Showing results by author "Avram Davidson" in All Categories

Set during the reign of the Aztecs in Mexico, two alien forces, dormant for centuries, enter a confrontation on a remote mountain that will decide Earth's fate. The great old ones benevolently ruled before the cruel Aztecs were shaped by the Huitzil, who came from the evil stars and taught the Aztecs how to conquer and demanded endless human sacrifice.

Rond and his crew had been left to die slowly on an unknown planet. As they moved warily through the alien forest they heard the eerie rhythms coming toward them. Then they saw the grotesque figures. A bizarre army of screaming women! Masked, brandishing gleaming swords, rattling their terrible death drums, howling with the fury of some primitive blood lust - and they were attacking! As the scarlet waves of growling women approached, Rond and his men began to run - back into the dark forest of looming horror...

The Maze is a pathway between worlds and times. Its Masters know the secret but decline to interfere. Its Guardians at different levels prevent invasion of one world by the inhabitants of another. But the alien hive-creatures called Chulpex mean to find their way past the Guardians to colonize a new world, and one ordinary, untrained Earthman is catapulted into wild adventure in his determination to stop them.

Jon-Joras had come to Earth simply to oversee arrangements for a dragon hunt to amuse the king. These hunts were as much pageantry as sport - the dragons, brought to Earth centuries before as pets of an alien race, were powerful but slow-witted....

Earth was old, her riches gone. Her children too had left her, all but a few who lived peacefully off the land. And then came the Kar-Chee, to crack Earth open and suck out what remained of her richness, threatening the twilight of the old planet with an evil beyond anything that had gone before. With them they brought their servants, beasts so cruel and horrible that men could recall their like only from ancestral nightmares, and named them "dragons"....

The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy is a collection of historical mystery fantasy short stories by Avram Davidson, featuring his scholarly detective character Doctor Eszterhazy and set in an imaginary European country. It never got better than this - short stories set in the "triune monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania" in the decades before the World Wars.

Swarthy, hairy, ostracized by others of his tribe, Arnten set off to lead a life of proud and lonely independence in his primitive world of Thule - Ultima Thule - where men huddled in animal skins against the arctic cold and used crude clubs and spears to kill the giant prehistoric animals that roamed the land. But Arnten - "The Bear" - was quicker of body and sharper of mind than his fellow men, and he had a special destiny: a path beset with mortal danges and evil witchery he must overcome to save himself, his world, and his woman, from the evil one called "The Wolf"!