The Evil in Pemberley House

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For over thirty years, readers have marveled at Philip José Farmer’s inventive integration of popular fiction and literature’s most beloved characters, in a mythical web known as the Wold Newton Family. First described in the fictional biographies Tarzan Alive: The Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, Farmer expanded his Wold Newton mythos in novels such as The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, The Adventure of the Peerless Peer, Time’s Last Gift, Hadon of Ancient Opar, Flight to Opar, The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel, and Escape from Loki: Doc Savage’s First Adventure.
 
The Evil in Pemberley House, an addition to the Wold Newton cycle, plays with the Gothic horror tradition. Patricia Wildman, the daughter of the world-renowned adventurer and crimefighter of the 1930s and ’40s, Dr. James Clarke “Doc” Wildman, is all alone in the world when she inherits the family estate in Derbyshire, England—old, dark, and supposedly haunted.
 
But Farmer, characteristically, turns convention on its ear. Is the ghost real, or a clever sham? In Patricia Wildman, Farmer creates an introspective character who struggles to reconcile the supernatural with her rational scientific upbringing, while also attempting to work through unresolved feelings about her late parents. He sets the action at Pemberley from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and ingrains the various mysteries in the Canon of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
 
The Evil in Pemberley House is a darkly erotic novel with broad appeal to readers of pulp and popular literature, particularly followers of Doc Savage, Sherlockians, and fans of Farmer’s own celebrated Wold Newton Family.
 
The Limited Edition of The Evil in Pemberley House will come with an exclusive chapbook of bonus materials that includes Philip José Farmer’s original outline for the novel, as well as an extensive family tree for the Wold Newton Universe.
 
Limited: 200 numbered copies, signed by Win Scott Eckert, with bonus chapbook
Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition
Complete ordering information at The Evil in Pemberley House blog....

Booklist: "The Evil in Pemberley House. Farmer, Philip José (author) and Win Scott Eckert (author). Sept. 2009. 216p. Subterranean, hardcover, $40 (9781596062498). REVIEW. First published August, 2009 (Booklist).

In the many novels of the Wold Newton series, the late Farmer proved fond of enhancing the "biographies" of famous literary characters, such as Verne's Phileas Fogg and Burroughs' Tarzan, with fanciful, "uncovered" details. Here, collaborating with sf colleague and Wold Newton enthusiast Eckert, he recounts the fate of Patricia Wildman, daughter of pulp fiction icon Doc Savage. When her parents are presumed dead in a plane crash, 22-year-old Patricia assuages her grief in a spate of short-lived, unfulfilling love affairs. Then surprising news arrives: Patricia is the sole heir to Pemberley House, the estate featured in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and she sets off immediately for England. Eager for the change of scenery, Patricia comes well prepared to meet her bawdy cousins and 103-year-old dowager aunt, still living at Pemberley, but is less prepared for the restless ghost still haunting the estate. Part pulp romance, part erotic thriller, Farmer and Eckert's yarn is a steamy, intriguing addition to Wold Newton lore.

- Carl Hays"
(c) Booklist 2009

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