Name: Dispatches From Wondermark Manor: The Novel-books
SKU: 46DF7GDLP1
Price: 4.50 USD
Availability: InStock

Description

Victorian adventure — an era full of top-hatted intrigue, dirigibles galore, all-too-demure sensuality and completely unironic classism. Altogether too normal.

Now there’s an antidote: Dispatches from Wondermark Manor, a rollicking, absurd, completely ridiculous humor novel from the author of the celebrated comic strip “Wondermark.”

Taking the tropes of Conan Doyle-style adventure fiction and ramping them way over the top, this tale brings together:

Ghosts (of course)
Airships
High society intrigue
Old men in salt barrels
Horses that cannot fly
Frightful moustaches aplenty
Cheese handling as an artform
General bad decisions, and
Casual mass murder

All in a stunningly-designed package evocative of the grandest pulp style.

Praised by many for its strangeness and wonder, Dispatches from Wondermark Manor is offered here in a 500-page omnibus edition, including all three volumes of the original novels (previously available only as long-out-of-print chapbooks) plus a separate prologue (originally published in the book Beards of our Forefathers) as well as three brand-new hand-drawn maps of the locales in the story.

Buy with confidence! This edition is guaranteed at least 48% opium-free by law.

An Excerpt Follows:

ONCE EVERY GREAT WHILE, usually after a particularly hearty swig of coot-barrel moonshine (brewed the old-fashioned way — by my servants in a marble bath-tub), I find myself digging through the old oaken bureau and extracting my late uncle’s great, thick key-ring from beneath mouldy mounds of old maps and tobacco-straws and spiked corsets. Without particularly intending to, I have on occasion let idle curiosity drift me slowly through the halls of the East Wing, where I may carefully try a key or three against the many rooms that have remained locked for the entirety of my residency.

On each attempt, I would try three keys in each of three doors. I suppose I could have stood there shoving scores of keys into dozens of locks all the day long until one gave way, but such a cold method seemed wholly devoid of charm. I preferred to believe that my spare selection invited Fate to intervene, should she decide to do so. I would never make an empirical study of the many keys on the ring, full of check-lists and calipers and abacusi and no doubt one of Babbage’s clanging pornography-engines rolled into my front garden; rather, I enjoyed prolonging the mystery for as long as Fate deemed appropriate, believing that which-ever door (if any) might open on this day, that it purposefully led to something she would have me find…