Harry Turtledove’s myriad books tweaking the events of the greatest real conflicts in human history have earned him the unofficial title of Master of the Alternate History Novel. His books ask the big questions: what if the South won the Civil War? What if the Byzantine Empire never fell? What if aliens invaded smack dab in the middle of World War II?

His next novel, The House of Daniel, hinges on far less seismic events, yet the results are no less thought provoking. It’s the 1930s, the Depression is in full swing, the downtrodden find escape in the game of baseball, fast becoming the American pastime—and, oh yeah, magic is real, the market crash was caused by wizardry, and no one can find a paying job because the zombie hordes will work for free.

Tor Books has kindly given us the chance to debut the trailer for The House of Daniel, which Publisher’s Weekly has called, “a loving callback to the early days of a quintessential American sport.” Then, keep reading for a guest post from Harry Turtledove, who explains how the book came to be—with a little help from Peter S. Beagle.

How The House of Daniel Happened

by Harry Turtledove

I’ve been lucky enough to know Peter S. Beagle for twenty-odd years. I’ve admired his work for much longer than that, of course. I was utterly blown away when I first read The Last Unicorn, and still am whenever I reread it. It strikes me as being as nearly perfect a book as has ever been written, perfect in style and characters and structure and theme. You can’t do a better book than that. And he didn’t go downhill afterwards—see, for instance, The Folk of the Air and Tamsin.

Along with Theodore Sturgeon, Samuel R. Delany, and Mary Renault, Peter is one of the people I read when I want to clear my head and remind myself what good writing is all about. One of the things about being a writer is, you have to know who’s better than you are. If you can start to understand why, you get better yourself.

We met at conventions. We met at signings. We did some talking. I suspect I went all fanboy, but how could I help it? Migawd, there I was talking with Peter Beagle! He noticed me enough to include the Yiddish version of my family name (my grandfather anglicized it, which is why I’m Turtledove) in “The Rabbi’s Story” in 2008.

We did more talking than usual at the 2011 World Fantasy Convention in San Diego. We’d both known Avram Davidson, Peter earlier than I (a couple of Avram’s last stories were done on a typewriter I sent him after I got a computer—my old machine happened to be the model he used, and his crapped out). Anyone who ever made Avram’s acquaintance has stories about him. We swapped ours. I saw Peter again at a little book fair here in Los Angeles a few months later. I said, “Next time you come to town, let’s have dinner.”

A few months after that, in the summer of 2012, he came back to L.A. for a media convention and let me know he was coming. Along with my wife and one of my daughters, I took him to a Korean grill-your-own barbecue place a couple of blocks from the hotel where he was staying. I’d known for years that he was the same kind of obsessive baseball fan I am. One of his stories is about stickball, the great New York kids’ game. And his essay, “My Last Heroes,” is a paean to Warren Spahn and Georges Brassens. I don’t play the guitar or have quite enough French to appreciate Brassens the way Peter does, but Warren Spahn I get. He was still rolling along, still racking up twenty wins a year, when I became a fan, ten years after Peter did.

So I asked him about “My Last Heroes,” and that got us started. Being older than I am, and growing up on the East Coast, he got to see so many of the wonderful ballparks I’ve just read about: the real Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds, Forbes Field in Pittsburgh (I have been to Fenway Park, by Crom!). My own first baseball hero was Steve Bilko, lumbering first baseman on the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League. He was an indifferent big-league, but boy, did he tear up the PCL from 1955 to 1957. He played in L.A.’s Wrigley Field, a small ballyard ideally suited to him, and, with the closest major-league teams half a continent away before 1958, the PCL was a very big deal out West. It was a wonderful evening for me, and I hope for him, too, and it left me with baseball on the brain.

I had so much baseball on the brain, in fact, that I thought, I need to write something about this. I came up with a protagonist, a semipro ballplayer down on his luck, during the 1930s, when the whole country was down on its luck. If he got in trouble with a local tough guy, how could he take it on the lam? I thought of the real House of David, the church that supported a touring semipro baseball team. If I transposed my hero into a world not quite like ours, a world where magic worked, and if I transposed the real House of David into a fictional House of Daniel fixated on that book in the Old Testament (and you can fixate on Daniel—it’s almost as out there as Revelations), maybe my guy could find a way to hook on with them. Maybe. And that’s how The House of Daniel came to be. Thank you, Peter!

Preorder The House of Daniel, available April 19.