The Dragon House / Darrell Schweitzer. Wildside Press, 2018 (hardcover 978-1-4794-3836-5 / trade paperback 978-1-4794-3821-1). 166 pages.

I got Darrell Schweitzer’s The Dragon House in the mail Sunday. (Yes, I know, but the postal service actually delivers that day for Amazon.) It’s a short book—less than 60,000 words in my estimate, and I read it in an afternoon, something you usually just can’t do anymore with the fat, fat, fat tomes we get these days. George R. R. Martin would have spread the thing out to at least four portly volumes. It’s refreshing to find a more digestible read.

But not unexpected. Darrell’s a master of the quick fuse. He is primarily a writer of short stories, and his rare novels are something of an event. The Dragon House is one such—and what an event! He rocks this book like a boogie-woogie choo-choo train. It’s like going to a birthday party and seeing it turn into the Fourth of July. As the story of a young boy’s self-discovery, you might be expect it to unfold in a leisurely fashion, but it moves at breakneck pace, piling event on event and marvel on marvel. Protagonist Edward Longstretch is barely established in the Dragon House and beginning to explore its mysteries than his new status quo is upended.

And it keeps upending. Don’t be fooled by the facade of normality behind which it begins. This is not your normal cosmos, but a mad mashup of Vonnegut, Lovecraft, Bellairs and Rowling. Hold onto your hat, and tally-ho for the Twilight Zone! Schweitzer is fully aware of his unconventional approach: his characters themselves continually remark on how everything ought to have gone more slowly! As it is, Edward has to grow up fast and turn himself into a hero without even the Cliff Notes version of how to do it. The house’s library is full of works that might ready him for what’s to come (Ghastly Horrors and What To Do About Them would have been especially useful), but he doesn’t get time enough to read them. Too bad; the titles are quite intriguing.

So are the characters. There’s Edward’s family, apparently normal, but with issues. (All Schweitzer’s families have issues.) Edward’s bombastic father, also an Edward, has a mysterious profession he doesn’t tell his children about. Is he travelling salesman? A secret agent? And where do all those strange souvenirs he brings home come from? Then there’s the calm and placid home-making mother, who proves to have hidden depths. She’s the one I’d want in my corner in a pinch, not the dad. (Though the elder Edward does get points for confronting evil with a card trick.) And let’s not forget Edward’s utterly normal sister Margaret, who in practical fashion defers going mad from the plot’s myriad impossibilities in order to help her brother.

Nor should I forget to mention the indispensable, partly-robotic Zarcon of planet Zarconax (where everyone has the same name), the blink-and-you-miss-him teacher Dr. Basileus, the not-quite-ghost Miss Emily Armitage, the House’s Gargoyles (who also all have the same name), the House’s Librarians (they’re crystal skulls), and of course the House itself, which really is a dragon, and which had better wake up REALLY QUICK if universal disaster is to be forestalled. Not to mention the shuddersome Ghastly Horrors, their sadistic schoolmistress-boss Mrs. Morgentod (who could give Dolores Umbridge a run for her money), and the terrible undead anti-dragon and its equally horrific avatar, who signals his villainy in classic style by playing a really big organ.

As always, the author excels in his presentation of the marvelous, and since this is intended to be “a book for younger readers, or for readers who remember what it was like to be young,” his tone here is brighter than it often is. Schweitzer is known for weird, dark fantasy verging on or tipping over the edge into Lovecraftian horror, and while the magic he weaves is a powerful one, it is most often a bleak magic. Light’s triumph over Darkness, if it happens at all, tends to be at best partial, and more commonly one of compromise or accommodation. Yet Light does triumph in this book.

There are certainly elements of Schweitzer’s bleaker vision. His celebrated “ew” factor is in full evidence. The enemies confronting the good guys are forces of corruption, decay and death, and in quite a literal fashion; their attack is not simply a physical and moral one, but the inevitable progression of a fatal disease that can be combatted only by awakening and supercharging an immune response. Filth, ash, and ugly linoleum are left in their wake. The Ghastly Horrors, constituting the main disease vector, are straight out of nightmare—and they are described as the least of the enemy’s weapons.

Yet the brighter tone is signaled early and often. Yes, there are foreboding, menace, and dark secrets. But the Dragon House is a marvelous, messy, vital locale chock-full of wacky and wonderful things. Think of the Weasleys’ warren, Admiral Boom’s ship-house, Villa Villekulla, Green Knowe, the Winchester Mystery House, Willy Wonka’s factory, Prospero’s untidy dwelling with its deranged magic mirror, Hogwarts and its changing topography. (Which may actually share the world of The Dragon House; witness the teasing hint that Edward’s father studied there.) Who wouldn’t want to live in a home whose walls you can literally swim through, from whose belfry you can fire cannonballs, and which has the coolest model train ever? Our author’s thrown in everything, including the kitchen sink; the book’s an embarrassment of riches, and just as one might expect from him, everything goes cosmic in a hurry. (We’ve scarcely time to notice, but we spend perhaps a third of the book off-planet.)

Schweitzer’s best work is often suffused with a wry, subtle humor, but here that humor rises to a joyful, almost operatic pitch, a rollicking counter to the savage foe. There are a few false notes; the outer space cannon ball duel between opposing dragon houses strikes me as a stretch. But still. Even when the situation is at its worst, Schweitzer can change things up, revealing the foe through a cartoon lens. Black may be evil’s favored color, but evidently it is reserved for the higher echelons; its minions are relegated to orange prison jumpsuits stenciled “janitor” or “slave.” (In fairness, good guys are also labeled. Edward’s mother belongs to Good Witches Local 101.)

The publisher has likened this novel to “the spooky narratives of John Bellairs.” The comparison is apt, but Bellairs gives you time to breathe, to live a little in his cozy, creepy places before plunging you into the thick of things. Schweitzer hasn’t done that. The elements are there; he could have devoted more space to development and build-up. But he didn’t. And that’s ... not actually a bad thing. It would have been nice to be able to savor this book, to explore the many mysteries of the House (that merry-go-round room, for one)—to take time, as it were, for tea. Well, there are other venues for such things. Whole books, for that matter. But this one has a different pace, and its glories might even dissipate did they not strobe by quite so fast, and were we given more opportunity to examine them.

So prepare for a roller-coaster of a novel, where the ride ends just as you’re starting to get into it. You may very well want to go back in and ride again. Buy it, and hold on for dear life. You will believe heroes wear bunny slippers!

This review is an expansion of one I posted to Amazon on May 21, 2018.

Five out of five stars.

—Brian.