American fantasy writer John Crowley died on August 8, highlighting a broader decline in publisher support for ambitious literary fantasy in favor of commercial bestsellers.
Crowley was best known for his 1981 novel Little, Big, a World Fantasy Award winner that literary critic Harold Bloom included in his Western canon as an underrated classic.
The novel presents a family saga blending human and non-human characters across personal dilemmas, terrifying Gothic moments, and magical lyricism. Critic Jesus Palacios noted that its narrative style operates on the concept that the small and the large are mirror images containing one another.
Little, Big incorporates references to Lewis Carroll's Alice books and Sylvie and Bruno, Theosophy, Spiritism, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Cottingley fairies, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, the Crusades, Paracelsus, Tarot, Alchemy, elemental beings, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Giordano Bruno's Art of Memory, and W. B. Yeats's The Celtic Twilight.
Literary Limbo and Out-of-Print Works
Alongside American writers such as Terry Gilliam and Russell Hoban who adopted English sensibilities, Crowley produced work compared to Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, and Julio Cortazar. Palacios observed that Crowley's ambitions exceeded standard genre categories, leaving his books in a literary limbo ignored by both fantasy fans and general readers.
In Spain, publisher Minotauro released Little, Big in 1989, and Factoria de Ideas reissued it in 2011, but the book is currently out of print. Minotauro also left Crowley's Aegypt series unfinished, while his 2017 novel Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, which won the Mythopoetic Award and reached the World Fantasy Award finals, remains unpublished in the country. Copies of his translated works command high prices online.
The Case of Brian Catling
The situation mirrors that of British author Brian Catling, a visual artist, sculptor, photographer, poet, and professor who died in 2022. Catling began writing novels in 2007 and published The Vorrh in 2012 as the first volume of an alternative colonial trilogy set in the imaginary African city of Essenwald on the edge of a jungle known as the Vorrh.
Published in Spain by Siruela, The Vorrh combined elements of Charles Dickens, Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld, Joseph Conrad, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, Henry James, steampunk, Jules Verne, David Lynch, H. Rider Haggard, and Thomas Pynchon. Figures including Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, and Terry Gilliam praised the work, with Gilliam expressing interest in a film adaptation. Low sales halted Spanish publication after the first volume.
Catling's 2019 novel Earwig was adapted into a film by Lucile Hadzihalilovic but remains unpublished in Spain. In 2021, publisher Aristas Martinez released his novel The Hollow Mountain in a translation by Javier Calvo, combining dark humor, religious satire, and apocalyptic narrative inspired by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel.
Overlooked Fantasy Classics
Palacios argued that Crowley and Catling represent a wider trend in which literary fantasy is overshadowed by commercial epic and romantic titles inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien, George R. R. Martin, Brian Sanderson, and the romantasy subgenre. While acknowledging the popularity of these books, Palacios stated that market saturation threatens works written for readers seeking higher literary ambition.
Several other classic fantasy titles have seen limited recognition in Spain, including Eric Rucker Eddison's 1922 novel The Worm Ouroboros, reissued by Albo and Zarco with a prologue by Maica Rivera, while his Zimiamvia Trilogy remains unpublished. James Branch Cabell's 1919 satire Jurgen, admired by H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis, stands as the only translated volume of his series.
Spanish releases of Alexander De Comeau's 1931 novel The Monk's Magic by Valdemar and William Morris's 1891 work The Story of the Glittering Plain by Catedra attracted little notice. Works by female authors Tanith Lee, Andre Norton, Mary Stewart, and Evangeline Walton, alongside male writers Charles Williams, Fletcher Pratt, Mervyn Peake, and Philip Jose Farmer, remain out of print or poorly distributed in Spain.
