Five More Forgotten Fictional Fantasy Novels

Kurt Vonnegut once said in an interview that he invented Kilgore Trout so that he could provide pithy, entertaining summaries of books without having to write them. The method works; people like reading these sorts of posts, and I like writing them, so they shall continue.

Previous posts:

• 20 Anomalous Media
• 5 Forgotten Fictional Fantasy Novels
• Star Wars Movies that Don't Exist and Never Will

 

The Unseen (Dressel, Oscar. ~1936)

An unfinished and unpublished novel recounting an unnamed narrator's encounter with, attraction to, and eventual obsession with a man that only he can see. Haunting, dreamlike prose is accompanied by feverish charcoal sketches. The narrator eventually finds that his dreams are intruding upon reality (or that he is slipping into his own dreams), but this narrative thread reaches no conclusion; Dressel,was accused of homosexuality by a neighbor in 1938 and imprisoned at the Buchenwald concentration camp. The single known manuscript, which contained Dressel’s editing notes for the first 33 pages, was anonymously delivered to the University of Vienna in 1995.

Ruckus and Puck (Fisher, Elizabeth. 1962)

A short comedic adventure for younger readers, featuring the two titular squires as they gallivant their way across a parody of Arthurian romance. Among their escapades they bumble through rescuing a pair of princesses, fail to slay a dragon (though they beat it at euchre), and manage to outwit a sociopathic Sir Percival in order to recover one of the water pitchers of the Last Supper. The sequel novel, Kat and Pat, was released a year later and followed a similarly silly adventure undertaken by the princesses from the first book.

While well-received by readers, the books did not find much audience; the novels received a single printing each before Fisher’s sudden death in January of 1964, and sales were not deemed sufficient for a second. Physical copies are extremely rare and no official ebook version was ever made, though scans are easily available.

Myth-Cycle of Ancient Zanul (“Zagdu the Sage”. ~1924)

Nearly 3000 pages of supposed mystic-historical texts of an ancient, technologically advanced Indo-Aryan civilization. The work purports to be the translations of texts discovered in a Nepalese monastery by a Cambridge anthropology professor, but is in truth authored by career grifter C.K. Neal in the hopes of defrauding wealthy theosophists. The manuscript was never used to that end, as Neal was stabbed to death by one of his previous scam victims before he could shop it around. It wasn't discovered until over 80 years later, in the bottom of a cedar chest pulled out of an abandoned storage unit by a great grand-nephew.

Ruby in the Rosebush (Roman, Jessica. 2018)

Infamous in the romantic fantasy subgenre for its third-act twist; at the climax of the plot, the female lead discovers that her elf lover had been directly influencing her mind since their first encounter, that he was a fetishist for centuries-long age-gaps, and that he had used his aristocratic station to get away with this multiple times before. She immediately follows this revelation by smashing his brains out with a marble statuette, setting his manor on fire, and running off into the night. The sequel novels switch gears entirely to a crime procedural where the elf gendarme are dragged into a cross-elfland cat-and mouse hunt with “the Whippoorwill”, culminating in a peasant uprising that obliterates the elf aristocracy and a one-woman assault on the fortified manor of the King of Green Leaves.

Roman shut down the entirety of her online social media presence during the summer of 2020, citing burnout and stress. This was in part for the obvious reasons, but was certainly exacerbated by her combative persona, fiery opinions, and regularly finding herself in the middle of Book Twitter Discourse (As one can easily tell from Ruby, Roman had low opinions of romantic fantasy genre conventions) She has not resumed online activity as of 2024.

The Naqdor Affair (Folger, Bernadette. 1998?)

A novel of the Star Wars expanded universe, the existence of which is known only through a 2004 interview with a former editor for Bantam Books. This interview contained only the following details, all unsubstantiated by Lucasfilm Licensing or Bantam.

• The book was described as a “political paranormal horror” novel, centered on Leia Organa and a new character named Togi Panar.
• The book was set in 20 ABY, directly after Timothy Zahn’s Hand of Thrawn duology .
• The book was draft-complete, though still in the editing process, when it was canceled.
• The explanation provided by Lucasfilm was that it “didn’t fit” with their plans for upcoming novels.

From these crumbs came a persistent conspiratorial cottage industry of dedicated internet sleuths attempting to find any more information, any at all, about the book. Wild theories bloomed on Star Wars discussion boards. One dedicated adherent wrote over 60,000 words attempting to glean potential references to the novel that had been snuck into the Prequel trilogy and reconstructing it from these supposed traces. Rumors of the book’s content grew increasingly lurid, often bordering on the obscene. Extreme violence and sexual content was treated as a given, despite the total lack of evidence to suggest it.

This continued without much development until the summer of 2009, when an anonymous poster on 4chan’s literature board began a thread titled NEW INFO ON NAQDOR AFFAIR - BERNADETTE FOUND containing several potentially ground-shattering claims:

• Bernadette Folger was a pseudonym.
• The novel was intended to set up a multi-book storyline with a new major antagonist.
• The actual reason for the cancellation was still under NDA, but it did not involve graphic content.
• There had been a romantic subplot involving Togi Panar, but it was cut before the book was canceled. The emails don’t mention who the other party was (this only emboldened the Togeia shippers.)

Three photographs of typewritten manuscript pages were included in the thread, supposedly from “a draft old enough that they won’t come after me for it.”

• Page 1: Leia is waiting for Togi to arrive at a grav-train station on an unnamed planet (it is unclear if this is Naqdor - it is described only as “a jagged expanse of gray, dead stone under a dead gray sky, interrupted only by the soft tumor-like shapes of brown-black fungi”). Leia is depicted contrary to her typical imagery, wearing a leather jacket and smoking a cigarette. Togi does not appear by the end of the page.
• Page 2 - Presumably from somewhere in the middle of the book, this page is nearly entirely dialogue between Togi Panar and a character named Yo-Chimmak. Stripped from context, the conversation is obtuse and hard to follow, though it seems to be about some Force-related entity or principle called the Kulut.
• Page 3 - An action sequence where Leia flees from an unknown assailant that had broken into her diplomatic quarters (presumably on Naqdor). No details are given on the killer besides “even with two arms and two legs, it moved in a way that humanoids cannot and do not.”

Following this, OP leaves the following comment:

“hold on a couple minutes, I have to type something out”

They do not post again in the thread.