Rogue Dragon; Avram Davidson; 1965

Another Nebula finalist.  This starts off with a great description of a dragon hunt, eventually gets lost and muddles through the middle, and then ends tolerably well.  Paul Brooks' Amazon review from 2 years ago excellently explains what went wrong, I think.  Now I want to read the original 58-page story... still, at under 150 pages for the entire "expanded" novel, the filler isn't too painful.

Rogue Dragon also has the following contribution to the Annals of Bad Editing [my comments in square brackets]:

The loft lay at the top of a teetering old tenement deep in the festering slums of Old Drogue.  Below, illicit win was made from wild grapes, and unlicensed tobacco cured and sold; the [there?] was an inn - de facto, not de jure - which kept no register of those who found cheap if uncertain slumber on the rag beds of it's [aaaarrgggh!] frousty [spelled with the alternate "frowsty" on a later page] floor; an entire establishment of ladies officially if not all actually young, who failing any gainful skills above a certain level, got their living by the use of such passive skills as lay beneath it; and a number of seamstresses and tailors who lacked time and place and perhaps inclination to weave the cloths they cut and sewed, depending instead on the activities of those who preferred not to vex the original owners with the tiresome bookkeeping inseparable from purchase.

There are plenty of typographical errors in this edition, but in addition to the typos, this passage is a beautiful example of when to kill your darlings, or, at the very least, turn some of those semi-colons into periods.

Lastly, the back cover 2009 IDW paperback declares "Was Avram Davidson the Greatest Fantasist of the 20th Century?  Very likely."  

WAT

You could make the case he's the best fantasist I'd never heard of before working through the Nebula finalists list, but better than Gene Wolfe, Ursula LeGuin, and Stephen King (who are mentioned by name on the back cover), not to mention that guy who wrote about those short people trying to get rid of some oppressive jewelry?!!?  I hear he was pretty good, too.  Hell, if we want to talk dragons in an SF setting, I may have guilty-pleasure enjoyed Dragonriders of Pern more than Rogue Dragon.