The Reluctant Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales is a 1970 collection of short stories by science fiction and fantasy author L. Sprague de Camp, first published in paperback by Pyramid Books. The pieces were originally published between 1939 and 1958 in the magazines Thrilling Wonder Stories, Unknown, and Fantastic Universe. The collection has also been translated into French and German.

The book contains short fantasies by the author, most of them with contemporary settings, although the final piece is one of his "Pusadian" tales set in an antediluvian world patterned after Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age.

Contents

• "The Reluctant Shaman"
• "The Hardwood Pile"
• "Nothing in the Rules"
• "The Ghosts of Melvin Pye"
• "The Wisdom of the East"
• "Mr. Arson"
• "Ka the Appalling"

Trivia

The characters of Virgil Hathaway and Henri Michod from in "The Reluctant Shaman" and "The Hardwood Pile", set in the fictional town of Gahato in upstate New York, were much later reused by de Camp in two of his tales of W. Wilson Newbury, "The Huns" (1978) and "Darius" (1977).

References

• Laughlin, Charlotte; Daniel J. H. Levack De Camp: An L. Sprague de Camp Bibliography. San Francisco: Underwood/Miller.