The Crimson Bears
Tom La Farge
Introduction by Wendy Walker
2025

A new, single-volume edition of Tom La Farge's The Crimson Bears and A Hundred Doors (The Crimson Bears, Part 2), originally published by Sun & Moon Press in 1993 and 1994, respectively.

The Crimson Bears is an adult fantasy novel in which young bear siblings Edgar and Alice embark on a journey to visit their uncle in the bustling, multi-species city of Bargeton, where they encounter a diverse array of anthropomorphic creatures and become entangled in rising political tensions and an impending invasion by the fearsome titular bears. Its sequel, A Hundred Doors, continues their story amid the escalating civil war in Bargeton, as the siblings get drawn into a chaotic revolution orchestrated by unlikely allies against the forces threatening bear rule.

It was La Farge's preference that his lengthy manuscript for The Crimson Bears be published in one volume. However, the original publisher decided to split it into two citing production costs as the reason. A single-volume German edition, Die Zitadelle des Goldenen Bären (The Citadel of the Golden Bear), translated by Hans J. Schütz, was published in 1997. The new Tough Poets edition also combines the two novels into one book, as the author had originally intended. It also includes a new introduction by Wendy Walker, Tom's wife and literary partner, in which she elaborates on the genesis of the novel.

"Tom La Farge is the James Joyce of comparative zoology, a brilliant writer in whose literary universe the 'speakable kinds' are so varied and articulate that the absence of the human animal is barely noted."
— Henry Wessells, The New York Review of Science Fiction, January 2003

"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 tradition 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."
— Don Webb, American Book Review, February–March 1994