Seek out the bizarre, the imaginative, the truly Oregonian! For exciting new fantasy authors, look no further than our own state. Oregon authors have offered us a legion of exceptional works and continue to expand on the tradition.

“Escapement” by Jay Lake. In 2006 Jay Lake introduced us to the literally clockwork world of Mainspring, where the planets circle the sun with visible gears in the heavens. There apprentice Hethor Jacques must complete the task charged to him by the angel Gabriel, namely to rewind the mainspring of the world. Welcome back with Escapement, in which forces battle to control a young girl, whose own newfound power to control all of God's creation on the surface of the earth with her own clock both threatens and entices those who know of her existence. With intriguing subplots and moral dilemmas throughout, and most importantly with a cliffhanger ending that will have you only sorry you read it so quickly, Lake pulls out all the stops in this absolute winner.

“Lamentation” by Ken Scholes. “Darkness swallows the light as a pillar of smoke and ash blots out the sun.” And so Scholes’ wonderful fantasy world opens with the destruction of Windwir, a city dedicated to the rediscovery of knowledge lost in centuries of devastation. All that remains, besides a city of bones, are the mechanical men who served the keepers of the library. With unique and complex characters, Scholes draws us into a land where warriors communicate through many languages of touch and sign, where a family of spies (all literally the children of their patriarch) infiltrate all layers of society and may be responsible for political manipulation going back generations, and where mechanical men can recreate the knowledge of a world, and with hidden words bring about its destruction. What begins as a simple tale of power and conquest soon expands into a much more complex tale of magic and layered intrigue. This is a surprisingly accomplished debut novel, and first in a series that you won’t want to miss.

“Couch” by Benjamin Parzybok. Meet Erik, Tree and Thom, three unlikely new roommates sharing a Portland apartment with an inherited handmade gigantic orange couch. Here’s the plot: the three, thrown out on the street after a freak flooding of their apartment, and told to take the couch with them, appear to be compelled to carry their possibly “magical” couch on a journey of the couch’s making through the streets of Portland west to the Pacific and a different reality thousands of miles away. Quirky doesn’t begin to describe it. Parzybok, in his debut novel, sketches the three roommates and the various characters they encounter with an amazingly sure hand for one so new to the trade, and the outrageous storyline (is the couch really the “seat of power” spoken of in ancient South American legend? Is there really an ancient but still vibrant hidden civilization that is calling the couch to itself?) provides a fascinating framework on which Parzybok hangs his social and political observations and off-the-wall humor. A perfect Portland fantasy.