Argo Press announces publication of The Box Hunters, a new fantasy novel by Albert J. Manachino. The Box Hunters is the story of the Ems, a not-so-typical family on summer vacation in a place where not a single thing is normal. It was a chance to "go somewhere for a change." So the Ems found Margrave: $75 a month, 150 rooms all to themselves, no other tenants. But there were neighbors. The wizards, Brown and Chain. Captain Fearless, part-time superhero. And don't even ask about Boes and Ransome. Who were all these people? Box hunters ...

 

The Box Hunters is a rare combination of wacky whimsicality and ominous foreboding, a roller-coaster ride through a fun house that changes into a haunted house, then back again. Albert J. Manachino, a veteran short-story writer for fantasy magazines, has previously published three collections. The Box Hunters is his first novel. The book features a full-color wraparound cover and three dozen black-and-white text illustrations by prolific Canadian artist Larry Dickison.

 

Albert J. Manachino has received wide critical acclaim. "Manachino is an original, his work a voice that comes straight from the heart with no compromise," says best-selling fantasy author Charles de Lint. "His stories are absurd and logical, hilarious and serious, all at once, a melting pot of strange and whimsical ideas, astute observations of contemporary life and sharp insights into the human psyche."

 

"Albert J. Manachino's stories are quite wonderful and unapologetically strange," according to William Browning Spencer, author of the critically acclaimed novel Zod Wallop. "You might call these stories surreal pulp fiction (a collaboration, perhaps, between William Hope Hodgson and Franz Kafka). Wildly inventive, they waste no time, cutting right to the chase. In a single volume their cumulative oddness produces its own unsettling logic. Lovers of the macabre and fantastic should be utterly delighted."

 

The late Frank Belknap Long, legendary science fantasy writer and compeer of H. P. Lovecraft, had this to say: "Albert J. Manachino has a perceptive awareness of the precise point in a story when an abyss of ultimate horror should be allowed to widen."

 

And Ray Bradbury said of Manachino's collection Noctet, "Grand fun all round."

 

Albert J. Manachinohas published hundreds of short stories and novellas in magazines and anthologies and has received awards for Best Fiction Writer and Best Comic Writer (for his cartoon series with Kevin Duncan). An excerpt from The Box Hunters and a sampling of Manachino's short stories may be read online at http://www.the-borderland.co.uk.

trade paper, 6x9, 264 pp

color cover & 36 B&W text illustrations by Larry Dickison

$16.95 plus $3.00 S&H U.S.

Argo Press

P.O. Box 4201, Austin,

Texas 78765-4201, USA

Michael Ambrose, Publisher

mikeargo@flash.net (512)263-5027

 

Review, courtesy of John M. Peters

http://www.the-borderland.co.uk

For further information on the novels and short stories by Albert J. Manachino, author of "Dreadful Bargain" (appearing in Issue No. 3 of The Pink Chameleon), log on to the Archive section of John M. Peters "The Borderland":
http://www.the-borderland.co.uk

Enjoy

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