James A. Owen works out of the Coppervale Studio on Arizona; he apparently was primarily one who produced (wrote and drew) comic books, including a successful series that he self-published in the nineties. Here There Be Dragons is not his first novel, but it’s apparently his first YA novel, and the first published by a major publisher. The film rights were picked up by Warner Bros., as well; I’d LOVE to see it made into a movie. The second volume is called The Search for the Red Dragon; the third volume, The Indigo King, is due out next month, and if I’m lucky, someone will buy me a copy of that one, too.

John is a young man, just home from combat in World War I. On a dark and stormy night, he meets up with two other fellow Oxonians (Oxford students) over the body of his tutor, who was murdered. Mere moments after that, a strange man in odd clothing, holding a book entitled the Imaginarium Geographica, herds him and the other two (Jack and Charles) out to a dragon ship. From there, they sail off to the Archipelago of Dreams. In this other world, the Winter King is trying to take over; he has turned as much as a quarter of the Archipelago into shadow-lands. Can John — who is apparently meant to be the Caretaker of the Imaginarium Geographica — save this world?

The first thing I have to mention is that I have no idea how James A. Owen got such an amazing book-object for this book, which may or may not be his first published by New York. It’s printed on heavy, thick paper, with amazing fonts and an incredibly intricate cover. I actually avoided reading it for a while because I thought it was about a 450-page book; it’s only about 325 pages long. That’s how thick the paper is. The book also contains quite a few pen-and-ink drawings by Mr. Owen himself; he’s quite a talented artist. The drawings are done in a bit of a comic-book style, but definitely not caricatures.

The story is very cinematic; I can see why the movie studios went after it right away. It’s even a bit in Peter Jackson’s style, having trolls, dwarves, elves, talking badgers, and other fantastic creatures, along with big sea battle-scenes and a climactic battle at the end. The scenery, even just as described through words (not using his pictures), is amazing, from the castle of which, apparently, Camelot was a mere shadow, to the dragon ships (much less cruel-sounding than the dragon-ships from Midshipwizard Halcyon Blythe) and the island of large cats.

A lot of the book is name-dropping and literary references, I’ll admit. However, that was my favorite part. From the throwaway sentence on page 7 asking if Jack was the Jack from Whitechapel (Jack the Ripper) to a character named Magwitch who knew Charles Dickens, there are references to England’s literary past all over the place. That and, of course, the fact that it seems that all the previous Caretakers of the book were famous writers (Dickens, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Lord Byron, etc.). How can you not love a book that has you at 221B Baker Street twenty pages in?

That having been said, though, the plot’s been done before, in various forms. It’s sort of got elements of a great big pastiche going on — references to almost every mythology on earth, connections to different sorts of creation stories, dragons, Pandora’s box, whatnot. There’s a pan-mythology behind the entire story; Greek, Celtic, and Egyptian mythology combine with dragons and ships to make up the plot. Overall, though, I did enjoy the book quite a bit. The ending is fantastic, and definitely put a smile on my face. I’d recommend it to fans of high fantasy works, especially the classics, and fans of classic literature overall. 4.5/5 stars.