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.

Alice and Edgar, two half-grown bears, set off on a two-month journey by foot to see the world and visit their uncle Claudio, a ruler of sorts. When the siblings arrive, they discover Claudio's kingdom under threat of attack. He intends to send them home but they accidentally evade him and their porcupine nursemaid, and undergo a sequence of adventures reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. In A Hundred Doors, part two of The Crimson Bears, the young naïve bears find themselves trapped and forced to serve in the civil war being fought out across the animal metropolis of Bargeton.

"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