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.

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 A Hundred Doors, Edgar and Alice witness the grand meeting of their enemies and hear their plan to topple the rule of bears in the city of Bargeton. But later, when all seems hopeless, the faction of the Clowncats, led by the heroic and ingenious Possy Damp Paws, subverts the plot. The Clowncats initiate a night of riot and confusion through Bargeton. Caught up in the sweep of events, the young bears do what they can to help Possy. Exhausted but sleepless, Alice spends part of the night in a bookstore, reading from a book written in letters shaped like birds, and from another called Court Memoirs of a Termite. When all is over, Alice and Edgar are able to measure how their lives have been changed.

"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