Mark Valentine’s stories have been described by critic Rick Kleffel as "consistently amazing and inexplicably beautiful". He has been called "A superb writer, among the leading practitioners of classic supernatural fiction" by Michael Dirda of The Washington Post, and his work is regularly chosen for year’s best and other anthologies.
This new selection offers previously uncollected or hard to find tales in the finest traditions of the strange and fantastic. As well as tributes to the masters of the field, Valentine provides his own original and otherworldly visions, with what Supernatural Tales has called "the author's trademark erudition" in "unusual byways of history, folklore and general scholarship". Opening a book will never seem quite the same again after encountering this curious volume of Seventeen Stories . . .
Mark is a storyteller of the liminal spaces, of the thin places and of thresholds. He speaks of slips into the unknowable, of flavours lost or untasted, and of sounds best left unheard. He tells stories of those broken by experiences of the numinous, of those with the power to exploit it and of those with the wherewithal to leave well enough alone when they feel it's presence and here Swan River Press have provided us with a beautifully rounded collection of Mark's tales.
To my mind, he's our best writer of the classic form of weird and supernatural tales whose stories are to be savoured like - and possibly with - a fine cognac.
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