“Do you understand what had to be done? The world had to be unvoided; the chaos had to be unchaosed; the spoil had to be unspoiled; and it must be continued. Everything has to be patterned and structured, continuously. That is the real beginning: the patterning." And Lafferty’s story, "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs," is pretty characteristic of him, about a man who loves springs and their "pegeids" (analogous to naiads). They are all imperfect, and the pegeid at the c

On August 8, 1971, a book by Lafferty received a rare notice in The New York Times Book Review . The review drew attention to the heady blend of “politics, poetry, [and] magic” in The Flame Is Green  and noted the bright splashes of humor threaded through its moral symbolism. Unfortunately, the final two volumes of the Cosucin tetralogy remain unpublished. Taken as a whole, the Cosucin novels constitute a major work, worthy of being set alongside Argo  and Green Tree . Until

A while back, I shared some thoughts on East of Laughter  in response to a discussion about certain obiter dicta  on pornography in an...

While thinking about Past Master  (1968), I returned to Lafferty’s short story "Condillac’s Statue or Wrens in His Head." It offers another take on how to construct a Programmed Person. In the story, the philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) creates a statue out of frog-colored travertine granite on his estate near Beaugency. The occult doctor Jouhandeau helps him enliven this statue—“Old Rock” or “Rock-Head”—with sensory abilities one by one: smell, hearing, si