Outside the Dog Museum Harry Radcliffe is a brilliant prize-winning architect - a very witty and remarkable man. He is also a self-serving opportunist, ready to take advantage of whatever situations - and women come his way. After all ‘geniuses’ are allowed do anything.
But now Harry is being wooed and pursued by the extremely wealthy Sultan of Saru, who wants him to design a very special building. For the Sultan has one towering passion - dogs. And, fearing imminent assassination, he wants to build the ultimate reverential monument in the form of a billion-dollar Dog Museum.
Harry is profoundly uninterested in anything so bizarre ... yet he has reached a strange point in his life, the aftermath of a recent divorce, an inexplicable nervous breakdown and the complexities of juggling with the affections of two strong-minded women.
Then occurs a devastating earthquake, and suddenly the way seems clear. On his arrival in Saru he learns that the Sultan is no more, but his son and heir wants the project to continue ... not now in the Arabian desert, but in a remote corner of the Austrian Alps.
Once work begins, Harry's interest and then obsession grow, for this will be his ultimate triumph. But little does Radcliffe realise what he is now in the process of creating. As the powers of magic weave themselves around him, the implications of his strange undertaking grow ever more ominous and astounding...
From a world-renowned master of fantastical fiction and sheer inventiveness, a novel to provoke the mind and haunt the imagination. ’His style is a kind of prose hybrid of Hermann Hesse and D.M. Thomas, less graphically sexual but more longingly sensuous, less deliberately mystic but more warm and romantic ... Carroll achieves that rarest of literary triumphs: bold adult fantasy that shimmers with both invention and feeling’ Booklist
‘Jonathan Carroll writes the kind of book that either confuses people utterly or makes them want to run out and give copies to their best friends ... a true original, possessing both a distinctive artistic vision and the talent to make that vision come fully to life on the page’ San Francisco Chronicle
’I would say that only five writers have written serious novels which incorporate themes of fantasy or the inexplicable and still qualify as literature: T.E.D. Klein, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, Richard Adams, and now Jonathan Carroll’ Stephen King
‘Fete him, read his books. See him for what he is - one of our most gifted and intelligent entertainers’ Washington Post
Paperback - Legend (1989)
A Child Across the Sky Philip Strayhorn makes a series of notorious horror films that bring him everything; love,
fame, money. Then he takes a gun and blows his head off.
Why? His best friend Weber Gregston hopes the answer is on the video tapes Phil has left him. Instead he finds messages from beyond the grave, and that the evil in Phil's last film is not just slasher gore. He has created something that threatens his friends' lives. And if Weber doesn't put it right, and fast, that evil will extend far beyond a handful of people in Hollywood. A Child Across the Sky is a brilliant tale of wonder and fear. It is also one of the most important novels of fantastic fiction in recent years. 'A unique blend of horror, fantasy and reality. Reading Jonathan Carroll is like dreaming with your eyes open' Lisa Tuttle
Paperback - Gollancz Millenium (2000)
The Land of Laughs For schoolteacher Thomas Abbey there was no writer to equal Marshall France, a legendary author of children's books who hid himself away in the small town of Galen and died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four. Tom and his girlfriend Saxony, wanting to write France's biography, arrive in Galen, where they discover the writer's fiercely protective daughter Anna is waiting for them. Before long, they realise that this idyllic little town and its inhabitants - both man and animal - are not quite what they seem: France's magic has spread beyond the printed page … 'Carroll's first novel is an audacious game of puppets and masks, in which the roots of fiction, and the relationship between people and their favourite books, and the nature of belief, is laid bare in a way that is both heart-warming and utterly chilling. It's a book about love and abandonment: a ghost story, a romance, and a tale of the bad place - the place where dreams come true. The Land of Laughs is a book for anyone who has ever believed that a favourite book could be a safe place to go when things get hard.'
Nell Gaiman
'A marvellous, exciting, beautifully written book, and absolutely riveting.' Ruth Rendell
'Part horror, part fantasy, part mystery, part love story, his novels reel you in quickly and effortlessly ... working a rich vein - the horror lurking on the shadowy edges of daily life.' Washington Post
'Tricky and undeniably high-minded, Carroll's novels demand, and deserve, to be taken seriously.' New York Times Book Review
’The sort of book an inveterate fiction reader hopes to escape with on a rainy day.' Los Angeles Times
'Jonathan Carroll is a profound, ironic, scathing poet of the terror of the prison of mortality.' The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
'Blending fairy tale, drama, magic realism and occult horror, the fiction of Jonathan Carroll is like no one else's. It begins with a careful sketch of 'real' life, takes a sudden turn into the fantastic, then careers toward ever more disorienting wonders until a final revelation or enigma' Washington Post
’Beguiling and original, this is an intricate, challenging, ultimately chilling tale, full of startling juxtapositions and surprises’ Washington Post
’I can’t remember when I’ve been so blown away by a fantasy novel’ Stephen King
Outside the Dog Museum
Outside the Dog Museum