Avram Davidson

1923-1993

Reviewed by Kat Hooper

Avram Davidson was a prolific award-winning author of books in several genres. Here is a website devoted to Mr. Davidson.

Click covers to view available formats, including audio & Kindle.

Kar-Chee — (1966) This omnibus contains the two original novels: The Kar-Chee Reign and Rogue Dragon. Other reprint editions are available.
Rogue Dragon: Jon-Joras came to Earth to oversee arrangements for a dragon hunt to amuse his king. The dragons, brought to Earth centuries earlier as pets of an alien race, were powerful but slow-witted — until now! Now, Jon-Joras finds himself caught in the middle of an uprising that could shake the powers of the galaxy!

Doctor Eszterhazy — (1969-1975) Amazon: This invaluable collection of Avram Davidson's resonant, witty short stories describes some incidents in the career of many-times-Doctor Engelbert Eszterhazy, loyal subject of the Triune Monarchy of Scythia- Pannonia-Transbalkania, located in a nineteenth-century Europe whose political landscape will be, after a little reflection, familiar to most fantasy readers. Enquire with Doctor Eszterhazy into curious matters — the lurley; the old woman who lived with a bear; gingerbread men; dancing goats; and more. NB: Read the stories in the order written, beginning with "Polly Charms", and turning back to read the later stories at the front.

book review Doctor Eszterhazy Adventures Enquiries Avram Davidson

Avram Davidson review 1. The Phoenix and the Mirror, 2. Vergil in Averno

Vergil Magus — (1966,1986) Publisher: Against the backdrop of a hauntingly familiar yet alien otherworld, Avram Davidson casts the adventures of the sorcerer known as Vergil Magus. Vergil was to construct a virgin speculum, a mirror of magical properties.

The Phoenix and the Mirror

The Phoenix and the Mirror, written by Avram Davidson and published in 1966, is based on the medieval legend that the poet Vergil (The Aeneid) was a mage and sorcerer. Queen Cornelia of Carsus has taken hostage part of Vergil’s soul. This leaves him feeling like less than a full man — he’s unmotivated and impotent. Though some of his parts don’t work too well, Vergil’s brain still works fine, so he sets out to meet Cornelia’s demand: manufacture a virgin speculum so Cornelia can scry the whereabouts of her kidnapped daughter, Laura.

It’s not too easy to make a magic mirror, even for an ancient and powerful sorcerer like Vergil. His first task is to acquire tin and copper ore that has never been used before, but this is difficult in a time when the Sea Huns are prowling the waters and controlling trade. Even if he can get all the materials he needs, the actual construction is an extremely precise and delicate alchemical operation.

Luckily, Vergil has several allies: his colleague Clemens, who’s like a walking encyclopedia; a crew of students and apprentices who do most of Vergil’s laboratory work; a mysterious Phoenician who is willing to guide him in his travels; a strange woman who dispenses advice and prophecies as she feeds her cats; and a down-and-out Sea-Hun king who can be bribed with the promise of worshipping Aphrodite in her temple of beautiful priestesses.

Avram Davidson uses the backdrop of Vergil’s quest to fill The Phoenix and the Mirror with some real geography, history, and science, and plenty of richly-detailed bits of medieval legends, fantastical creatures, alchemical instructions, and astrological divinations. Thus, you’ll meet a cyclops, a gargoyle and a homunculus along with Roman soldiers and Sea-Huns and you’ll learn the exact techniques for the construction of magical mirrors.

The Phoenix and the Mirror is beautifully written and gently and delightfully humorous, too, as Vergil and Clemens playfully stab each other with their witty banter and as Vergil manipulates his intellectual inferiors with his subtle persuasive techniques. The book begins with Vergil being chased by manticores through the sewers of Naples, and it ends with a surprise and a twist, but the middle of the book bogs down with too many details about Vergil’s travels and the construction of the mirror.

Intriguing questions about Vergil remain — Where did he come from? How old is he? What are his powers? What was he searching for in the sewers? I hope these will be answered in the sequel: Vergil in Averno.
—Kat Hooper

Peregrine — (1971,1981) Publisher: Peregrine was the illigitimate son of the king of Sapodilla, which, as every schoolboy knows, was the last pagan kingdom in the world to resist Christianity. Cast out of Sapodilla as required by law when he reached his majority, Peregrine sallied forth into the Dark Ages with his page Dafty and the rather time-worn sorcerer Appledore to find his fortune. What he found instead was: dragons, whores, Huns, Roman legions, emperors, and a delightful collection of mysteries and adventures.

book review Avram Davidson 1. Peregrine: Primus, 2. Peregrine: Secundus

A Few of Avram Davidson's Other Works:

Adventures in Unhistory — (1991) Publisher: Not a novel, not a book of short stories, Adventures in Unhistory is a book of the fantastic — a compendium of magisterial examinations of Mermaids, Mandrakes, and Mammoths; Dragons, Werewolves, and Unicorns; the Phoenix and the Roc; about places such as Sicily, Siberia, and the Moon; about heroic, sinister, and legendary persons such as Sindbad, and Aleister Crowley, and Prester John; and — revealed at last — the Secret of Hyperborea. The facts are here, the foundations behind rumors, legends, and the imaginations of generations of tale-spinners. But far from being dry recitals, these meditations, or lectures, or deadpan prose performances are as lively, as crazily inventive, as witty as the best fiction of the author, a writer praised by Gardner Dozois as “one of the great short story writers of our times.” Who, on the subject of Dragons, could write coldly, dispassionately, guided only by logic? Certainly not Avram Davidson. Certain facts, these facts, deserve more than recitation; they deserve flourish, verve, gusto, style — the late, great Avram Davidson’s unique voice. That prose which, in the words of Peter S. Beagle’s Preface to this volume, “cries out to be read aloud.”

The Avram Davidson Treasury — (1990) Publisher: Avram Davidson was erudite, cranky, Jewish, wildly creative, and sold most of his wonderful stories to obscure pulp magazines. Now his estate and his friends have brought together a definitive collection of his finest work, each story introduced by an SF luminary: writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, and dozens of others.

The Other Nineteenth Century — (2001) With The Other Nineteenth Century, we offer a new collection focussing on Avram Davidsons distinctive historical fantasies, tales of strange Mitteleuropas, and of magic in Victorian England and on the American frontier.

The Boss in the Wall — (1998) Publisher: Professor Vlad Smith is on a terrifying quest, one that will take him from the halls of our most hallowed institutions to the most run-down of old houses in blighted neighborhoods. A mysterious committee, shredded yellowed newspapers, a daguerrotype of a Confederate soldier, a headless corpse and a corpseless head... These are the clues which Smith must piece together to save his sanity and his daughter, and uncover the terrible secret of the Boss in the Wall.

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