Newly announced by Tartarus Press and shipping this week is the new collection of essays from Mark Valentine, 'Tea and Gargoyles'.
These collections are always fascinating and always manage to be the cause of much consternation with my bank account as Mark lifts the lid on more strange delights.
From the Tartarus Press website...
In Tea and Gargoyles, Mark Valentine explores fiction that seems to hover on the edge of the uncanny, including work by Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Bowen, Gladys Mitchell and Walter de la Mare. He also discusses the more unusual and obscure metaphysical thrillers of the mid twentieth century.
Another essay looks at books that are rarer still: the imaginary titles conjured up in fiction which often, however, seem strangely familiar. His enjoyment of the recondite continues with a delight in a forgotten Edwardian nonsense poet and a shadowy relic of the 1890s, in old board games, and in the esoteric music and journals of the 1970s.
Valentine also celebrates the menagerie of seventeenth-century book-sellers’ signs, an old book about a town populated by bears which has a bookshop open all night, and the book¬shop detectives who uncover even more places to find books. The collection concludes with joyful accounts of book-browsing expeditions in the Marcher country.
'Tea and Gargoyles' is published in a 350 limited edition run of Tartarus Press' beautiful hardbacks and is available now from the publisher here...
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Carwyn and Rhian – the last in a long line of
sheep farmers – are living out a brutal year on their hillside farm,
deep in the mountains of North Wales. When Carwyn discovers a
buried prehistoric ruin in one of the fields on their land, his
curiosity quickly descends into obsession. His wife, Rhian, meanwhile,
is confronted with the growing realization that the man with whom she
shares her life and home is becoming a frightening stranger. As
the harsh winter closes in, Rhian finds herself alone with her
increasingly unrecognizable husband, and the mountains, and the looming
megalithic stones.
Treading similar ground to Andrew Mihael Hurley, but relocated to North Wales, Liam Higginson's debut novel is a folk horror descent into the unknown depths, historical, geographical and mythological, of the area.
On their farm in the Eryri National Park (formerly known as Snowdonia) Carwyn discovers an ancient burial mound where, with visions of riches, he begins to amateur archeologise his way into it. As he becomes increasingly obsessed it's left to Rhian to take care of the farm and deal with his increasingly unhinged behaviour. Beyond this, the wider story of the mound unfolds in snatches alongside glimpses of the couple's past slowly providing an understanding of how they came to be where they are.
It's a nicely written piece, delicately paced with a satisfying, if maybe predictable, conclusion and whilst Higginson perhaps doesn't quite yet have Hurley's poised lyricism there's a real storyteller at work here teasing out the descent into both man and mountain and perfectly situating each in the existence of the other. Higginson is careful to provide a definite sense of place that's only intermittently broken when the couple, who, as North Wales hill farmers, I assumed to be pretty much always speaking in Welsh, suddenly, drop actual Welsh words and phrases into their dialogue which yanked me out of the storyworld every time. I get what he was trying to do with it but, for me, it seemed anomalous.
It's an impressive debut, grounded, humane and yet deliciously eerie, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what Higginson does next.
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For '3 Wyrd Things' I ask various creative people whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work:
- a book or author,
- a film or TV show,
- a piece of music or a musician.
This month: Alex Older
Alex first came to my attention via an Instagram post by David Tibet enthusing about his novel 'The Animals Praise the Antichrist', which proved to be a fabulously strange love story revolving around two music obsessed teen outsiders.
Where to start with this neglected jewel of a novel? If you like Kafka, Arthur Machen, surrealism, mid-century gay writing, books with atmospheres both weird and eerie, time slips, paranoia, descriptions of the English countryside that are by turns lyrical and nightmarish, then this may be a novel for you.
It’s a great shame that The Image of a Drawn Sword isn’t a Penguin Classic, that it’s only available second-hand or via print-on-demand. It ought to be better known. In rural Kent, not long after the end of the Second World War, a solitary bank clerk named Reynard Langrish is drawn into an opaque world of mysterious army operations which are taking place in the countryside around his home. He’s recruited, ambiguously, by an elusive man, Captain Roy Archer, who remains vague about what his unit is up to. Is another war imminent? Is Britain already secretly at war again? Or is a civil conflict brewing? Langrish isn’t sure. Moreover, he’s preoccupied with his own inner struggles – a burdensome ennui, a growing sense of unreality, a teetering on the verge of personal dissolution. His perceptions and his memory seem unreliable, his understanding of his own situation somewhat limited. As the novel unfolds, it becomes apparent that time is not behaving normally and that identities are uncertain and unstable. Characters age at different rates, facial features alter and become indecipherable. Langrish may be attracted to Archer’s world in part because he finds soldiering – training, gymnastics, boxing – erotic, but it is never stated to what extent he realises this about himself. In a Machenesque touch, a Roman earthworks, perhaps of dubious authenticity, is a crucial site in the novel. Brooke had certainly read and admired Machen. A skilled botanist, he is capable of writing about the English countryside with an evocative skill reminiscent of Machen’s descriptions of Wales. But menace and fear and sexual anxiety hang over everything; there is little respite from the condition of existential dread, not even in rural Kent. This is also true in another of Brooke’s novels, The Scapegoat, a short work of fiction that is never explicitly supernatural, but that has an oppressive atmosphere and a theme of ritual sacrifice fans of folk horror might enjoy.
Despite its cosy trappings, its cottages and pubs, Brooke’s Kent is one that is rendered truly strange by latent violence, and by a mystifying military bureaucracy. At times, the sights and sounds of war intrude weirdly into the supposedly peaceful Garden of England; on other occasions, Langrish’s fruitless searches for the unaccountable Archer and his enigmatic troops happen in a landscape grown silent and eerie. And the restless Langrish cannot reconcile himself to either of these states. At the end of the novel, a literal fog descends, but metaphorically it’s been there all along.
I’ve been thinking about The Image of a Drawn Sword a great deal recently. Aspects of the novel are very much of its time, but it remains contemporary as well. This is true most especially in relation to the unspecified “Emergency” that forms the novel’s backdrop. The origins and the nature of this Emergency are hard to fathom and never spelled out, which seems, sadly, all too familiar. Then, too, the disoriented protagonist of Image repeatedly searches for an answer to a troubling question: Are we at war? As I write this, it is an unfortunate fact that I know exactly how he feels.
Music The Cure - Charlotte Sometimes
War, time slips, and splintered personalities haunt my music choice as well.
I’ve loved this song ever since I was a teen: it’s four minutes of gothic perfection. I like the way it was never an album track, it only enhances the sense I have of “Charlotte Sometimes” being a hermetic sound world with its own special atmosphere. It’s like a sunless aural space I can walk into at any time. And I do walk into it quite often. In fact, I often feel I have been living inside this song – living within its gloomy precincts – for most of my life.
So, for me the song is a kind of portal, a portal into a particular grey and doleful place. But the song is itself about portals. Robert Smith’s inspiration for “Charlotte Sometimes” is the 1969 children’s novel of the same name by Penelope Farmer. It’s a book about a girl at a English boarding school named Charlotte who finds that her dormitory bed acts as a portal into the past. While she sleeps she exchanges places with a girl named Clare who slept in the same bed decades ago. Clare was at the school during the First World War, and she and Charlotte keep swapping places between the war years and the 1950s.
If this sounds like an opportunity for exciting adventures, then it really doesn’t turn out that way. Charlotte Sometimes is nothing like a children’s book of today. There are no heroics, and identities are not affirmed – on the contrary, they are always under threat of disintegration (the b-side to “Charlotte Sometimes”, also inspired by the novel, is called “Splintered In Her Head”). It’s such a monochrome, mournful book, shaped by war, disease, death, and grief. The Cure captured its muted melancholy very well. Indeed, some of the song’s lyrics are lifted more or less directly from the novel. Grief and loss are subjects that have reoccured in my writing frequently: there is often an absent other shaping my stories. I’ve been preoccupied with these themes since childhood. Robert Smith has touched upon them repeatedly too: the most recent album by The Cure, Songs of a Lost World, is manifestly a work about grief.
Film
The Company of Wolves
After all that grey, we need some bold colours. My film choice is also about a girl who, whilst in bed, passes through a portal of sorts: the portal of her dreams.
Again, this work is a lifelong love of mine. The earliest dream I can recollect, from when I was very small, is an Alice-style nightmare of tumbling down a hole in the earth into a strange, flickering black-and-white room. For that reason, and perhaps for reasons to do with childhood loss, I’ve always been obsessed with the notion of children passing from one world into another. These stories often focus on young girls, and The Company of Wolves, adapted from Angela Carter’s stories in The Bloody Chamber, is one such film.
In the film, a young girl, Rosaleen, is sleeping in her artfully cluttered room in an English country house (if you look closely you can see a picture of The Cure on her wall). The objects in her room, and her sister and parents, are all woven into her fantastical dreams of a fairytale-like world of forests and wolves, folklore, and a wise old grandmother, played brilliantly by Angela Lansbury. Essentially, the film is a gothic retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood”, but with a number of embedded stories along the way, stories of wronged women, wolves, and even the Devil driving in the forest in his white Rolls-Royce.
Director Neil Jordan is Irish, but The Company of Wolves is a certainly a British film, made here, and very much shaped by the magnificent imagination of Angela Carter, who co-wrote the script. That said, one of the things I adore about it is how un-British it is. British films are rarely allowed to be this sumptuously symbolic – especially when the symbolism is mostly about sex and desire and reproduction. It’s all dark pathways, werewolves, hair, blood, flowers, eggs, mirrors: a veritable forest of Freudianism. It was made on a tight budget, which shows sometimes, but nonetheless it manages to be wonderfully overripe and extravagant. There isn’t enough of that in Britain, I sometimes feel. We could do with more artistic opulence and profusion. I first saw The Company of Wolves when I was very young, and I think I learned from it that sometimes you just have to set your imagination running free.
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John Travers has been hanged for the murder of his mother-in-law Helga, but to those who knew him something is amiss. Driven by justice and a sense of uncanny forces at work, John’s friend Doctor Toogood recounts a haunting tale of love and jealousy under the fell influence of a shadowy and implacable evil. First published in 1927, this novel by husband-and-wife writing duo Rosalie and Edward Synton (real surname Corse-Scott) has been lost for nearly a century and returns now from the Library collections to deliver its occult thrills anew.
A
newly rediscovered novel of the occult unearthed by the venerable
Johnny Mains and presented here by the British Library's Tales of the
Weird imprint, a most fitting home.
The Syntons, pen-names of Rosalie & Edward Corse-Scott, the
former a teacher, the latter a soldier and farmer, tell an
occult story of murder and manipulation across three perspectives, with the first doing most of
the heavy lifting.
Sometime in the 1920s, in the aftermath of WWI, John Travers is
hanged for the murder of his mother-in-law, Helga. Telling his story
is his friend, and fellow Helga-hater, Dr Toogood who reveals her
devious, manipulative and possibly supernatural nature as he relates the effect she had on his friend and the actions taken. The novel's second part is provided by Travers as he awaits execution before the book ends with the maleficent mother-in-law herself.
I was really quite pleasantly surprised by this one. Admittedly, it drags in parts but generally it's a nippy little tale with an unusual premise and an unexpected denouement.
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WELCOME TO THE NEW ABNORMAL! Award-nominated
writer, KEK-W, presents a sextet of weird tales that blend Horror and
Absurdism with the banal strangeness of Post-War British Science
Fiction, summoning up a future-past that is fantastical and disturbing,
yet oddly familiar.
Here we have six short weird tales that put me in mind of the likes of M. John Harrison and Joel Lane. The stories range from Prisoner style dystopian spy-fi - which I could very happily have kept reading for the entire book; through hermitic territory wars; dadaist, Kafkaesque bureaucratic hellscapes and half-remembered books to a techno-apocalypse and the Dreamtime.
Altogether it made for an entirely fascinating read and one that held the potential for more extraordinary excursions to come.
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