Tag: Castalia House

The Cat Commotion

The second volume of The Casebook of Hanshichi takes the Japanese Sherlock Holmes deeper into the shadowed streets and darkened households of old Edo, where nothing is ever quite what it seems. A cat lady’s twenty pets are drowned in the bay and she dies within the week, but only her son knows what really happened. A beautiful young woman born on the Day of the Snake is worshipped as a child of the goddess Benten until the waters of Shinobazu Pond reclaim her. A desperate samurai faces ritual suicide in a Hakone inn while his detective races down the Tōkaidō road to save him. And when a random spear-killer terrorizes the city at night, the investigation falls not to Hanshichi but to the old detective who came before him, a man who solves crimes by touch and instinct rather than observation.

Now available on Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

EXCERPT

Old Hanshichi kept a small calico kitten at his house. One warm day in February, I dropped by unannounced and found him on the south-facing veranda, stroking the soft back of the small creature curled on his lap.

“What a charming cat,” I said.

“Still just a baby.” The old man smiled. “Hasn’t learned how to catch a mouse yet.”

Bright midday sun lit the old roof tiles next door. From somewhere nearby came the clamor of cats squabbling. Hanshichi looked up toward the noise and laughed.

“This one will be doing the same before long, yowling in love, giving you writers material for your opening verses. Cats are really only lovable when they’re small like this. Once they grow large enough to look as though they might transform, they pass right through hateful into something that makes your skin crawl. People have always said that cats can turn into monsters. Do you suppose there’s any truth in it?”

“Well, there are plenty of old stories about monster cats,” I answered vaguely. “But whether they’re true or not, who can say?” This was old Hanshichi, after all. There was no telling what kind of living proof he might have tucked away. To dismiss the matter carelessly and then have it turned against me would have been mortifying.

Yet even the old man seemed not to possess a proven case of feline transformation. He set the calico down from his lap and spoke.

“I suppose you’re right. The stories have come down through the ages, but nobody can claim to have actually witnessed such a thing. Still, I did run into one strange business myself. Not that I saw it with my own eyes, mind you, but it didn’t seem to be a lie. Two people died on account of that cat commotion. When you think about it, it’s a frightening thing.”

“Did a cat devour them?”

“No, not devoured exactly. It’s a most peculiar story. Just listen.”

He shooed away the kitten, which had been clinging stubbornly to his lap, and began quietly to speak.

⁂

It happened on the evening of September the twenty-second, when the autumn of Bunkyū 2 was already waning and the ginger fair at Shiba Shinmei Shrine had ended the day before. In a back-alley tenement not far from the shrine grounds, an old woman named Omaki died suddenly. Omaki was sixty-six that year, born in the monkey year of Kansei, and she had a filial son called Shichinosuke. She had lost her husband in her forties and raised five children single-handed, but the eldest daughter had taken a lover at her place of service and run off to parts unknown. The eldest son had drowned while swimming at Shibaura. The second son had been carried off by measles. The third she had driven out herself for his thieving.

“I truly have no luck with children.”

Omaki was forever lamenting, but her youngest, Shichinosuke, had stayed safely at home. As if shouldering the filial duty of all his brothers and sisters combined, the boy had worked since childhood to support his aging mother.

“With such a filial son, Omaki is a lucky woman.”

The woman who had always bemoaned her fortune with children now found herself envied by the neighborhood. Shichinosuke was a fish-seller who hauled his board through the streets each day, making the rounds of his regular customers. A young man of twenty, working without vanity or pretension, burned dark by the sun. His was a peddler’s small trade, but it kept them from real hardship, and the two of them lived together contentedly, just the two of them. Beyond his devotion to his mother, Shichinosuke had a quiet, gentle disposition quite at odds with his rough trade. The neighbors were fond of him.

His mother’s reputation, by contrast, was in steady decline. Omaki had done nothing to earn anyone’s hatred, but she possessed one habit that drew their dislike. She had loved cats since she was young, and the passion had only intensified with age. By now she kept fifteen or sixteen, adults and kittens together. Keeping cats was her prerogative, of course, and strictly speaking no one had grounds for complaint. That so many animals crammed into a tiny house gave visitors a faintly unsettling, disagreeable impression, but that alone did not constitute legitimate cause to confront the owner. The animals, however, would not stay quietly indoors. They crept out and into the neighboring kitchens and raided them. No matter how well Omaki fed them, the thieving did not stop.

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The Lady-in-Waiting

If you are a fan of Sherlock Holmes or detective stories in general, you really don’t want to miss The Casebook of Hanshichi by Okamoto Kido, the first volume of which is now available in an original translation from Castalia House. I regretfully note that a small Japanese press has beaten us to the first complete translation of all 69 stories by about a month, but while I cannot attest to the quality of those, I think you will find that the quality of Castalia’s translations are excellent.

This is an excerpt from the seventh story from The Ghost Master, which is now available on Kindle, KU, and audiobook. Paid subscribers to Castalia Library receive a new translated ebook every week; next week’s book will be the second volume, after which we’ll start alternating with additional releases from the excellent Spanish Episodios Nacionales of Benito Perez Galdos. Both series will eventually be published in print editions; Trafalgar from the latter is already in print and available at both Amazon and NDM Express.

I returned to Tokyo at the height of August, the heat still fierce, after a summer holiday of about a fortnight. Bringing a few small gifts, I called on old Hanshichi and found him just back from the bathhouse, sitting cross-legged on a rush mat on the veranda, fanning himself in great sweeps with a round fan. A cool evening breeze was blowing through the narrow garden, and from the neighbor’s window came the chirping of crickets.

“Of all the insects, the cricket is the most truly Edo,” the old man declared. “I grant you they’re cheap, and they may well be the humblest of singing insects, but somehow they feel more like Edo than the pine cricket or the bell cricket ever could. You can be walking along any street, and when you hear a cricket singing from some window or eave, the summers of old Edo come flooding back. The insect sellers would hate me for saying so, but your pine crickets and grass larks are nothing but expensive. They’re not Edo at all. To use the modern phrase: the most plebeian, and for that very reason the most Edo, is the common cricket, and nothing else.”

The old man held forth at length on the subject, lavishing praise on a creature that nowadays is barely more than a child’s plaything, worth perhaps three sen apiece. If I was going to keep insects at all, he urged, I should keep crickets. From insects we moved on to wind chimes, and from wind chimes to the observation that tonight was the fifteenth of August by the new calendar.

“The calendars don’t match, you see, so August by the new reckoning is still as hot as this,” the old man said. “Under the old calendar, mornings and evenings would have turned properly cool by now.”

He began reminiscing about moon-viewing in the old days. In the course of this, the following story emerged, adding one more entry to my notebook.

It was the evening of August the fourteenth, in the second year of Bunkyū. Hanshichi had come home earlier than usual and was thinking of finishing his supper and stopping by a neighborhood mujin gathering, when a woman of about forty appeared at his door. She wore her hair in a small round chignon, and her face was heavy with care.

“I do apologize for the long silence, sir. I trust you’ve been keeping well.”

“Why, Okame. It’s been quite a while. Young Ochō must be turning into a fine girl by now. She’s a good, steady worker from what I hear, so her mother can rest easy.”

“It’s Ochō I’ve come about, actually, sir. I’m at my wits’ end, and I hardly know what to do.”

Looking at the lines on the woman’s forehead, Hanshichi had a fairly good idea what this was about. Okame ran a tea shop near Eitai Bridge with her daughter Ochō, who was seventeen this year. The girl was refined and beautiful, and if her one fault was a tendency to be too quiet, she had more than enough charm to draw the young men in. Okame was proud of having borne such a beautiful daughter. If she had come here troubled about the girl, even a man less shrewd than Hanshichi could guess the nature of it: dutiful Ochō had found someone who mattered to her more than her own mother. Given the trade they were in, making a fuss about it would only be boorish.

“So that’s it, is it. Young Ochō’s got herself into something and now she’s giving her mother grief. Well, I’d say you’d do better to let it pass. She’s young. If there isn’t a little fun in her life, she won’t have much heart for the work, will she? You must remember what that was like yourself. Best not to make too much of it.” Hanshichi was laughing as he spoke.

Okame did not so much as smile. She fixed him with a steady gaze.

“No, sir. It’s nothing of that sort at all. If she’d taken up with some man, some frivolous little affair, I’d do exactly as you say and let it pass. But this is something else entirely. The girl shakes, and she weeps…”

“That is odd. What exactly has happened?”

“My daughter sometimes disappears.”

Hanshichi went on laughing. A young tea-shop girl who vanished from time to time: his expression said this was scarcely worth troubling over. Seeing it, Okame pressed forward with greater urgency.

“No, it’s nothing to do with men or anything of that sort. Please hear me out, sir. It was just before the river-opening in May. A fine-looking samurai, with one attendant, happened to pass in front of my shop and caught sight of my daughter inside. He came wandering in, drank his tea, rested a while, and left a full isshū for the tea. A very generous customer indeed. About three days later, the same samurai came again, but this time he had a woman with him, thirty-five or thirty-six, very refined, with the bearing of someone in service at a great house. They didn’t seem to be husband and wife. The woman asked Ochō’s name, asked her age, and again left an isshū for the tea. Then, about three days after that, Ochō was gone.”

“I see,” said Hanshichi, nodding.

They were a type of kidnapping ring, he judged, people who disguised themselves as persons of rank to carry off a good-looking girl.

“And the girl never came back?”

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THE GHOST MASTER

Castalia House has spent the last several months quietly doing something no English publisher has bothered to do in a century: translating the great works of Japanese popular literature that built the entire modern adventure and detective fiction tradition in that country. Now they’re announcing their next project, and it is worth your attention.

The new series is the Hanshichi Casebook, written by Okamoto Kidō beginning in 1917. Hanshichi is Japan’s answer to Sherlock Holmes — a street detective working in historical Edo, solving murders, hauntings, and conspiracies in the shadow world beneath the Tokugawa shogunate. The stories ran for decades and spawned stage productions, radio adaptations, films, and television series. In Japan, Okamoto is to detective fiction what Conan Doyle is to English readers. In English, almost nobody has heard of him.

One previous academic translation covered 14 of the 69 stories. The other 55 have never been translated. Castalia House is publishing all of them across seven volumes. Volume 1, The Ghost Master, goes to paid subscribers this week and will be available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited next week.

The first volume of the translated Casebook, The Ghost Master, has already gone out to the subscribers and is now available on Amazon via Kindle, KU, and audiobook. An excerpt from the first story is now available at the Library site if you’d like to get a taste of the flavor of Japan’s greatest detective. I’ve already translated the first twenty stories, and I have to say that they are up there with the best detective fiction I’ve ever read.

It’s really a must-read if you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, because while the stories are every bit as detailed and interesting, the atmosphere, the plots, the crimes, and most definitely the punishments are entirely different. When the guilty party isn’t just turned over to the inept policemen of Scotland Yard, but is instead paraded through the streets prior to being crucified, the solution of the case tends to hit just a little bit differently.

The Casebook of Hanshichi Vol. I: The Ghost Master consists of the following:

Preface by Okamoto Kidō

1. The Spirit of Ofumi

2. The Stone Lantern

3. The Death of Kanpei

4. Upstairs at the Bathhouse

5. The Ghost Master

6. The Mystery of the Fire Bell

7. The Lady-in-Waiting

8. The Sash-Snatching Pond

9. Spring Thaw

10. Hiroshige and the Otter

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An Intriguing Discovery

It was around April of 1916, as I recall, that I first conceived the idea of writing the Hanshichi Casebook. I had been reading Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories here and there for some time but had never read them straight through from beginning to end. One day, having occasion to visit the Maruzen bookshop, I bought three volumes — the Adventures, the Memoirs, and the Return — and read all three at a single sitting. A keen interest in detective fiction welled up in me at once, and I found myself seized by the desire to try my hand at the form. I had read Hume and others before, of course, but it was Doyle who truly struck the spark.

I was not yet free to begin, however. I went on hunting down more of Doyle’s writings and set about reading The Last Galley, The Green Flag, The Captain of the Polestar, the Round the Fire Stories, and various other collections of his short fiction, one after another. But I had my own work to attend to: I was preparing a serial novel for the Jiji Shinpō at the time, and my reading did not progress as quickly as I would have liked. From when I had started it took roughly a month, and it was late May before I finished the lot.

When at last I sat down to write, what struck me was this: no one had ever written detective fiction set in the Edo period. The tales of Ōoka and Itakura were fundamentally adjudication records, concerned with trials and judgments rather than with investigation, and it seemed to me that a story built around detection itself would make for something fresh. There was a further consideration. Writing detective fiction set in the present day carried the constant risk of lapsing into imitation of Western models, whereas committing to a purely Edo-period mode might yield something with a flavor all its own. I was fortunate in possessing a reasonable working knowledge of Edo customs, manners, and statutes, as well as the world of the city magistrates, their constables and inspectors, and the network of private thief-takers.

Read the rest at Castalia Library…

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The Gold Demon

This week’s Castalia translation is The Gold Demon by Koyo Ozaki.

A Japanese classic of love, ruthlessness, and betrayal

Kan’ichi Hazama and Miya Shigisawa have loved each other since childhood. Raised under the same roof, pledged to marry, they share a bond so deep that Kan’ichi has staked his entire future on it. Then a wealthy man with a diamond on his finger enters their world, and Miya’s parents, dazzled by the prospect of a brilliant match, break the engagement. On a winter night at the beach in Atami, Kan’ichi confronts the woman he loves and demands she choose. And she cannot answer him.

Kan’ichi, shattered by betrayal, abandons his studies and remakes himself into a ruthless man determined to worship the only god that never disappoints: money. Miya, married into luxury, discovers that wealth without love is its own kind of prison. As the years pass, guilt, longing, and the memory of what was lost draw them toward each other again, but the damage may be beyond repair. The Gold Demon is about what happens to the human soul when love is tested by fortune and found wanting.

Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903) was the most celebrated Japanese novelist of his generation. A prodigy who founded the influential Ken’yūsha literary society while still a student, he became the star writer of the Yomiuri Shimbun and the mentor to an entire generation of younger writers, among them Izumi Kyōka. He began serializing The Gold Demon on New Year’s Day, 1897, and the novel became a national sensation, but he died at the age of thirty-five, leaving the story unfinished. It is the most celebrated unfinished work in Japanese literature. The novel has been adapted into seventeen films and has never been out of print in Japan.

This translation by Kenji Weaver is the first complete English translation of The Gold Demon.

To read an excerpt from this 129-year old work, now appearing for the first time in English, visit Castalia Library. You can also support our weekly translation efforts by subscribing to the Castalia Library substack.

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An Editorial Update

Upon further review, and after reading some of the comments from the initial readers, it became obvious that the Chekov’s Blade situation in the first Wyrmwick College book by Mr. J.M. Wayland was going to prove distracting to its readers. While I personally reject, wholeheartedly and comprehensively, the conceit of Chekov’s Gun, which states a narrative principle that every element introduced in a story must be necessary to the plot, meaning that if something is mentioned, it should have significance later on, the responsible editor must respect the preferences of the readers, even at the expense of his own literary philosophy.

And anyhow, the contemplation of this omission led to my own observation that there was a major strategic element missing from the book. So I had Mr. Wayland update his manuscript, adding a new chapter, several new sections to existing chapters, and tweaking the details in a major scene or two. Nothing has actually changed from the previous version, but the revised manuscript is now 20 pages longer, and, I think, rather better for the additions.

All of which is to say that version 003 of DORIAN VANE AND THE VAMPIRE’S BLOOD is now available on Amazon, so those of you who have been kind enough to purchase it already may wish to update your Kindle. Please do not ask me how to do it, as I do not own a Kindle and I do not know how.

Furthermore, for those who are interested in the background lore, a very small portion of has been published on the Castalia Library site, and I am contemplating the possibility of doing a Special Illustrated Edition Hardcover after the regular print editions are released in a few weeks that would not only contain chapter heading illustrations, but also an appendix dedicated to A Chronicle of the First Rising and the Binding of Mordreth the Undying.

I’ve been very pleased to see that the reviews have generally been quite favorable, even prior to the Chekov’s Blade correction.

  • Great start to what looks to be a new classic series in YA Fantasy. One of the things I like best in this book is that the main character comes from a tradition with grounded values rather than the typical trope of a lost child with zero background. Dorian is still a child, and therefore is still puzzled by both life and the actions of others; but he thinks and acts from a solid core. The characters feel real, the plot is interesting and the overall read was a lot of fun. I look forward to the next in the series.
  • What Harry Potter should have been. Characters, and their stories, we can actually relate to. Games that actually make sense and are compelling for their own sake.. Bad guys that have legitimate reasons for bad behavior. A protagonist that, in the end, can’t do the impossible. Well done. Looking forward to the next one.
  • I would recommend this book to anyone that liked harry potter. This book and hopefully series is better and better written.
  • Take all of the things that worked in the Potterverse and turn them up to 11 because this is not the author’s first story. Rewrite all the WTF moments and make them Awesome. The plot will be familiar to fans of the genre. But what makes the storing thrilling for young adults and fascinating for parents who grew up in the Potterverse, are how the changes are wrung. Dorian, Halli, and Rory are not cartoon cutouts but are portrayed as 10 year olds with strengths and weaknesses. The text is littered with “textual ruins” that hint at deep and dark alternate universe worldbuilding. Muggleblood prejudice is replaced with “Magic is not a talent… It is a discipline.” Instead of Quidditch with its the ridiculous scoring system, we have Ruck and Sanjitsu, grounded in how rugby and full body marital arts are actually played. The cover illustrates what happens when magic is added to a Warhammer 40K historical miniatures battle.

And yes, after in-depth conversations with the author, I can confirm that Wyrmwick College will be a seven-book series. It’s been interesting to see that the readers have been able to detect that although that Mr. Wayland’s work is built upon a Potteresque infrastructure, it owes considerably more to The Dark is Rising and even The Chronicles of Prydain in terms of its flesh, its soul, and its future direction.

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Good Company

Thanks to everyone who has given Mr. JM Wayland’s new Coming-of-Age Fantasy book, DORIAN VANE AND THE VAMPIRE’S BLOOD, a chance. It should be very interesting to see what people think as the reviews start coming in, but the fact that it’s now in the company of books by Rowling, Tolkien, Madeleine l’Engle, and even the appalling, but inexplicably popular Ursula K. Le Guin is reason for a very small degree of optimism that it and its successors will be numbered in their company for decades to come.

That’s probably not the safe way to bet, but it is off to a good start. Also, what is with those covers? Aside from The Hobbit and A Wrinkle in Time, the Dorian Vane cover looks considerably better than the other top ten books in the category. I suppose that can’t hurt.

And in an inevitable sign that the book is squarely in Gamma country, it has already received its first fake one-star rating sans review, explanation or verified purchase. Someone is very unhappy about this particular entrant to the category…

In the meantime, an excerpt:

CHAPTER ONE: Somerset House

Dorian Vane sat on his thinking stump at the bottom of the forest garden and watched a beetle climb a blade of grass. The beetle was shiny and black and appeared to know exactly where it was going, which put it considerably ahead of most people Dorian had met in his eleven years.

The stump was the remains of an ash tree that had come down in a storm the year he turned five. His grandfather had the trunk cleared and the timber stacked, because Edward Somerset did not waste timber, but he left the stump where it stood. Dorian claimed it that same summer, and it had been generally regarded as his ever since. It had been a giant stump when he was five, and it was still the right height for sitting and thinking six years later. It was at the bottom of the garden, which meant nobody came down to find him unless they had something that required saying. And it was under the biggest oaks, where the forest canopy closed overhead and turned the sunlight green and dark, which mattered to Dorian more than he usually admitted.

His dark glasses were pushed up on his head. Here under the trees, with the sunlight filtered through at least three layers of greenleaf, the brightness dropped to the level his eyes could endure without complaint. They were, in several ways, unusual eyes. They were silver-grey, pale as rain on slate, with pupils that were not round but vertically slit, like a cat’s. And in the dark, they reflected light like a fox’s. No one else in the family had eyes like his. No one Dorian had ever met or even heard of had eyes like his. People stared, or said nothing, or said something out of the side of their mouth in the apparent belief that he was deaf as well. His glasses protected him from their stares the same way they protected him from the light; they put a wall between Dorian and the world.

The garden climbed the slope behind him in three terraces his grandmother had built up over forty years. The herbs nearest the kitchen door were rosemary, sage, thyme, things she cooked with and things she used in workings, which were occasionally the same plants. Next were the vegetable rows, then the old roses on the second terrace, and then the trees running down the slope to where the ground flattened out and the moss took over. The paths were swept clean down the grey bedrock that lay a hand’s breadth under the whole country and sat several inches below the moss and loam on either side. His grandmother said the bedrock was what gave the land its character. His grandfather said that sweeping those paths had taken him the better part of ten years.

On Saturday mornings, Dorian and his grandfather would roam the garden like forest rangers, brooms in hand, making sure that the vegetation hadn’t dared to encroach upon his grandmother’s cherished paths. It seemed to Dorian that every year, the forest gave up a little more hope of ever reconquering the exposed ground.

Beyond his stump the ground dropped to a stream, and beyond the stream it rose to open pasture, and beyond the pasture were the moors. You could see them from the upstairs windows, miles of heather and gorse and granite, running all the way north until the sky got in the way. His grandfather said the moors were the finest thing about the property, which was generous praise for a landscape that was mostly rocks and rain and sheep with strongly held opinions about fences.

A thrush was singing somewhere above him. The beetle reached the top of its grass blade, paused, and appeared to reconsider the entire enterprise. Dorian watched it with the sympathy of a fellow creature who frequently climbed trees only to discover there was nothing at the top beyond the occasional empty birdsnest.

“Dor! Dor! Dorian!”

His grandmother’s voice, from the top of the garden. It wasn’t her emergency voice. This was the ordinary one, albeit with a certain note in it that meant right now.

He reached up with both hands and pulled his glasses down. The lenses were tinted dark, mirrored on the outside, and the world dimmed comfortably behind them. He stood up, brushed the moss off his trousers, and walked up the winding path that curved through the trees.

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A Visit to Wyrmwick College

This is the result of an experiment that got very badly out of hand. After finishing The Refutation of Kant, I definitely had the sense that my analytical engine could use a break and decided to let my mind coast a while. No more amphibolies, contemplations of the true nature of reality or das Ding an sich, no more irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, or infinite sets, no more deconstructing the construction account, and no attempting to decide which aspect of the Veriphysical philosophy to develop next. So the day after Team Castalia finished deciding what was to go into the combined print edition that resulted in The Return of the Real, I found myself dwelling upon all the various nonsensicalities of the Wizarding World concoted by Ms JK Rowling.

I believe that many years ago, I was among the first to point out the absolute absurdities of the Quidditch rules, though I was far from the only one. But there were so many more things that made no sense, such as the pointless points system, the insane dual economies, the bizarre competitions, and the upside-down nature of a craven, spoiled elite that left one wondering how it had gotten there in the first place. Which, in light of recent revelations, actually tends to reconstruct the Wizarding World as a much darker fictional universe than anyone had ever imagined, one in which Tom Riddle is actually the hero seeking vengeance for his childhood abuse at the hands of a schoolmaster with a very dark and nasty secret.

But that’s neither here nor there. My main thought was this: what if the protagonist of an academy novel was not despised, but loved? What if he wasn’t a passive lens for the reader to pass through the world, but a character with strength, independence, and a will of his own? What if there were consequences to historical actions, and if the present was the result of past decisions? And what if the Silent Academy wasn’t the only school to which the Inghitaran elite sent their children? One question led to another, and another, and the sum total of the answers is now available for your exploration if you happen to be so inclined.

While the core concept is obviously derived from the British magical school tradition, the end result reads more as if Susan Cooper was the primary literary influence, with perhaps a dash of Lloyd Alexander, as the various Red Team reviews have noticed.

  • This is one of the strongest Harry Potter-inspired school fantasies I’ve read. It borrows a great deal from Rowling’s structure, but it has sufficiently strong prose, characterization, and worldbuilding that it gradually stops feeling like imitation and starts feeling like a genuine series in its own right.
  • The novel clearly draws from the greats of classic children’s fantasy while forging its own path. The most obvious surface parallel is the magical boarding school with house sorting, rivalries, feasts in a great hall, and a boy discovering his powers and place in a hidden world. Wyrmwick echoes Hogwarts in structure, but the execution diverges sharply. It captures the excitement of arrival and belonging but leans harder into quiet character moments and institutional realism. The story has Susan Cooper’s feel for deep time, hidden powers in the land, and a boy awakening to a larger, dangerous heritage without flashy destiny tropes. Overall, Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood is a strong, heartfelt addition to the magical-school genre—loyal to its influences while carving out a distinctive, moor-rooted identity. Fans of thoughtful fantasy with real emotional texture and British mythic flavor will find it deeply satisfying.
  • Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood is an exceptionally high-quality children’s fantasy novel. It honors the rich, atmospheric traditions of classic British folklore while implementing the rigorous, satisfying world-building mechanics found in modern American fantasy. By replacing cheap whimsy with tactical depth, J.M. Wayland has crafted a story that respects the intelligence of young readers.

Dorian Vane has silver eyes and no idea why.

Raised by his grandparents on the quiet Somerset moors, Dorian has spent his whole life hiding behind a pair of mirror-shaded glasses. Then the letter from Wyrmwick College arrives, and he is pulled from his comfortable home in the countryside into an exciting world of magic and wonder.

Wyrmwick is a school like no other, ancient, magnificent, and impossible, carved into a mountainside above a lake that reflects its stone towers back into the deep waters. Here, students learn how to hold fire in their hands, to shape metal with their thoughts, and to create wards that protect the living from things that dwell in the dark and hunt in the night. At Wyrmwick, Dorian finds unexpected friends, magical challenges, a misfit house that claims him as its own, and professors who seem to know more about his heritage than he does.

But the ancient college conceals old and bloody secrets in its foundations. Even hidden behind his glasses, Dorian’s eyes mark him as something the magical world hasn’t seen in centuries, and someone at the school wants him gone. In addition to his lessons, he learns that wonder and danger stalk the same stone corridors, and that being special is not the same as being safe.

Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood is the gripping first novel in a gothic magical fantasy series of courage, self-discovery, and the darkness that every new generation finds that it must face.

Now available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

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Napoleon at Chamartín

The fifth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

Napoleon at Chamartín by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It returns the protagonist Gabriel to Madrid in the closing weeks of 1808, as the imperial Grande Armée, recovered from its humiliation at Bailén, marches on the capital with the Emperor himself at its head.

Gabriel’s Inés has vanished into another world. Discovered to be the lost heiress of one of the greatest houses in Spain, she has been carried off to a palace on the Cuesta de la Vega and groomed for a marriage of fortune to the young Count of Rumblar — the dissolute, easily led Don Diego, who divides his nights between gaming dens, comic masonic lodges, and the salons of the manolería, where the celebrated greengrocer beauty known as the Zaina holds court. Barred from the palace and reduced to flinging pebbles at a lighted window, Gabriel shadows his rival through this doomed demimonde — while behind the marriage scheme moves the afrancesado Santorcaz, who has his own secret plans for Inés.

Around this private drama, Madrid braces for the French. The city throws up earthworks and musters a citizen militia, and Galdós fills these chapters with the comic Gran Capitán playing at general, the swaggering bully Mañara, and the whole brawling life of the lower town. Then comes the unthinkable betrayal that Galdós renders into one of the great crowd scenes of European fiction, and the mob, sold out and maddened, falls upon Mañara.

Madrid falls. Napoleon installs himself at Chamartín, just north of the city, and from his headquarters dictates the decrees that will remake Spain entirely to his design. Amid the wreckage Gabriel is captured and swept out of the conquered capital in a chained column of deported “patriots,” driven past the Emperor’s own coach on the road by Chamartín, and sent toward a city about to endure the most terrible siege of the entire war.

Napoleon at Chamartín is at once a panoramic chronicle of a nation’s capital under siege, a savage comedy of Madrid society, and a love story pursued through a falling city, narrated with the older Gabriel’s characteristic blend of self-deprecating wit and moral seriousness.

Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook on Amazon. The ebooks have already been sent out to the paid subscribers. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.

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A Refutation, Reviewed

The first review of THE REFUTATION OF KANT has been posted.

A refutation of Kant has to do one of two things: produce a counterexample the system cannot deal with, or locate the move inside the system that doesn’t actually argue for what it concludes. The second part of Day’s Veriphysics does both, and the interlocking of the two halves is what makes the book hard to answer because every defense of one wing concedes ground on the other.

The argument worth focusing on is the Master Amphiboly, and Vox is right about it. The “Thing-in-itself” runs two readings across a single word: that every cognizer is shaped by its apparatus, and that no feature of reality is in principle accessible to human cognition. The first is trivially true and Kant argues for it. The second is the load-bearing claim of the whole edifice and Kant never argues for it once, and instead moves to it under cover of the first. Once you see the slide, you can’t unsee it. Neptune is the cleanest empirical counterexample, though not the only one: Le Verrier worked an inverse problem through pure formalism and Galle confirmed the prediction within a degree, and the positron case is structurally identical: Dirac’s equation required it before anyone looked. If formal cognition cannot in principle identify features of reality not already given in experience, these events did not happen.

The mathematical half is harder to evade and simpler to state. Construction in Kant’s sense was tied to constructibility, which was already a problem with the irrationals in 1781 and decisively broken by Cantor a century later. The available retreat is to recast synthetic a priori as analytic, which costs the system the work it was built to do. The pincer is real and no version of Kant survives both jaws. One place worth pressing further is that the amphiboly used is portable. The slide from an apparatus-relative epistemic limit to an ontological claim about reality runs through Hume on causation, through Wittgenstein on private language, and through most of the strong-program science studies literature. Naming it generalizes the refutation.

Worth reading. Excellent work by Day

That is an intriguing observation about the potential portability of the Master Amphiboly. I shall have to examine the situation and see just how far the intellectual rot goes.

UPDATE: A second review has been posted.

I would like to thank Vox for writing this excellent book. Since Kant is the foundational philosophical thinker of the “Enlightenment”, its easy to see why many people cannot think straight these days. I enjoy reading St. Thomas Aquinas. Vox mentions that he may have called Kant a heretic and that sounds spot on.

Now if we could just convince the world to abandon Kant, things might improve. His notion of “…the thing-in-itself is unknowable by theoretical reason..” amazed me. Really??? Kant never did applied physics, medicine, or skilled trades, did he? That said, the world is heavily invested in Kant, just like Darwin, and seems to like to double down, not change its thinking. Indeed I enjoyed Vox pointing out that the current defenders of both have moved WAY beyond the original works in their defenses thereof.

Hegel’s thought confuses me too, perhaps he’s in the queue as well for a refutation? I highly recommend this book to anyone who seeks an understanding of why we need a 21st Century philosophy that is actually workable.

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