Welcome to Nowhere Hythloday House is dedicated to producing and promoting literary adventure fantasy. If you have walked in the visionary worlds of Lord Dunsany or Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard or Clark Ashton Smith, Mervyn Peake or J. R. R. Tolkien, we hope you will find something here to your taste. And if you're simply looking for something strange and new, let us be your passport.
Hythloday House is pleased to offer the works of Raphael Ordoñez, whose short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and other magazines, and been named in the annual Locus Online recommended reading list. The first two novels in his Enoch tetralogy, Dragonfly and The King of Nightspore's Crown, have been published by Hythloday House.
Dragonfly is available for purchase through our eStore and Amazon.com. It is available in a print edition and as an e-book, and is enrolled in the Kindle Matchbook program.
The King of Nightspore's Crown is available for purchase through our eStore and Amazon.com. It is available in a print edition.
Taking inspiration from the vintage paperbacks of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, both British high fantasy and the American pulps, with wrap-around cover images painted by the author, these volumes are aimed at readers looking for something substantial, fresh, strange, and different. Dragonfly
In the counter-earth of paleozoic darkness and daemonic sway, the people
of Arras have dwindled, retreating from Urgit and Cormrum-by-the-Sea to
clutches of domes in the desert. But still they walk the songlines of
the seraphim, preserving their primeval lore. |
|
|
"Dragonfly is the first of a planned tetralogy. In this day of calculated, mass-marketed, trend-following books, here is a self-published adventure, practically handcrafted, with cover, map, and interior art all done by Ordoñez himself. It tells of a young prince let loose in a world of steam engines, complacent aristocrats, and tunnel-dwelling workers, and a social order on the verge of being overthrown. Ordoñez' style hearkens back to the likes of A. E. van Vogt and Jack Vance, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs. [...]
"Every chapter, nearly every page, is filled with such wondrous images. Ordoñez may mock himself by naming his publishing company Hythloday (talker of nonsense) House, but if nonsense, it’s of a sort that will draw me back again and again. There’s a degree of creativity and depth of thoughtfulness present here that is absent in most run-of-the-mill fantasy.
"If you have any taste for fantasy that doesn’t simply mimic the fashions of the day you will find Dragonfly worth your attention. Fantasy gives the writer license to create things that do not just look like our world in fancy dress or with pointed ears. Ordoñez has embraced the opportunity to create a thrilling, mysterious adventure that stands out from the packs of grimdark books and Tolkien-clones.
"You should read it."
— Fletcher Vredenburgh, Black Gate Reviews
Raphael Ordoñez is a mildly autistic author, artist, and circuit-riding professor residing in the Texas hinterlands, eighty miles from the
nearest bookstore. His short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and other magazines, and been named in the Locus Online
yearly recommended reading list. He lives in a rickety old house with
his wife, three children, a chicken, and a rabbit, and muses
sporadically on fantasy, style, symmetry, art, and life at his blog, Cosmic Antipodes.
The things Raphael most enjoys watching, reading, and thinking about include film noir, samurai movies, spaghetti westerns, sci-fi actioners from the eighties, Batman comics, Greek mythology, the Book of Genesis, paleontology, entomology, More's Utopia, Art Nouveau, Moby-Dick, fairy tales, medieval philosophy, modern geometry, Friedrich Nietzsche, old-school JRPGs, St. John of the Cross, and various other things.
The things Raphael most enjoys watching, reading, and thinking about include film noir, samurai movies, spaghetti westerns, sci-fi actioners from the eighties, Batman comics, Greek mythology, the Book of Genesis, paleontology, entomology, More's Utopia, Art Nouveau, Moby-Dick, fairy tales, medieval philosophy, modern geometry, Friedrich Nietzsche, old-school JRPGs, St. John of the Cross, and various other things.
He is currently at work on several projects, including the third volume in the Enoch series: Ark of the Hexaemeron.