and pitched overboard.
In Aylesford itself a grave is opened and possibly robbed of the skull. The suspected grave robber, the infamous Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, is an old nemesis of Langdon St. Ives. When Dr. Narbondo returns to kidnap his four-year-old son Eddie and then vanishes into the night, St. Ives and his factotum Hasbro race to London in pursuit...
#8
The Adventure of the Ring of Stones
2014
The secret log of a murdered lighthouse keeper falls into the hands of the immensely wealthy Gilbert Frobisher, who discovers encoded within it a stunning and dangerous mystery.
Against all odds Langdon St. Ives and his companions set sail in the dark of night for the West Indies aboard Gilbert Frobisher’s steam yacht, pursued by murderous pirates and bound for an uncharted volcanic island on the verge of eruption. There they undertake the perilous search for a hidden treasure protected by an unspeakable pagan god, and in the process unleash a power that will ultimately threaten the devastation of London.
#9
Beneath London
2015
The collapse of the Victoria Embankment uncovers a passage to an unknown realm beneath the city. Langdon St. Ives sets out to explore it, not knowing that a brilliant and wealthy psychopathic murderer is working to keep the underworld’s secrets hidden for reasons of his own.
St. Ives and his stalwart friends investigate a string of ghastly the gruesome death of a witch, the kidnapping of a blind, psychic girl, and the grim horrors of a secret hospital where experiments in medical electricity and the development of human, vampiric fungi, serve the strange, murderous ends of perhaps St. Ives’s most dangerous nemesis yet.
#10
River's Edge
2017
The body of a girl washes up on a mud bank along the edge of the River Medway amid a litter of poisoned fish and sea birds, casting an accusing shadow upon the deadly secrets of the Majestic Paper Mill and its wealthy owners. Simple answers to the mystery begin to suggest insidious secrets, and very quickly Langdon St. Ives and his wife Alice are drawn into a web of conspiracies involving murder, a suspicious suicide, and ritual sacrifice at a lonely and ancient cluster of standing stones. Abruptly St. Ives' life is complicated beyond the edge of human reason, and he finds himself battling to save Alice's life and the ruination of his friends, each step forward leading him further into the entanglement, a dark labyrinth from which there is no apparent exit.
#11
The Gobblin' Society
2020
The story begins with an inheritance. Following a protracted legal battle, Alice St. Ives, Langdon’s wife, has come into full possession of Seaward, the house left to her by her late Uncle Godfrey, a man with a number of bizarre proclivities. Heartened by this good fortune, Alice, Langdon and their surrogate son Finn prepare to take possession of the house. From this point forward, events spin out of control, taking on a madcap logic of their own that is exhilarating and—in typical Blaylock fashion—often quite funny.
What follows is, in a sense, a tale of two houses. The first, of course, is Seaward, a “rambling, eccentric old house” with it its history, its secrets, its priceless accumulation of volumes of arcane lore. The other is a neighboring house known, for good reasons, as “Gobblin’ Manor,” home base of The Gobblin’ Society, a “culinary establishment” with its own peculiar—and very dark—traditions. In the course of an event filled few days, St. Ives and his cohorts will encounter smuggling, mesmerism, kidnapping, cannibalism and murder. It is, in other words, a typical—and typically eccentric—Langdon St. Ives adventure.
Author
James P. Blaylock
Author · 31 books
James Paul Blaylock is an American fantasy author. He is noted for his distinctive style. He writes in a humorous way: His characters never walk, they clump along, or when someone complains (in a flying machine) that flight is impossible, the other characters agree and show him why he's right. He was born in Long Beach, California; studied English at California State University, Fullerton, receiving an M.A. in 1974; and lives in Orange, California, teaching creative writing at Chapman University. Many of his books are set in Orange County, California, and can more specifically be termed "fabulism" — that is, fantastic things happen in our present-day world, rather than in traditional fantasy, where the setting is often some other world. His works have also been categorized as magic realism. He and his friends Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter were mentored by Philip K. Dick. Along with Powers he invented the poet William Ashbless. Blaylock and Powers have often collaborated with each other on writing stories, including The Better Boy, On Pirates, and The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook. Blaylock is also currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County High School of the Arts, where Powers is Writer in Residence.
