On Fridays, We Eat Meat

A.S. Hopewell
Eden Book Society

Gozie and her friends Mbembe and Chuma meet only during the summer holidays when they return from boarding school. They spend their days exploring on their bikes, building toys out of scrap gathered from construction sites and reading forbidden copies of Ikebe Super which Mbembe steals from his father. Their favourite haunt has been renovated and has a new occupant, a returnee with an icy house and even icier drinks who treats them as equals and invites them to return. The more they see him, however, the more the trio fight, their friendship strained by previously hidden secrets. Gozie is out – no girls allowed. And something is making the boys grow up faster than normal.

The Eden Book Society is a 'literary hoax' perpetuated by the publisher Dead Ink Books.  The idea being that the 'Eden Family' published a series of subscription only horror novelettes each year from 1919 until 2006.  To perpetrate their hoax Dead Ink have recruited a selection of pseudonymous authors - Chikodili Emelumadu, Grady Hendrix, Alison Rumfitt, Alex Pheby, Nina Allan, John Darnielle, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan & Kylie Whitehead - for this, the '1993 Collection'.

For the first time the Eden Book Society takes us overseas where three friends are negotiating the various trials of life in Nigeria until they discover a new house has been built in the area and everything takes a much darker turn with a welcome twist on a well worn horror trope.

It's a lively little book that doesn't overstay it's welcome but written in the vernacular and with a setting that doesn't hold much interest for me it needed to be a quick and effective story to hold my attention and it was both. 

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How To Mend The Sky

Ivy Liu
Eden Book Society

After her mother dies, running from grief, Ingrid falls in love with a much older painter. They move together to a cottage in the North of Scotland. Buried in beech trees and gorse, she tries to forget seeing death distort her mother's face. Winter comes, the cold seeps into the cottage's granite walls, and Ingrid begins to wonder if she made the right choice. As Christmas approaches, Ingrid’s dead mother shows up on her doorstep. She seems solid and is hefting a suitcase with a broken zipper. Ingrid does not know how to explain to her fiancé who this woman is. She doesn't know what has brought her mother back, or how to make her stay.

The Eden Book Society is a 'literary hoax' perpetuated by the publisher Dead Ink Books.  The idea being that the 'Eden Family' published a series of subscription only horror novelettes each year from 1919 until 2006.  To perpetrate their hoax Dead Ink have recruited a selection of pseudonymous authors - Chikodili Emelumadu, Grady Hendrix, Alison Rumfitt, Alex Pheby, Nina Allan, John Darnielle, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan & Kylie Whitehead - for this, the '1993 Collection'.

Naive New York teen Ingrid, numb with grief, falls under the spell of a Scottish artist and soon finds herself in a remote cottage somewhere in - unsurprisingly - Scotland.  Adrift and feeling increasingly used and abused she opens the door one day just before Christmas to find her deceased mother on the doorstep.

Despite it's increasingly dark content this one is written with a lovely light touch that propels the story nicely but I couldn't help but think it needed a bit of pruning, although I really couldn't tell you where from, and the ending won't come as a surprise to anyone but generally a strong and very enjoyable story.

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Servants To The King

Marion Scott
Eden Book Society

Photographer Neil Morrish died of a drugs overdose, or so the police claim. His friend Kay Timmis does not believe them. In the months before his death, Neil had become increasingly distant, increasingly preoccupied, as if he suspected he might be in danger.
Kay is determined to discover the truth about what happened to him. The final photographs Neil took were all of the same man. But who is Gregory King, and how might he be linked with a tragic incident from Neil's past?

The Eden Book Society is a 'literary hoax' perpetuated by the publisher Dead Ink Books.  The idea being that the 'Eden Family' published a series of subscription only horror novelettes each year from 1919 until 2006.  To perpetrate their hoax Dead Ink have recruited a selection of pseudonymous authors - Chikodili Emelumadu, Grady Hendrix, Alison Rumfitt, Alex Pheby, Nina Allan, John Darnielle, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan & Kylie Whitehead - for this, the '1993 Collection'.

This, my fourth Eden Book is a bit of a corker.

Photographer Neil has died of an unlikely drug overdose leaving behind him an unfinished investigation into a missing kid, a roll of photographs of a far right political wannabe named 'Gregory King' and a whole lot of questions that his friend Kay wants answers to.

It becomes quite evident early on where the roots of Scott's story are planted and anyone with a familiarity with Robert Chambers' book will appreciate how well she's mirrored the enigmatic nature of the original stories.  There's nothing obvious here and indeed things warp and twist as the story progresses in all manner of interesting ways that made for a fabulous read.

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Jackie's Ghost

Norman Keane
Eden Book Society

Jackie Price is a little girl with a problem: there's a horrible ghost living in her cellar. It makes bad things happen.
You might think it's Jackie doing all the bad things, but it's not: it's her ghost. With her mummy gone and her older brother, Steve, busy with his very naughty mates, Jackie keeps getting into trouble. And the ghost keeps upping the stakes so that eventually she has to sort it out once and for all.
Except what if the ghost isn't what she thought it was? What if it's something much worse? Then what?

The Eden Book Society is a 'literary hoax' perpetuated by the publisher Dead Ink Books.  The idea being that the 'Eden Family' published a series of subscription only horror novelettes each year from 1919 until 2006.  To perpetrate their hoax Dead Ink have recruited a selection of pseudonymous authors - Chikodili Emelumadu, Grady Hendrix, Alison Rumfitt, Alex Pheby, Nina Allan, John Darnielle, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan & Kylie Whitehead - for this, the '1993 Collection'.

The third novelette to come off the pile is a story of loss, violence and resilience.  

Jackie is the second child and has been left holding the babies following their mother's disappearance.  Older brother Steve is almost fully committed to his life of delinquency but is not above keeping them, just about, fed and housed.  Jackie's main problem is the ghost in the cellar, the one that gets into people and makes them do bad things.

There's a hell of a lot packed into 101 pages and it's lively enough propelled by it's first person narration but there are no surprises.  It's pretty simple to work out where things are going but the ride there is enjoyable enough.

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Our Little Group

Patricia Rivers
Eden Book Society

Abby, Jessica and Ken are stuck in their hometown, living with their parents and working dead end jobs. When Jessica dies in a sudden violent accident, Abby and Ken cling onto their fractured friendship and try to adapt to life without her.
When Jessica arrives back at work one morning, nobody but Abby and Ken seems to realise she's been dead. As the three settle back into their old routines, Jessica starts to act strangely.
It seems like coming back from the dead isn't enough for her. But what is?

The Eden Book Society is a 'literary hoax' perpetuated by the publisher Dead Ink Books.  The idea being that the 'Eden Family' published a series of subscription only horror novelettes each year from 1919 until 2006.  To perpetrate their hoax Dead Ink have recruited a selection of pseudonymous authors - Chikodili Emelumadu, Grady Hendrix, Alison Rumfitt, Alex Pheby, Nina Allan, John Darnielle, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan & Kylie Whitehead - for this, the '1993 Collection'.

This second Eden Book novelette from the stack is a very different animal to the first I read and from my usual reading material.  This is a much pulpier read than I normally go for but nonetheless I enjoyed it.

When one member of a small clique of friends returns from the dead with only the other two remembering the whole crashing,  dying and being buried thing things are never going to go well especially as the newly resurrected Jessica is even more callous then before and has acquired a fondness for eating hman hair, oh, and revenge.

There's little time for explanation here so we never really earn any hows or whos or whys but it's wittily written and it never lets up it's breakneck speed until it reaches it's blood soaked finale.

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An Attempted Bibliography of the Works of Barbara Livesey

Stephen George Wallis
Eden Book Society

Although unpublished by Eden outside of the famed anthology Best Short Stories: 1952, the work of Barbara Livesey forms a part of The Eden Book Society's story. The first yellow envelope to show Livesey's return address in Norwich is postmarked December 1949; a  cover letter accompanying the manuscript within is signed "M.G.W." Further correspondence in the record is signed with the same initials and continues through the autumn of 1955, concluding in the manner detailed herein. Livesey's writing career survived the end of her dealings with Eden by four years, through July of 1959, after which the trail goes cold.

The Eden Book Society is a 'literary hoax' perpetuated by the publisher Dead Ink Books.  The idea being that the 'Eden Family' published a series of subscription only horror novelettes each year from 1919 until 2006.  To perpetrate their hoax Dead Ink have recruited a selection of pseudonymous authors - Chikodili Emelumadu, Grady Hendrix, Alison Rumfitt, Alex Pheby, Nina Allan, John Darnielle, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan & Kylie Whitehead - for this, the '1993 Collection'.

The first of the eight I chose from the stack - chosen purely because it had the most intriguing title - tells of the writings of Barbara Livesey who had contributed to Eden Book Society in the 1950s and is pieced together here as a scrapbook of her published work and various ephemera.  Lindsey's writing is eclectic and seemingly unfocussed - short stories, tourist pamphlets, extracts from a memoir - but collected together in the bibliography one begins to see evidence of an ongoing warning hidden in her work that becomes increasingly specific over time.

It makes for a fascinating and delicately plotted read that teases out it's subtle subtext and made for an auspicious start for my journey through these Eden Books.

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Votive Offerings

Mark Valentine
John Howard
Peter Bell
Colin Insole
Sarob Press

Four ‘all new’ long stories (or novelettes) imbued with the mystery and otherworldliness of place and of landscape – strange, secret, mystical, and ancient.

Sarob has been doing these lovely little books for a while now, featuring Mark Valentine and John Howard, who, this time out, are joined by two others, Peter Bell and Colin Insole.

Here we have 4 stories themed to the title;  Mark's, 'Roman Masks', is a story of a happening and a conjuring, of old Roman gods and of a missing deity inadvertently summoned whilst John Howard gives us 'Desire Path', as old routes cross with new and roads once travelled are revisited, occasionally simultaneously. 

I know I've read some Peter Bell before but I certainly need to read more, his 'Figures in a Landscape', was fabulous detailing a search for a lost 'horse' on a hillside in Gwent.  Colin Insole closes the proceedings with a fun and pulpy tale of ancient evil and generations of guardians protecting the land.

Altogether an entertaining quartet of stories and another in a long line of quality releases from Sarob. 

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A Caution For The Wise

A clergyman raises alarm in his new parish when, in contravention of local superstition, he crosses and then sets out to defile the 'Devil's Mound' thinking it no more than an ancient burial site where he can satisfy his antiquarian urges.

This 2023 short, written, directed, edited and co-produced by Gaius Brown and adapted from a chapter in the novel Skendleby by Nick Brown, has the welcome feel of an M.R. James adaptation to it and owes a - very - large tip of the hat to the master's 'A Warning to the Curious'. 

Made on an obviously tighter than tight budget it's understandably a little rough around the edges but there's a great central performance from Patrick O'Donnell as 'Reverend Heatly Smythe' and it maintains a palpable, moody atmosphere throughout thanks to cinematographer Joseph Mcdonald.  If I'm being hugely picky , I'd have loved it to have ended a minute earlier but this is a fantastic little homage to the golden ages of both spooky stories and spooky television.

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The Sanctuary And Other Strange Stories

R.B. Russell
Tartarus Press

Gathering together lost souls on the Sussex Downs, houses demolished and rediscovered, and half-remembered dreams, The Sanctuary and Other Strange Stories collects uncanny fiction written by R.B. Russell over two decades. Many stories are rooted in moments of real life, but are transformed into something disquieting, from the enigmatic commune of ‘The Sanctuary’ to the ex libris of a lost artist, these stories drift between memory, history and imagination.

Inspired by writers as varied as Mark Valentine and Ian Fleming, Robert Aickman, and Reggie Oliver, and shaped by influences, from forgotten cults and stamp collecting, Russell’s tales explore the boundaries between the ordinary and the otherworldly. Love, death, music and off-beat literary researches intertwine, giving rise to stories that feel both intimate and unsettling.

I've had the pleasure of reading Ray's fiction (and non-fiction) several times over the last few years and happily I have his new essay collection 'Bibliomancy & Other Essays' here on the top of the TBR mountain, but accompanying me on my recent travels has been this rather fine collection of short fictions that thanks to some health issues I've been reading on and off whenever I felt up to it over several months.

As the co-publisher of Tartarus Press it'll come as no surprise that the strange and the supernatural loom large in these stories but threaded through you'll find other of his interests such as cults and espionage.  Ray's love of a spy gives a distinct ITC spy-fi flavour to many of the stories and you can taste traces of a youth spent watching shows like 'The Prisoner', 'The Champions', and 'The Saint'.  Alongside this his fascination with the likes of the Scientologist cult, the Brotherhood of the Cross & Star, The Temple of Psychic Youth and T. Lobsang Rampa all of whom he wrote about in his book headed by his biography of the Plympton lama, 'T. Lobsang Rampa And Other Characters of Questionable Faith'.

Obviously it's a collection and in every collection you'll find yourself more invested in some stories more than others.  My interest in cults pales next to my love of spy-fi which lives deep in the shadow of my abiding love of a strange and spooky story.  There is though a lot to be said for breaking up your reading of a collection such as this one and so it got read piecemeal which helped as I kept coming back to it fresh and being re-immersed into Ray's story worlds.

It's a cracking read.  I've read a few of Ray's shorts before but I'm mostly familiar with his longer form work and so to see his obvious mastery of the form was a joy and this is heartily recommended to all connoisseurs of the strange. 

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Ampney Crucis Investigates

Ian Edgington
Simon Davis
2000AD / Rebellion / Hatchette

England, 1928. Lord Ampney Crucis, together with his loyal butler Cromwell, is an investigator into the paranormal. A survivor of the Somme, where he witnessed something otherworldly that tore his sanity in two and left him susceptible to the entities beyond everyday reality, he knows full well that dark creatures lurk in this green and pleasant land... Chilling Lovecraftian capers abound in this complete collection of Ampney’s adventures from writer Ian Edginton (Scarlet Traces) and artist Simon Davis (Sláine, Thistlebone)! 

I've picked up a few of these 2000AD partworks recently so expect some more here in the near future.  This one I'd never heard of but there was no way I was going to resist reading an Edwardian occult detective romp especially one created by two of modern 2000AD's best creators.

Crucis had a difficult war that led him to being hospitalised after seeing one of the elder beings materialise on a battlefield to eat the dead.  This has led to him becoming something of an expert in dealing with the uncanny and now his services are called upon whenever there's an outbreak of anything inconveniently odd.

The first few stories are fabulous, full of upper class, Edwardian derring do, witty banter and dazzlingly improbable occult escapades, but it gets a little lost as Crucis and his trusty aide Cromwell skip dimensions and everything goes a bit timey-whimey and connections to Edgington's 'Scarlet Traces' start to appear but, that said, it's still all good Moorcockian fun and I really hope there's another volume out there somewhere as like Crucis with a pink gin I'm simply gasping for another.

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The Thirteenth Floor Anthology

Guy Adams (editor)
Rebellion

Max goes worldwide!
London's Maxwell Towers have long been under the control of Max - an all-seeing AI intent on punishing wrongdoers and wicked tenants by sending them to the Thirteenth Floor, where unspeakable horrors come to life. Now, Max's coding has been embedded in computer systems all over the world, and there is no escape from his nightmarish reign.
Featuring thirteen brand-new stories by A. K. Benedict, Angela Slatter, Mason Cross, Una McCormack, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Thana Niveau, James Lovegrove, Derek Farrell, MK Hardy, John Llewellyn Probert, Martyn Waites, Aubrey Wood, and James Goss.

'The Thirteenth Floor' with its occult AI 'Max' was created by writers John Wagner & Alan Grant and artist José Ortiz for the horror comic Scream!, but I first read it in the pages of the revived Eagle comic where it quickly became one of my favourite strips (along with 'The Tower King' - also drawn by Ortiz).  Then, a couple of years ago, long after both titles had faded into history, Max was rebooted by publisher Rebellion for a Scream & Misty special, which has now led us to this prose collection.

Max has gone global.  Rescued from the wreckage of Maxwell Towers, he has become the basis for a corporate AI tool installed in buildings all across the world.  He remains, in many ways, the same benevolent, paternal, caring Max, and he also remains, in all the other ways, the same retributive enthusiast we knew and loved, gleefully casting miscreants into his hellish thirteenth floor.

Among the contributors here we have various folks that'll be familiar to the world of Doctor Who fandom - Una McCormack, Guy Adams, James Goss - a few award winners and NYT bestseller writers - James Lovegrove, John Llewellyn Probert, Martyn Waites - and a host of others  - 15 in all, even though I kind of expected there to be two less.

I'm going to be entirely honest here and admit I picked this up on a nostalgia powered whim, I was in a reading slump and couldn't find anything else that I fancied and I pretty much expected nothing from it beyond a diverting tale or two, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It's a collection of well constructed and fun pulp horrors riffing on a fairly well-worn trope of crime and occult retribution, and I loved it. 

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NEWS: David Tibet presents HALLUCINATE CHILDREN at the DOX Gallery in Prague.

David Tibet the creative force behind Current 93 is hosting what he's rather fabulously called a "Gnostic cartoon PickNick", 'HALLUCINATE, CHILDREN' at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art  in Prague from (the evening of) 22 Oct 2026 – 4 Apr 2027.

Through music, word and image David has long been one of our great esoteric, visionary artists and this show looks to pull together all those threads of a creative life that has included collaborations with, amongst many others, Steven Stapleton (of Nurse With Wound), Jhonn Balance & Peter Christopherson (of Coil), Michael Cashmore, Youth, Nick Cave, Tiny Tim, Shirley Collins, Andrew Liles and Anohni.

Photo by Ania Goszczyńska

From the gallery's website...

The exhibition Hallucinate, Children is being developed in collaboration with the artist and will present visual works spanning the full arc of Tibet’s career. It will introduce his artistic practice as an autonomous visual universe, closely interwoven with his music, writings, publishing activities, and long-standing engagement with visionary literature, Biblical and apocryphal texts, and marginal currents of spiritual imagination.

Tibet’s work emerges from a broad tradition of visionary art and literature: from John Milton, William Blake, MR James, Count Stenbock, and Thomas Ligotti to the British hallucinatory underground, Christian apocalypticism, and obscure supernatural writings. Hallucinate, Children invites viewers into a space in which the image is not decoration, but a sign: an urgent, unsettling, and strangely tender testimony to a world perpetually on the threshold of revelation.

For those unfamiliar with David's visual art we've previously shared a video made for his exhibition at the California State University, Fullerton, Begovich Gallery titled 'Invocation of Almost' which you can watch at the link below...

https://wyrdbritain.blogspot.com/2022/09/who-is-david-tibet.html?m=1

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Shadows Over Cymru: Uncanny Stories of the Welsh Weird

Aaron Worth (editor)
British Library 

From the peaks of Eryri to hidden valleys and haunted mines, the storied landscapes of Wales have inspired centuries of myth and folklore. Over time, these tales of the unexplained and the Otherworld have formed a unique strain of weird fiction. 

Continuing the British Library's 'Gilded Nightmares' series of lavish hardbacks is this rather fabulous collection of stories exploring the darker side of Wales.  

One only needs to glance at the Welsh flag to understand the importance of the mythic in Wales; the "land of my fathers" is a place of stories, a land steeped in mysteries old and new.  This collection utilises the geography, the mythology and the character of the country to explore it's very nature.  The book revels in a country awash with story; a country of hidden places, creatures, people, and gods.  Stories by authors steeped in the heritage - Arthur Machen, Dylan Thomas, Richard Hughes - and by those finding inspiration in it - Algernon Blackwood, L.T.C. Rolt, A.C Benson, John Wyndham, Marjorie Bowen - travel the Welsh hinterlands unveiling secrets and mysteries in all the dark, neglected and forgotten corners.

In the hands of these writers, many amongst the crème of the golden age of weird fiction, Wales is a land of uncanny mystery as unforgiving as it is inviting. A place where the fantastical finds itself at odds with the mundane; a land where the supernatural lurks, poised beneath the surface, watchful for the unwary.

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NEWS: The Lost Occult Books of Victor Neuburg

'We will leave the silver moon-flowers of old thought for the gold sun-flowers of our true Apollonian theme ... It is before Dionysus, the maddening one, the disturber, came rudely in the twilight to make the fair, even world, odd and fantastic; the horns thrusting apart the twin thighs of duality.  Out of that odd, wild, Bacchic art came Unity, for the order of the old tie was as a chaos to the goat-god...' 

- from 'Dionysus and Diana'

Coming soon - with your help - from the resurrected Vine Press is a fascinating sounding collection of 'lost' occult poems from Victor B. Neuburg.  Languishing, mostly unread, for over  a century this first publication is being marshalled into being by Justin Hopper (author of 'Old Weird Albion'), designer Stefan Musgrove and Neuburg's granddaughter Caroline who dedicated her life to preserving and promoting her grandfather's work.

 

Justin contacted me recently to help promote the Kickstarter they've set up to fund the publication -

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oldweirdalbion/lost-occult-books-of-the-1920s-relaunching-vine-press

 

- and kindly provided the information below...

Victor Neuburg (almost certainly), Rites of Eleusis,
London, 1910. (From The Bystander, 1910)

In 1924 the poet, publisher and occultist Victor Neuburg was visited by unidentifiable spirits in his cottage in a small Sussex town. As he later put it, these voices ‘dictated’ poems to him – streams-of-consciousness pieces of prose steeped in esoteric symbolism. He wrote them down, nearly 100 pieces of writing, into the form of a book he called The Water Bearer. 

 

And no one would touch it. None less than Ralph Shirley, the editor of The Occult Review, told Victor that these were unique, wholly original, works, but ‘what publisher would risk it?’ 

For the next 100 years these poems sat, mostly unread, in a family chest. Until now. 

 

Victor Neuburg is best known as the magical (and sexual) partner of Aleister Crowley; as the man who discovered the poet Dylan Thomas; as a funny name that comes up when mentioning just about any aspect of early-20th century British counterculture. (An anarchist who advocated for gay rights and prison reform; the living connection between the Decadents and the Surrealists; friend to Austin Osman Spare and inspiration to Peter Warlock; early champion of nudists and yoga; the list continues.) 

 

‘Stan’, Dion Byngham, Victor Neuburg, ‘Frank’, 
late-1920s likely The Sanctuary, West Sussex. 
Photo copyright Justin Hopper. 

His published poetry books now sell for hundreds or even thousands, but perhaps his greatest-ever works – those which best espoused his bizarre hodge-podge of occult and spiritual beliefs – have been read by almost no one alive. 

 

We’re publishing these works as one of the last wishes of Caroline Neuburg, the poet’s granddaughter, who dove deeply into them – her copious notes on the symbolism in the works will act as introduction to the book The Water Bearer and Other Lost Works of Victor Neuburg. 

 

You can pre-order, and help make it all happen – a century in the making – through the 30th of October at www.vinepress.co.uk

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Oliver's Ghost

'Worlds Beyond' was an ITV series that somehow managed to run for 2 entire years - September 1986 to December 1988 - despite only consisting of 12 half hour episodes.   Each of those dozen episodes is purportedly based on stories from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research.

We've featured a few episodes from the series on Wyrd Britain over the years despite them being, on the whole, pretty woeful because I have a bit of a soft spot for them.  This, the series' final episode is perhaps the most fun but you probably shouldn't take that as any sort of indicator of quality.

Denholm Elliott is Sir Oliver Beresford reduced to turning his ancestral home into a hotel.  His, I assume, first bunch of guests - three American couples - have arrived and he, his wife and the maid are struggling to cope, hindered in no small part by the presence of the ghost of a little girl who keeps making one of the guests sleepwalk into other rooms - and into cupboard doors.

Writer Tony Williamson, who wrote the majority of the series - as well as many scripts for ITC shows including 'The Avengers', 'Department S', 'Jason King' - has thrown all ideas of spooky out of the window and gone for more of a bedroom farce sort of vibe and there're some fun one liners from the harassed Elliott but don't go looking for any chills.  I know most don't think of this series at all but, if you do, then think of it as more of a curio than anything else, a curio that was already horrendously dated when it was originally broadcast and one that pretty much deserves it's obscurity but, that said, I'll definitely feature it here again,

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