The Crimson Bears (Sun & Moon, 1993)

Edgar and Alice, brother and sister bears, take a vacation journey to visit their uncle Claudio, chief magistrate of the city of Bargeton, where many kinds of animals live together. On their way they meet and cannot rid themselves of a Slizz, a woolly lizard, apparently witless but belonging to a kind that once in ten thousand births produces an individual capable of speech. All such individuals, called Ceruk, live in Bargeton. Edgar and Alice find the city threatened by invasion by huge barbarous crimson bears and are confined within the protected zone of the Citadel, but when their Slizz eludes them and runs off, they follow him through the city, meeting several other kinds: the huge, menacing, evil-smelling saurians called the Thoog, the madcap, impoverished Clowncats who inhabit the trashheaps and ruins of their former empire, and the militant Shaven Ceruk, whose program it is to separate themselves completely from their shameful origins among the Slizz by an act of genocide. The farther Edgar and Alice move into Bargeton, the deeper they move into a plot enmeshing all these kinds with the Crimson Bears.

In 1998 The Crimson Bears (both volumes) was translated into German by Hans J. Schütz and published as Die Zitadelle des Goldenen Bären by Klett-Cotta Verlag in their "Hobbit-Presse" fantasy series that also includes Gene Wolfe, Jeff VanderMeer, Mervyn Peake, Peter S. Beagle, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Here are some excerpts from a review of The Crimson Bears by Don Webb in the AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW Vol 15, No. 6, Feb.-March 1994.

A Sip of a Restoring Cordial

If this book had been written seventy years earlier, it would've been one of the great treasures of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series edited by the late Lin Vrooman Carter…, giving us such delights as Vathek and the novels of Hannes Bok. Those books of high fantasy and richness of language--along with Tolkien--caused the birth of the high fantasy tradtion in current American publishing. Of course most fantasy makes the sensitive reader gag because it is a copy of a copy of a copy of the real thing. The Crimson Bears is the real thing. When this book… is reprinted, it will likewise be the source of a new Nile.…

In fact the mark of good fantasy is twofold. First, the use of a language such as never was, but shoud've been. A language of rich, ringing Latinisms that we would have had our ancestors' ancestors speak. Second, a pacing--deriving not fro the commercial novel…--but from the dynamics of poetry. La Farge in his dedication of the book to Wendy Walker says that she taught him pacing, so we all owe a debt to her (and the craftier of us will go and study her work for this secret of magic).… This language is pure magic--it makes one aware of the essential parts of oneself. Those who are touched by the words, but not capable of them, will attempt again and again to recreate them. In a fantasy of the rank of The Crimson Bears a true transfomation is achieved, and in seeking that same ecstasy, toehr writers will poduce paler and paler imitations. But such is the nature of religion. But I am not entirely dissatisfied with the religion, since it improves the imaginary past of our language. For I also in my private and secret moments turn to such an imaginary past as a sip of a restoring cordial.