Wild Folk: Tales from the Stones

Jackie Morris (words)
Tamsin Abbott (images)
Unbound

Wild Folk comprises seven richly illustrated fables of transformation and power, summoned from the ancient stones beneath our feet and transformed by word and image into portals between past and future.

Jackie  Morris has produced a series of beautiful books over the years, many of which grace the bookshelves here at Wyrd Manor but beyond sharing a few of her paintings on the Wyrd Britain facebook page she's been conspicuously absent from the blog.  We're rectifying that right now with this lovely new book written in collaboration with stained glass artist Tamsin Abbott.

'Wild Folk' contains seven folklorish tales inspired by such diverse influences as classic folktales, the label of a cider bottle, a castle, W.B. Yeats and an island but what they have in common is their themes of a deep abiding love of the natural world and the mysteries it holds and a need to protect both.  Here she tells stories of hares, foxes, selkies, owls, trouts, swans, and ravens in a poetic prose, words often tumbling down the page in an almost race to present themselves.

Like all the best illustrators Abbott's art reflects these themes, encapsulating and reinterpreting the stories using her chosen medium to bring an additional vibrancy to the  stories, an expressiveness gained in no small part to the literal illumination that animates the art.

Not all the stories work as well as one would wish, 'The Owl's Tale' has a jarring shift mid story and 'The White Hare's Tale' is a tad heavy handed but generally this is a delicately wistful and rather beautiful book that I devoured over the course of an evening.

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Master of Reality

Recorded in early 1971 and released on the 6th of August, Black Sabbath's third album, 'Master of Reality', saw the band release another genre defining record developing further on the two previous albums, 'Black Sabbath' & 'Paranoid'.  Having recorded and released two albums and toured around the world during 1970 the band were on top of their game and with more studio time to play with the band downtuned their instruments, smoked an unfeasible amount of hash and headed off into the void. 

Eight tracks over a thirty four minute run time including four songs - 'Sweat Leaf', 'After Forever', 'Children of the Grave' & 'Into the Void' - that would come to be considered amongst their greatest, the band forged the heavy, groove laden sound and lyrical themes that would later come to define Grunge, Doom Metal and Stoner Rock.   

Like it's predecessors the album was poorly reviewed by critics but embraced by the public charting high on both sides of the Atlantic and, to date, selling in excess of 4.8 million copies worldwide.  

Writing this two weeks after the Ozzy's passing I know it'll always be their peerless debut that lives at the centre of my affections, but some 40 odd years on from when my Uncle Mike introduced me to them - thanks man - and at a point in my life when I listen to almost no rock music, that album and 'Master of Reality' number among a very few that are still rarely far from my record player.

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Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group

Rebecca Gransden
The Tangerine Press

A pilgrimage. An England in delirium.

In the midst of an apocalyptic event of unknown provenance – a mass of red spreading north from the southern counties – a young girl sets out on a journey. Along the way she encounters a series of eccentric characters, the few left behind in the wake of a widespread evacuation. Some of these individuals are ravaged and on the edge of death, while others are immersed in their own hermetic practices, be they solipsistic, nihilistic, or otherwise. None wish to engage for more than the brief time necessary to offer their meagre assistance

Rebecca contacted me recently with regard to her book and a read of the synopsis alongside a glowing review from Iain Sinclair -  ‘Linguistically inventive, alert in every sense, and propelled with such narrative force that hairs burn on the unsuspecting reader's neck.'  - was all I needed to avail myself of a copy.

A post-apocalyptic novella that accompanies 'Flo' on her journey across an emptied land, its inhabitants having fled the unknown apocalypse spreading from the south.  It's effects on those who've remained are as profound as they are bizarre but it's most obvious impact is the altering of the written word, reducing it to single syllables, a deconstruction of language that gives the book the deeply lyrical character of Beat or Jazz poetry as the words fracture and tangle, tumbling over each other to create a delerious, occasionally nightmarish, vision of a land stripped of cohesion, slowly degenerating, reducing itself to a primordial state.

At first look, this broken narrative felt daunting, an obstacle placed directly in the reader's path, but by the third page, it became the novellas' strongest feature, one that immerses rather than repels, giving Flo's journey the character of her name.  There were moments that didn't necessarily work for me  - the chapter titled 'Public Information Dreams' seemed purposeless - and the enigma of the ending will,  I suspect, frustrate as many people as it enthralls but, and I say this unreservedly, I adored this book to the point that I'm certain I'll revisit this decaying world again soon.

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NEWS: Swan River Press publish Brian Catling collection, 'A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences'.

Following warm on the heels of their 2020 publication of the very excellent Brian Catling  novella, 'Munky', Swan River Press, have just announced the publication of a collection of Catling's short stories.

Limited to 500 copies and selling fast this is an unexpected chance to revisit, perhaps for the last time, the imagination of this singular and sadly missed artist and author.

From the website...

“The death itself was not a bodily thing.”

A ghost is an absence defined by its presence, or else a presence defined by its absence. The work of Brian Catling is filled with such visions, intrusions on the threshold of our world and the next. The stories collected within are fragments of a singular imagination, portals into worlds populated by dog-headed giants and reanimated bog bodies, spirits both beastly and mundane. These are tales about visionaries and mystics, about the need to venture into blurry territories of sight in which angels, ghosts and memories merge and reform. Together they showcase the distinctive voice underlying the very best of Catling’s work.

Includes three postcards with photos by Iain Sinclair and texts by Alan Moore.

Order details can be found here - 

https://swanriverpress.ie/srp-title/a-mystery-of-remnant/

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Lost in the Garden

Adam S Leslie
Dead Ink Books

Heather, Rachel and Antonia are going to Almanby. Heather needs to find her boyfriend who, like so many, went and never came back. Rachel has a mysterious package to deliver, and her life depends on it. And Antonia - poor, lovestruck Antonia just wants the chance to spend the day with Heather. So off they set through the idyllic yet perilous English countryside, in which nature thrives in abundance and summer lasts forever. And as they travel through ever-shifting geography and encounter strange voices in the fizz of shortwave radio, the harder it becomes to tell friend from foe. Creepy, dreamlike, unsettling and unforgettable - you are about to join the privileged few who come to understand exactly why we don't go to Almanby.

If you'd have asked me at any point during the first half of this book what I thought of it, actually if you'd even stood near me for long enough, I'd have raved at you about how good it is. Unfortunately, if you'd asked the same question during the second half, I'd have repled with a wistful, "Hmmm."

Initially, this is a strange and vaguely cosmic road trip overflowing with fun dialogue and inventive narrative.  Leslie's writing is witty, his world-building is captivating, his characters are engaging and his pacing is perfect.  As the three girls travel to the forbidden town of Almanby we are treated  to a slightly surreal road trip until they arrive at their destination and from that point I couldn't shake the feeling that Leslie was in dire need of an editor.

Once in Almanby the purposeful drive becomes an indulgent meander that soon overstays it's welcome.  At no point did I stop enjoying Leslie's prose but he lost all momentum and the book became bogged down in a succession of fairly uninteresting surreal set pieces, most of which could have been ejected and replaced with a single stronger final act.

Regular Wyrd Britain readers will know how much I dislike writing negative reviews and I want to stress that this isn't one.  There is so very much to love here and I've spoken to people who felt the exact opposite about the book and that it found it's feet in that second half but for me, it wasn't what it could have been or perhaps what I wanted it to be.  What it absolutely was though was a bold and intriguing debut and I'm very interested to see what Leslie does next.

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NEWS: Tartarus Press to publish 'T. Lobsang Rampa And Other Characters of Questionable Faith' by R.B. Russell

The ever wonderful Tartarus Press have just announced the publication of a new set of essays by publisher Ray Russell on the topics of Cyril Henry Hoskin, a surgical fitter from Devon who claimed to be a reincarnated Buddhist monk named Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, Millenarian church, the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star, the Scientology cult and Genesis P-Orridge and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.

From the website...

T. Lobsang Rampa’s autobiography, The Third Eye was an international bestseller in 1956, but the author had to face some awkward questions from critics. There were two possibilities; either he really was a Tibetan lama whose third eye had been physically opened (and who could reveal secrets of levitation, invisibility, gilded extraterrestrials, giant temple cats, etc), or he was really the eccentric son of a plumber from Plympton in Devon.

Rampa would explain himself by discussing transmigration, and over the next quarter of a century (and in another eighteen books) he would reveal the secrets of the human aura, astral travel, UFOs, life on Venus, and the hollow Earth (and hollow Moon), among many other alternative, New Age ideas. For Rampa, there was no wild, left-field belief that was not true.

R.B. Russell has written the first definitive biography of Rampa (also known as Cyril Henry Hoskin). The identity of Rampa may have been conclusively debunked by anybody who knew anything about Tibet, Buddhism, or basic scientific principles, but he would always claim that everything he wrote was true, and until his death in 1980 he doesn’t ever seem to have come out of character.

Russell’s biography of Rampa is accompanied in this volume by three further studies of alternative belief systems that have fascinated him over the years.

Following the biography of Rampa, Russell writes about the Millenarian church, the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star, who believed their leader was Christ and immortal, and that the world would end in 2000. (Spoiler alert: we are still here, and nobody has seen the leader for several years.)

A further essay is a brief look at one of the Church of Scientology’s techniques for recruiting members, the Oxford Capacity Analysis test. Russell argues that the test is based on a series of small, apparently innocuous lies, but he shows that they are indicative of Scientology’s complete disregard for honesty or integrity.

The final essay looks at the Temple of Psychic Youth, the knowing attempt by Genesis P-Orridge to create a modern cult. Was it exploitative and manipulative, or simply an ironic experiment? And how did it backfire when the 1980s tabloids created the Satanic Panic?

You can order the book from the website here - http://tartaruspress.com/russell-rampa.html

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Return of the Ancients: Unruly Tales of the Mythological Weird

Katy Soar (ed)
British Library Tales of the Weird

From the sun-seared shores of the Aegean to the misty bogs of ancient England, the dark tendrils of mythological gods and monsters have remained embedded in the minds of those who once believed, and throughout the past two centuries have inspired a haunting sub-genre of uncanny fiction.  

Collecting up strange tales of legendary Greco-Roman figures, pagan deities of Old Britain and godlings and abominations from the world’s pantheons returning to wreak havoc on modern civilization, this new anthology presents a thrilling array of weird fiction touched by the otherworldly and eternal mystique of myth, lore and legends. 

It's been a long while since I've dived into one of these British Library Tales of the Weird anthologies and even longer since I've enjoyed one as much.  There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a real pulp fiction character to the stories although I will note not as much as I was suspecting as the title had me anticipating various Lovecrafty 'Old Ones' rising from assorted 'deeps'.  Here though things are of a more historical bent, with a couple of exceptions.  

I'm certain I'm not the ony one who often finds anthologies to be a bit of  pick and mix in terms of quality but rather wonderfully there was nothing here that made me want to skip past although I did wonder if opening story, 'Dionea' by Vernon Lee, would get the better of me as I've struggled with her writing in the past, but this time perseverence paid off and the story unfolded nicely, if slowly.

Thomas Graham Jackson's 'The Ring' bears an acknowledged debt to M.R. James whilst R. Ellis Roberts' 'The Great Mother' has a Machenean feel, although one stripped of the Masters' more folkloric or evangelical characteristics.  

John Buchan, no stranger to a strange story, begins a run of pulp romps with tale filled with wind and fire, whilst F.A.M. Webster conjures Aztec magic in 'The Owl', Flavia Richardson evokes ancient cats in 'Pussy' and Eugene de Rezske tells a story of hidden cults and ancient relics in 'The Veil of Tanit'. 

'The Face in the Wind' by Carl Jacobi has the distinction of being one of the most popular stories ever published in the venerable 'Weird Tales' and I can see why, its a fun tale of ancient creatures and a big old wall.  Edmond Hamilton's 'Serpent Princess' treads into Lovecraftian territory with the re-awakening of an ancient goddess whereas John Wyndham plays for laughs in 'More Spinned Against'.

Evangeline Walton, who some will know from her retellings of Welsh mythology - most notably published as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series - here focusses her attention towards France and the legend of Y's in 'Above Ker-Is'.  Ken Alden tells a tale of paganism and politics in Justice Tresillian in the Tower' before the book ends strongly with two fairly modern tales from Stephen Baxter, with a story of obligations in 'Family History', and John Cooling's Carnacki-esque viking wolf tale 'The House of Fenris'.

Soar has assembled a thoroughly enjoyable selection that dipped into a pleasingly varied selection of mythologies avoiding over-familiar choices and my reintroduction to this fun series proved to be one of the stronger and more cohesive entrants.

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Spell of Evil

From a script idea by legendary Wyrd Britain writer Brian Clemens ('Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde', 'Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter' 'And Soon the Darkness', 'Danger Man', 'The Avengers', 'The Professionals' and many, many more), who created the series, providing all the stories and a large number of scripts, the final episode of the first series of mid 70s ITV  'Thriller' focussed on the matrimonial, magically Machiavellian, mischief of a money hungry witch.

Following the unexpected death of his wife Tony Mansell (Edward de Souza - 'Kiss of the Vampire') remarries the sultry Clara (Diane Cilento who that year also appeared as the schoolteacher 'Miss Rose' in 'The Wicker Man') who slowly begins to magically murder him.  With the death toll growing and Tony fading fast it's left to faithful secretary, Liz, (Jennifer Daniel - de Souza's former screen wife in 'Kiss of the Vampire') to save the day.

There's an obviously limited budget, but with  an often fairly camp and occasionally funny script, solid performances from an experienced cast including a fabulously over the top performance from Cilento who seems to be  channelling Fennella Fielding in 'Carry on Screaming!' it all makes for an enjoyably 1970s slice of wyrd TV.

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NEWS: A Year In The Country publish new collection, 'Other Worlds'

Our friend Stephen Prince over at the fabulous 'A Year In The Country' has just announced the latest of his collections.  

Stephen's books are always a fascinating read and are heartily recommended.

Here's the blurb...

A Year In The Country: Other Worlds

Searching For Far Off Lands Via Witchcraft Battles, Spectral Streets, Faded Visions Of the Future And The Secrets Of The Stones

A Year In The Country: Other Worlds intertwines and cross pollinates the A Year In The Country project’s core exploration of wyrd and hauntological culture with journeys to far off lands and seeks out hidden links in the cultural undergrowth.

Amongst other wyrd and far off lands it wanders to the Winter of Discontent witchcraft battles of the 1979 television adaptation of M.R. James’ Casting the Runes and the timeslip folk horror Cold War dread of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense’s And The Wall Came Tumbling Down…

Takes a trip into the surreal dreamscape pop fantasia of Nancy Sinatra’s Movin’ With Nancy television special and spends a night in the triple bill genre melding wonderworld of the Scala cinema…

Visits the ghosts of city streets via The Sandbaggers, The Gentle Touch and Adam Scovell’s Local Haunts and opens the time capsules of faded history in The Likely Lads and the modernist’s photozines…

Steps into the shadows of the 1980s secret state cycle of British film and television via Menace Unseen and Bird of Prey and crosses over the thresholds of Kate Bush and Suzanne Cianni’s boundary breaking worlds…

Unearths the hidden histories of The Profumo Affair, Mitch Glazer’s Magic city and Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn and explores the frontier-like autonomous zones of Walter Hill’s The Driver, Ryan Andrew Hooper’s The Toll and John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard…

Enters the endless “wilderness of mirrors” espionage games of Andrew Williams’ Witchfinder and conjures the lost visions of the future that are buried inside Karyn Kusama’s Aeon Flux and Robert Longo and William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic.

The book reflects and records a wide ranging personal cultural journey through the byways, highways, darkened alleys and edgelands of culture and variously visits, revisits and at times brings to the surface the sometimes subterranean themes and culture that have inspired and underpin A Year In The Country’s journeys amongst the wyrd spectral tales of culture.

More details and ordering info can be found here...

https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/a-year-in-the-country-other-worlds-book-released/

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Mervyn Peake documentary

Author, illustrator, poet, playwright and artist Mervyn Peake, the celebrated author of the 'Gormenghast' series, was born on this day in 1911.

The 1998 documentary below features family, friends, and contemporaries such as Quentin Crisp and celebrates his work and a life cut short by illness.

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NEWS: Egaeus Press reissue 'Soliloquy for Pan'.

This is a real one that got away moment for me as i was skint when this was originally published and still skint when it reprinted so I'm really happy to be able to say that there's a brand new 10th anniversary edition of 'Soliloquy of Pan' available now from Egaeus Press limited to an edition of 300 copies.

From the website...

HARK! HE HAS RETURNED.

One of Egaeus Press's most sought-after publications, SOLILOQUY FOR PAN has returned in a new edition, on this, the tenth anniversary of its original publication. Featuring a mammoth array of fiction, essays and poetry along with lesser-known archive material, in praise, in awe, in fear of the goat god, this new edition features all of the original contents, along with different endpapers, several new illustrations, AND a brand new, specially written story by the great BENJAMIN TWEDDELL.

The full contents are as follows...

• A Magical Invocation of Pan by Dion Fortune
• The Rebirthing of Pan by Adrian Eckersley
• Panic by R.B. Russell
• The Maze at Huntsmere by Reggie Oliver
• The Secret Woods by Lynda E. Rucker
• Faun and Flora: A Garden for the Goat-God Pan by Sheryl Humphrey
• The Game of the Great God Pan by Benjamin Tweddell
• Pan With Us by Robert Frost
• A Song Out of Reach by John Howard
• Lithe Tenant by Stephen J. Clark
• Pan by A.C. Benson (from an epitaph in The Greek Anthology)
• A New Pheidippioes by Henry Woodd Nevinson
• Goskin Woods by Charles Schneider
• Pan's Pipes by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The House of Pan by John Gale
• The Company of the Lake by Jonathan Wood
• The Role of Pan in Ritual, Magic & Poetry by Diane Champigny
• Leaf-Foot, Petal-Mouth by Bethany van Rijswijk
• The Rose-White Water by Colin Insole
• The Death of Pan by Lord Dunsany
• Meadow Saffron by Martin Jones
• The Lady in the Yard by Rosanne Rabinowitz
• An Old God Almost Dead: Pan in the 1940s by Nick Freeman
• A Puzzling Affair by Ivar Campbell
• South-West 13 by Nina Antonia
• In Cypress Shades by Mark Valentine
• Honey Moon by D.P. Watt
• Summer Enchantment by Harry Fitzgerald

Edited by Mark Beech

Order here: https://www.egaeuspress.com/Soliloquy_for_Pan.html

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Where Furnaces Burn

Joel Lane
Influx Press

Episodes from the casebook of a police officer in the West Midlands.
Blurring the occult detective story with urban noir fiction, Where Furnaces Burn offers a glimpse of the myths and terrors buried within the industrial landscape.
First published in 2012, Joel Lane’s World Fantasy Award-winning collection is a true modern classic of weird fiction that cemented his place as one of the most important and distinctive British writers of the weird.

I read my first Joel Lane book - 'The Earth Wire and Other Stories' - in 2022 and have picked up a couple of these nice new Influx Press editions since but this is the first I've had the opportunity to get stuck into and being a occult detective collection it was always going to be somewhere near the top of the tbr pile.

The 26 stories here follow the trials and travails of a copper in what's known as 'The Black Country' - the post-industrial, urban sprawl around the city of Wolverhampton in the West Midlands - as he navigates an unfortunate affinity for cases of a distinctinctly weird and supernatural nature.

Lane was a fabulously gifted writer and the stories here are wonderfully strange.  As you progress through the 26 tales you can feel the strain our hero is under pulling at the threads of his life and sanity.  He's dragged deeper and deeper into, sometimes literal, underworlds, navigating cases of abduction, of dismemberment, of loss, of neglect, of ghosts and of gods.

The only problem I had is that these stories - many of which appeared in various journals and anthologies - are very short and follow a distinct pattern so when read together they do start to feel a little samey but spread out and peppered in amongst other writers / stories they made for a great read.

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Barrowbeck

Andrew Michael Hurley
John Murray

For centuries, the inhabitants of Barrowbeck, a remote valley on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, have lived uneasily with forces beyond their reckoning. They raise their families, work the land, and do their best to welcome those who come seeking respite. But there is a darkness that runs through the village as persistently as the river.
As one generation gives way to the next and ancient land is carved up in the name of progress, darkness gathers. The people of Barrowbeck have forgotten that they are but guests in the valley.
Now there is a price to pay. Two thousand years of history is coming to an end.

Originally created as a series of short plays for Radio 4 as 'Voices in the Valley', this reworking of the stories tells, via a series of vignettes, the story of the isolated town of Barrowbeck from pre-history to the near future.

More overtly magical than his previous work but retaining the acute sense of place that characterises his writings, these folk horror miniatures often feel a little thin on the page.  Hurley has made some changes and additions from the scripts but I wish he'd gone deeper as for me they worked better in their original format and needed a deeper, more complex focus to fully satisfy as a book.  That said,  I'm writing from the perspective of someone who thorougly enjoyed the audio plays so perhaps these stories will prove more effective with those who are coming in cold.

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NEWS: 'A1 Deadline' to launch in July

So, this looks like it might be worth watching out for.  

'A1' and 'Deadline' were British anthology comics of the late 80s and early 90s - the latter being by far the more famous thanks mostly to the presence of cultural icon to be 'Tank Girl'.

'Deadline' arrived in 1988 alongside a host of comics - 'Crisis', 'Revolver', 'Toxic!' - aimed at older readers who had grown up reading '2000 AD' but who were in need of something new.  Created by artists Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon, it adopted a magazine format that mixed comics, both new ('Tank Girl', 'Johnny Nemo') and reprinted ('Love & Rockets', 'Milk and Cheese), with articles on indie music, championing the rise of what was to be 'Britpop'.

'A1', created in 1989 by Dave Elliott & Garry Leach and published - initially- via their own Atomeka Press acted, like 'Deadline', both as a vehicle for introducing UK audiences to strips and characters like Mr. X, Concrete and The Flaming Carrot whilst and as home to original stories by the likes of Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, Ted McKeever, Neil Gaiman, Brian Bolland and a host of others.

The new title with it's clunkily combined name was announced recently by Dave Elliott and will launch via Kickstarter in July.  Contributing to the new title so far include, Steve Pugh, Kevin Eastman, Mark Nelson, Shaky Kane, Bill Sienkiewicz, Rhoald Marcellius, Ron Marz, Rufus Dayglo and Simon Bisley and you can sign up for their mailing list here...

https://mailchi.mp/8703ca1e35a9/sign-up

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Torture Garden

1967s 'Torture Garden' was the second of the Amicus portmanteau movies and, to these eyes at least, the worst of the seven. Starring, at the insistence of the American money men, Burgess Meredith and Jack Palance, and consisting of several stories by 'Psycho' author, Robert Bloch (who also adapted them), it's a hammy and bloodless affair.

With a framing device based around a carnival sideshow where, for a price, 'Dr Diablo' (Meredith) provides an extra scary experience for a group of punters allowing them a look through the shears of 'Atropos' (one of the Fates) at "things that can be". The "things" they see involve a homicidal psychic cat, a jealous piano, movie robots and Edgar Allan Poe and, with the exception of the last one, they are all as daft as they sound.

Meredith is in full 'Penguin' mode here hamming it up terribly, and I've never been an admirer of Palance, although he is at least playing somewhat against type here.  Peter Cushing is relegated to a supporting role in the Poe segment and there are several Brit stalwarts like Michael Ripper and Maurice Denham striving valiantly too rescue the thing but the stories are weak and, whilst I've always liked how Amicus strove to present their stories with a more contemporary and even transatlantic setting in contrast to Hammer's gothic trappings this one feels both too American and not American enough.  As always with these anthologies though the stories are quick and director Freddie Francis always had a masterful eye but this is one of the those movies that is worth watching more for it's place in history than for it's merits.

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