The counterculture of the 1960s brought new relevance to 1954’s Goll’s Grimoire by one Barney W. Barney Jr.. Its touching story of magic, power, and the near corruption of a young sorcerer resonated with the new generation. When Barney Jr. went missing in 1975, the emerging fandom culture lost a titan and, unfortunately, Goll’s Grimoire would soon be out of print. Before his disappearance, though, there was still a considerable buzz around his work, a few short stories, and rumours of a sophomore novel with upstart publisher Chester van Moon.
Moon Paperbacks published straight-to-paperback speculative fiction, each numbered to encourage readers to collect the entire run, and Barney Jr.'s follow-up to Goll’s Grimoire was set to be number 1. Van Moon butted heads with him from the beginning, and Barney Jr. was already getting a reputation in the press as an eccentric.
He was intimate with the drug culture of the time, and in every interview would cite his ‘muse’. In her own interview in 1989, his wife, Helen Barney, insisted that this was never her, and if it wasn’t some groupie character, it was code for all the acid he’d been taking.
“He would tell me, straight to my face,” she told Fantom magazine, “that he’d been with the muse for days. That I shouldn’t worry. I honestly didn’t, either. I didn’t want him anywhere near me in the end.”
“Why not?” asked Fantom.
“Because he would just go on and on.”
Barney Jr. had told everyone who would listen about his dabblings with the occult, with real magic, but whenever pressed about these secrets, he would only tell them about his thoughts and feelings, and how real they were. “That’s the magic,” he would say.
Chester van Moon had little patience for Barney Jr.’s quirks. The manuscript he’d submitted, which he’d written himself into as a kind of father figure to a race of dying demigods, has never been read by the public. It was its unfortunate title, You are Dying of Thirst but Decline the Water Because it has No Flavor that van Moon had a problem with, and Barney Jr. had doubts of his own about van Moon’s vision for the future of the fantasy genre.
Barney Jr. had no interest in piggybacking on his own success, simply replicating Goll’s Grimoire a thousand times, and tricking reader’s into an addiction to formulaic writing. He wanted to join the new wave of writers he’d inspired and met in the late 60s. He would not change a word of his manuscript, calling it ‘sacred’. But van Moon was a businessman, and the so-called formula was a gold mine when Moon Paperbacks finally went into print. You are Dying of Thirst but Decline the Water Because it has No Flavor would never see the light of day, but when Barney Jr. was missing long enough to be presumed dead, Chester van Moon would finally capitalize on the success of Goll’s Grimoire.
Paracosm hit bookshelves in 1981, and would be Moon Paperbacks' 72nd and final instalment. At first, the buzz around Barney Jr.’s posthumous work was enough to drive numbers higher than any of Moon’s other bestsellers, and then readers got enthusiastic.
The book they were reading had, in fact, been edited and altered beyond recognition. Barney Jr.’s vision of himself as a wise all-father to the gods was now a stock fantasy meta-epic in which knights and wizards spoke casually to the narrator like a Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon. Its magnificent success prompted an ongoing series, with authors' names being reduced to footnotes. Moon Paperbacks would become Paracosm Books, and Barney Jr. was soon forgotten. Chester van Moon was seen as the genius behind the phenomenon. It didn’t help that he had named the narrator character after himself. The formula worked.
A man erased, his legacy stolen and buried.
But Barney Jr. didn’t think about these things at all. Occasionally he would hear van Moon’s name and smile. "Good for you, Chester,” he’d say to himself. “I knew you could do it.”
He lived alone. He was ninety years old and had been walking around with the same name for fifty years and no one ever noticed. He wouldn’t go for his walk this morning, though, because today he believed his feet were a pair of pigeons.