(Note: Today only the U.S. e-books of my novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance are deeply discounted everywhere. Also, a reminder that I’ll be participating in this NPR Science Friday book club discussion of The Lost City of Z on February 6.)

Today I was on NPR’s To The Best of Our Knowledge talking about Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side, which was reprinted by Dedalus late last year.

The Other Side (1908) tells the tale of a Dream Kingdom, somewhere in Central Asia. The mysterious and wealthy Patera has had a European city uprooted and brought to its new location, along with sixty-five thousand inhabitants, and named this city Pearl. The narrator, after some hesitation, agrees to visit and travels with there with his wife. Things soon get very strange indeed. The book is a masterpiece of a very precise kind of metaphysical phantasmagoria.

Kubin is a fascinating individual in part due to his amazing art and fiction but also his connections to other well-known creators. He illustrated Edgar Allen Poe’s fiction in its first German edition. He knew Gustav Meyrink and when Meyrink hit a snag in finishing The Golem, Kubin took his preliminary sketches and found ways to use some of them in The Other Side. Kubin also created illustrations for the influential early German SF novel Lesabendio by Paul Scheerbart, among others.

Check back tomorrow at Weirdfictionreview.com for more on Kubin. We’ll be featuring several pieces from the archives.