Night of the Jabberwock / The Deep End

In the second of a series of Fredric Brown Double Novels, Bruin Books joins together one of Fredric Brown’s best loved novels, Night Of The Jabberwock, with one of his most underrated mysteries, The Deep End. Brown’s lifelong love and appreciation of the works of Lewis Carroll is on full display in Night Of The Jabberwock. In that novel a bored journalist despairs over the fact he never has any newsworthy events to report on. In a zany and dark bit of wish fulfillment, which is further fueled by copious amounts of cheap whiskey and insomnia, he is plunged into a nightmarish hall of mirrors inspired by Carroll’s Alice books. In The Deep End, another journalist, this one on the fringes of divorce, must face his own shortcomings while solving a series of murders that has been previously whitewashed as accidents. This is an early example of the psycho-killer milieu, and Brown’s trademark shock-and-twist ending does not disappoint. Barry N. Malzberg, well-known science fiction writer and editor, introduces the novels with an overarching perspective of Brown’s literary legacy.