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Cover and endsheet artwork by Matt Mahurin

After Many a Summer, a magisterial new novella from Tim Powers, borrows its title from a line in Tennyson’s famous poem “Tithonus.” An elegiac appeal for death on the part of the titular figure from myth, a man who was granted the everlasting life he had originally begged from the gods, only to have their gift turn to ashes in his mouth, only, as Tennyson wrote, to become someone whom “only cruel immortality consumes.”

What does this have to do with homelessness, troubled movie production companies, kidnapped heiresses, prophecies delivered by taxidermized heads, and a Los Angeles County rendered with such masterful, lived in, bone deep attention to physical detail that to read the opening is to feel the heat from cracked asphalt rising through your shoes and to taste cheap fortified wine grown warm in the sun cloying your tongue? Can all these seemingly disparate things be connected, cohered, clarified?

This is a Tim Powers story. Of course they can.

Conrad is a down on his luck screenwriter who takes a very strange assignment that leads him to encounter a kidnapped heiress after delivering her ransom—a hundred-year-old mummified head fond of cryptic utterances. Nothing goes Conrad’s way, though, because nothing, no matter how bizarre, is what it seems.

Tim Powers is the World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Award winning author of many novels and stories. His career spans nearly fifty years, and his imagination all of human history. This latest entry is not to be missed.

From Publishers Weekly:

“World Fantasy Award winner Powers (Stolen Skies) is a master at turning gonzo concepts into mystical thrill rides, and this latest novella is no exception, setting a mummified head as the ransom in the kidnapping of Belgian heiress Arielle... Powers places his tale in a bleakly rendered Southern Californian landscape as bereft of magic as an empty film lot, with characters whose amoral focus on their bottom lines blind them to the costs and marvels of real magic.”

From Locus Online:

“One trademark allure of Powers’s work is the blend of tactile sunny California realism and mimesis with the vibrantly deranged occult, and this tale delivers such a combo in plenty… Powers’s noir stylings are topnotch here, with Satkin and motley crew being real mooks. His evocation of the L.A. landscape is palpable. The ultra-compressed timeframe of the tale—it all happens within the space of a few hours—is propulsive. And the portraits of Conrad and Arielle are shaded with granular finesse. Oh, and did I mention that the novel manages to pay homage to the themes and topics in Aldous Huxley’s book of the same name? Not bad for eighty-four pages of compact story-telling.”