Jonathan Carroll has been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy Award, and British Fantasy Awards multiple times. He won the World Fantasy Award for his short story “Friend’s Best Man,” the British Fantasy Award for his novel Outside the Dog Museum (1991), and the Bram Stoker for his collection The Panic Hand (1995).

I read his first novel The Land of Laughs (1980) the year it was released, and was enormously impressed. Carroll is a true original — his fantasy is hard to quantify, but I consider it an effective blend of magic realism and horror. His second novel, Voice of Our Shadow, appeared in hardcover from Viking in 1983, and was reprinted in paperback by Ace the following year. As you can see from the cover above, it was originally marketed as horror, but later printings have treated it more as dark fantasy. In 1992, it was reprinted by Gollancz as Fantasy Masterwork #25, and published in ebook format by Open Road Integrated Media in 2012.

Voice of Our Shadow was published by Ace Books in December 1984. It is 197 pages, priced at $2.75. The cover is by Joe DeVito. It is not hard to find; I bought an unread copy for $1 on eBay earlier this month.