Pictures for The Black Hole In the Basement

As you may have heard, Loome is offering a rare copy of my fantasy, The Black Hole In the Basement for $11,500... We haven't talked about this, but I do think there will be some affordable alternatives at some future time. Meanwhile, my friends at Loome (and other places) were wondering if there were any pictures (I mean illustrations) to go with it.

There weren't then, but there are now.

So, even though the issue of whether the BHB will be put on my story blogg or another, or only offered in "tactile" form is still being explored - I will show them to you, just to give you a taste. (One is kind of scary, so I have to omit it - it shows the bad guys, and they are nasty.) The others might not make a lot of sense, but I will try to explain a little, even though the explanations no doubt will also not make sense - until you read the book. Of course, they still may not make sense then either. It's the risk you run, as the Romans said: caveat lector. Hee hee.

Ahem. But you want to see pictures. Here you go:



Here we see Uncle and Auntie, busy erecting their famous "Thomistic Birdcage" - that is, a dodecahedron of flying folios of the Leonine edition of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas - in an attempt to isolate the evil black hole.



Next we see Mark Weaver riding his cycle on the way home late at night - in the distance, up on the hill, is his father's store, the famous Weaver's Books, located in what was once the "Psephic Church of God". They were a little-known sect in the mid 1800s, but died out long ago, and the building was bought by Mark's great-great grandfather in 1907 to store (and sell) his growing collection of used books. Normally it is not glowing blue like that. It's quite late at night, but something is going on inside, and Mark, intrepid and quite crazy as he is, will go and investigate. (No, this scene is a good number of pages after the one shown in the other picture.)



In this scene, which comes just a page after than the previous one, we see Mark meeting Uncle and Auntie (not their real names) for the first time. If you are wondering where the Black Hole is at this point, I can tell you. It's in the basement. (Gee, it's almost as if the title has some relation to what goes on in the story!)


So if you are intrigued and have $11,500 you can order the book from Weaver's. I mean Loome's. But if you don't, let us know if you are interested, and we'll see about getting reprints. The reprint, unlike the rare copy, will undoubtedly contain these pictures, hopefully in colour, and perhaps more. There are some other very exciting parts.

Finally: you will be happy to learn that there is every expectation of a sequel...