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.

..........................................................................................

If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

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

..........................................................................................

If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

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.

..........................................................................................

If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.