Andre Norton’s THE JARGOON PARD is the first sequel to Year of the Unicorn, set in Arvon, the homeland of the Wereriders. Arvon comes off much like Estcore, a land that sealed itself off after arrogant mages opened dimensional gates to Very Bad Things, and protagonist Kethan has a backstory similar to Kerovan of Crystal Gryphon, a son born touched by magic so that his mother can use him as a tool to attain power.
Surprisingly, though, the book charts it’s own course, starting with Mom bearing a girl, whom she promptly swaps for the son of another woman (Gillan of Unicorn). Like so many Witch World protagonists, Kethan grows up feeling something of an outsider, then one of his mother’s rivals gives him a magic belt that triggers his innate shapeshifting powers. Now he’s a pard (big puma — the jargoon is the carved gem on the belt’s clasp) but he can’t turn back unless he submits to the will of his mother’s resident sorceress — and Kethan would sooner die. The results are solidly entertaining; this is also the first book to spotlight the worship of the harvest/mother goddess Gunnora, which plays a big role in many later books.
THE DARK WORLD has Henry Kuttner’s name on it but some researchers suggest C.L. Moore is co- or sole author. While it has a lot in common with Mask of Circe, it also resembles Dwellers in the Mirage (amnesiac hero with buried memories, good vs. bad girl, other-dimensional soul-sucking horror) and would later inspire both Roger Zelazny’s Amber and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Falcons of Narabedla.
Oh, wait, you might want to know about the story too! The protagonist is a WW II veteran suffering strange blackouts and odd memories. When he’s drawn into the eponymous alternate timeline, he discovers that’s because he’s actually Ganelon, a member of the ruling coven of mages, bound to the other-dimensional horror Llyr; the resistance against the coven managed to swap him and the real veteran (parallel world counterparts), leaving Ganelon with the veteran’s memories. Now that Ganelon’s back, he’s ready to regain power, which requires working with the resistance against the coven and somehow driving Llyr back from this plane of existence. The result is a lively fantasy, though the random mix of myth names (Llyr, Medea, Freydis) is jarring (as Lin Carter says, names matter).
In THE STARMAN OF LLYRDIS by Leigh Brackett, an Earthman who’s spent his entire life as even more of an outcast than Kethan learns the reason: he’s only half-human, the other half being Varddan, the one race that can survive interstellar travel due to a gen-engineering breakthrough a millennium ago. The protagonist proves his Varddan genes hold true and wins the right to live and work in space — but then allies himself with revolutionaries who want to share the genetic breakthrough with all the races of the galaxy. A perfect example of Brackett’s fondness for characters who achieve their dreams only to find them hollow (as her husband put it).
Jack Vance’s THE DYING EARTH is probably best known as the basis for spellcasting in D&D (Gary Gygax copied Vance’s idea that mages can only hold a limited number of spells in their mind) but deserves to be known in its own right. On a distant future Earth, various wizards and occasional mortals feud, seek love or quest for knowledge amidst ruined cities, ancient secrets and unpleasant cults.
This blew me away when I read it as a teen, but less so now. The treatment of the female characters is sexist and Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique (which I suspect was a 
big influence) is a much eerier, darker setting, and Smith is a better writer. That said, this is still entertaining and enjoyably eerie.
#SFWApro. Top cover by Gray Morrow, bottom image is uncredited. Rights to both remain with current holder.
THE SILVER AGE FLASH OMNIBUS: Vol. 2 by (mostly) John Broome and Carmine Infantino collects the run of Flash (pun intentional) from #133 to #163. The Scarlet Speedster battles his Rogue’s Gallery, tackles alien invaders, copes with Iris’ constant carping (what would have been stock relationship stuff in fiction then looks a lot more shrewish now), teams up with Kid Flash, Jay Garric and the Elongated Man and loses his powers a couple of times. While I have most of this era in comics, it’s good to fill in the few gaps, and Infantino’s art is absolutely breathtaking in this format. Like most Silver Age comics, not for everyone, but definitely for me.
THE GINGER STAR was Leigh Brackett’s 1970s reboot of her Eric John Stark, showing him as an interstellar rather than an interplanetary adventurer. After Stark’s closest friend disappears on the dying backwater world of Skaith, Stark goes there to hunt for him despite opposition from the cults and gen-engineered races dominating the planet. This makes it something of a Greatest Hits mashup, taking Stark and adding in a dying world 
When kicking around ideas to pitch McFarland, I sometimes thought of proposing a book on screen witches. I don’t think had I done it that it would have been as good as Heather Greene’s excellent BELL, BOOK AND CAMERA: A Critical History of Witches in Film and Television. Greene chronicles the topic starting in the silent era when witches in movie were mostly the victims of the Salem witch trials (later films about Salem largely ignored the trial and used the town as a signifier that Here There Be Witches) or wise women in Western and rural settings (I like her insight that the New Age bookstore owner serves the same purpose in more recent years in giving the hero mystical insight). It was the 1930s that gave movie witches their first landmarks via Snow White (the Queen being the first Sexy Evil Witch) and The Wizard of Oz (Margaret Hamilton’s witch taking the Halloween crone used in cartoons for comedy and not only making her menacing but becoming the archetype). Later films shifted witches into real horror and rom-com such as I Married a Witch, threw in Wicca and Satanism (frequently mixing the two) and witch superheroes such as Charmed.
Today I look at two books from recent reading that I liked, but I thought had serious flaws (of course both authors are way more successful than me, so perhaps you should my opinions of them with a grain of salt)
Sherlock Holmes was, of course, talking about double-checking your deductions when he said that: is there another explanation besides your theory? But I think it’s another of those Holmesian lines that applies well to writing. Because the last thing we want is for our readers wishing we’d done something different.
THE BRAIN BOY ARCHIVES by Herb Castle and Frank Springer (with Gil Kane providing art on the first issue) collects the adventures of psychic teen spy Matt Price. Recruited by the US government, he uses his telepathic and telekinetic powers to tackle various threats to America, most notably the Latin American dictator Ricorta, a psi himself.
always seemed a little unfair that where his siblings have some degree of magic, Kyllan’s limited to controlling animals.
The Witch World sequel WEB OF THE WITCH WORLD is an apt title as the Kolder are now using mind-controlled Enemies of the Estcarp Way in an elaborate plot to ensnare the witches; when the scheme stretches to include kidnapping Loyse, Simon and Jaelithe start spinning webs of their own (though as other shave pointed out, their plots fall by the wayside). A major plot point is Jaelithe discovers losing her virginity didn’t cancel out her powers, leaving Simon worried she’ll return to her old life (it’s a nice touch that Jaelithe never sees any conflict between Career and Family) while the witches mutter about Jaelithe doing the impossible (which pays off in the next book). One of those sophomore installments that sells the series.
ancient Mercurian enslaves human colonists; The Moon That Vanished, in which a broken man is forced on a quest for the ultimate McGuffin; and Enchantress of Venus, one of her Eric John Stark’s stories (if I still DMed, I’d totally work the Red Sea of Venus into my campaign). The other stories are good, except Vanishing Venusiasn with its ugly colonialism (“Wow, Venusians are soulless monsters, we needn’t have any qualms about wiping them out and taking their land!”). Hamilton suggests a running theme in Brackett is of a strong man who attains his dream and discovers it’s hollow; he has a point, but several stories also fit a theme of “reality is better than dreams” (made explicit in Jewel of Bas).
Andre Norton’s WITCH WORLD was an insanely weird genre mash-up when I read it in the 1970s (about ten years after it appeared). Simon Tregarth begins as a veteran forced into a life of crime which is about to get him killed. A mysterious occultist offers him an escape via the Round Table’s Siege Perilous, which magically takes anyone who sits in it to the world they belong.
