The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H.G. Parry

Hold on—there’s Excalibur, if I can find Le Morte Darthur again.” “I’m not going to attack a spectral dog with a medieval sword, Charley! They shoot it in the original story, don’t they? If you must bring something out from the pages of a book, don’t you have books with guns?” “It’s not that simple,” he said. “It has to be—I don’t know, it would have to be an important gun, one with meaning and context. I can’t just reach in and pull out a hot dog because the protagonist eats one on page twenty-six.”

One should always have something sensational to read in bed.

There are no rules to what a fictional character may or may not be able to do, given the right reading.

Beside Dorian, Heathcliff brooded conscientiously, his diabolic face aflame. The White Witch stood beside him. They made an intimidating couple: one dark, one white as chalk, both tall, both stunningly beautiful, both able to break a person in half. Darcy Three was also present—the quiet, practical Darcy, whom Millie secretly thought of as the attractive one. (Dorian and Lady Macbeth both favored Five, but Millie thought him a little too reserved, and inclined to jump, un-Austen-like, in large bodies of water.)

The public house, a dark, low-ceilinged Elizabethan building lit by a haze of candles, was beginning to fill with diners of various shapes and sizes by the time they reached it. Lancelot and the Scarlet Pimpernel drank foaming beer by the window, Lancelot discoursing on the relative merits of broadswords in heavily accented Middle English. The Artful held court at a table in the corner, hiding a ball under a cup and shifting it rapidly as the Darcys watched. The White Witch sat alone at the bar, as cool and forbidding as a 1940s noir heroine. (“The silver Harley-Davidson on the curb is hers,” Millie explained. “Cheaper than reindeer, and it does better in traffic.”)