Deep in the heart of the Swiss Alps, where ancient lakes mirror snow-capped peaks and mist clings to mountain passes, extraordinary creatures soar through the skies - and the people who live alongside them must navigate a world both wondrous and perilous. Anselm Burkhalter's remarkable debut collection, *The Dragon of the Vierwaldstättersee: Seven Tales from the Cantons of the Wyrm*, introduces readers to a richly imagined Alpine landscape where wyrms - great, scaled, deeply mortal creatures - are as much a part of daily life as toll roads, canton politics, and the unyielding rhythms of mountain seasons.
Across seven interconnected stories, Burkhalter weaves a tapestry of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances.
Toll-keepers, riders, healers, and refugees populate these pages, each carrying burdens both visible and hidden. The collection opens with breathtaking confidence: a lone night-shift toll officer, a wounded wyrm bleeding black across pale flagstones, and a rider whose overpayment raises more questions than any declaration could answer. From this deceptively quiet beginning, Burkhalter builds a world of layered tension, quiet moral courage, and profound human complexity.
What sets this collection apart is its masterful restraint.
Burkhalter never overwhelms the reader with fantastical spectacle. Instead, his wyrms exist alongside bureaucratic ledgers, pitch-salve kettles, and the careful social codes of a confederation held together by mutual obligation and hard-won trust. The magic here is grounded, the wonder earned. Canton politics carry genuine weight. A child's badge from the wrong territory becomes a charged detail that reverberates across the narrative with the force of a thunderclap.
Burkhalter's prose is precise, atmospheric, and deeply humane - each sentence chosen with the care of a craftsman who trusts his readers completely.
Deep in the heart of the Swiss Alps, where ancient lakes mirror snow-capped peaks and mist clings to mountain passes, extraordinary creatures soar through the skies - and the people who live alongside them must navigate a world both wondrous and perilous. Anselm Burkhalter's remarkable debut collection, *The Dragon of the Vierwaldstättersee: Seven Tales from the Cantons of the Wyrm*, introduces readers to a richly imagined Alpine landscape where wyrms - great, scaled, deeply mortal creatures - are as much a part of daily life as toll roads, canton politics, and the unyielding rhythms of mountain seasons.
Across seven interconnected stories, Burkhalter weaves a tapestry of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances.
Toll-keepers, riders, healers, and refugees populate these pages, each carrying burdens both visible and hidden. The collection opens with breathtaking confidence: a lone night-shift toll officer, a wounded wyrm bleeding black across pale flagstones, and a rider whose overpayment raises more questions than any declaration could answer. From this deceptively quiet beginning, Burkhalter builds a world of layered tension, quiet moral courage, and profound human complexity.
What sets this collection apart is its masterful restraint.
Burkhalter never overwhelms the reader with fantastical spectacle. Instead, his wyrms exist alongside bureaucratic ledgers, pitch-salve kettles, and the careful social codes of a confederation held together by mutual obligation and hard-won trust. The magic here is grounded, the wonder earned. Canton politics carry genuine weight. A child's badge from the wrong territory becomes a charged detail that reverberates across the narrative with the force of a thunderclap.
Burkhalter's prose is precise, atmospheric, and deeply humane - each sentence chosen with the care of a craftsman who trusts his readers completely.
