NEWS: Zagava to issue David Tibet (Current 93) 'The Night Is Eating Us All' stamps and postcards

Publishing house Zagava are set to issue a sheet of stamps and a set of postcards featuring David Tibet's 'The Night Is Eating Us All' artwork.

Musician and artist David Tibet is a key figure in the UK post-industrial music scene with links to musicians such as Psychic TV, Nurse With Wound, and Coil. Over the past 40 years he has formed and run various record labels and publishing houses such as Durtro, Jnana, and Ghost Story Press through which he has released his own work - mostly under the Current 93 guise - as well as music and writings by, amongst others, Antony and the Johnsons, Tiny Tim, Sand, Robert Aickman, Count Eric Stenbock, Ron Weighell and Thomas Ligotti.

The 15 stamps are presented on a single 24x18cm perforated sheet of stamp paper.

The 13 16x11cm postcards will be printed on finest card stock and presented in a semi-transparent envelope.

Pre-orders are being accepted now at the Zagava website here.

You can find a short documentary on Tibet and his artwork here.

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Infra Noir 2020

Various authors
Zagava

Since some friends of Zagava missed single titles of our chapbook series, Zagava now offers all 11 Infra-Noir chapbooks published in 2020 as an inexpensive paperback! If you want all of the brilliant stories in one affordable place, this is the book for you.
D.P. Watt: Craft; Mark Valentine The Clerks of the Invisible; Jonathan Wood: The Idyll Is Over; Karim Ghahwagi: Codex of Light; Mark Samuels: Posterity; Rebecca Lloyd: Ancestor Water; Mark Valentine: Stained Medium; Timothy J. Jarvis: The Purblind Bards; Reggie Oliver: The Wet Woman; R.B. Russell: A House of Treasures; Rosalie Parker: Home Comforts 

Through 2020 Zagava released a series of small chapbooks by a coterie of authors associated with the publisher and enjoyed by us here at Wyrd Britain including Mark Valentine, Rosalie Parker, R.B. Russell and more.  These stories have now been collected together in this delightful volume.

D.P Watt has the honour of opening the proceedings with an entrancing tale of a beautifully made book whereas for Mark Valentine - in the first of two contributions - it's the mystery of a rare book and the joy of the hunt whilst Jonathan Wood explores the inner life of the book and the characters that the writer hopes to populate it with.

Karim Ghahwagi's 'Codex of Light' takes a different tack with a fantastical fable of fire and the restrictions of tradition.  Mark Samuels' 'Posterity' tells a wonderfully creepy talke of scholarlty hubris and a dead author (a thinly veiled Robert Aickman).  Rebecca Lloyd's 'Ancestor Water' like Ghahwagi's earlier story deals with the pull of heritage although it's contemporary setting free of gothic trappings gives it a more urgent and less folky aspect.

Happily we are given another Mark Valentine story (regular readers will be well aware of our love of Mark's writing) this time dealing with forgotten philosophies chance meetings and lost literary treasure whilst Timothy J. Jarvis spins a fascinating post apocalyptic tale in 'The Purblind Bards'.

Reggie Oliver is one of several authors on my ever growing 'must read more' list as what I have read has been a treat.  Here his story 'The Wet Woman' continues a trend I've noticed in his writing for a sort of dark whimsy which here takes the form of a group of thesps and musos engaging in petty revenge that unleashes more profound events.

The book ends with two stories from Tartarus Press publishers R.B. Russell and Rosalie Parker.  Ray's story 'A House of Treasures' is a beautifully poised tale of a search realised whilst Rosalie tells of desire and perhaps lust for a cuddly but avaricious toy waiter named Nigel.  It's very wrong and very funny.

Unfortunately this collection, as with all the Zagava paperbacks, was only available for a very short while due to to issues with print quality but if you can track a copy down it'll definitely reward the hunt.

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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

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The Irregular Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

Ron Weighell
Zagava

Sherlock Holmes, wrote his friend and chronicler John H. Watson, was an 'unofficial adviser and helper to everybody who is absolutely puzzled', and as such Holmes came into contact with 'all that is strange and bizarre'. Cases such as THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES or 'The Sussex Vampire' show the great detective dealing with matters which certainly are strange and bizarre; yet in all the sixty cases in the Sherlockian canon, Holmes proves that the supernatural plays no part in the matter under investigation.
What if, however, those sixty cases did not tell the entire story? In THE IRREGULAR CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, we encounter five cases which test Holmes's powers to the limit; strange and bizarre cases involving forces that are not of this world. Missing manuscripts, strange sects, sudden death, and mysterious encounters all lead Holmes and Watson into a twilight world of mystery, magic, and danger, where nothing is commonplace and people are not what they seem. 

Over the last few years I've had the real pleasure of reading a few of Ron Weighell's stories but this is the first time I've gotten to read his stories 'en-masse' and I'm hugely impressed.

Here Weighell embraces his love of the deerstalker detective and merges him with his love for supernatural fiction.  In Weighell's hands we find Holmes and Watson in the company of M.R. James investigating a mystery linked to Dr John Dee and with Arthur Machen investigating a cult entangled with the Holy Grail.  We also find him clambouring across rooftops in pursuit of a werewolf, in Egypt hunting a sorceror and swashbuckling on the canals of Venice.

I'm no Holmes devotee but I do enjoy the stories and I'm always open to a new one but personally I find the arch rationalist Holmes to be a poor fit with supernatural stories and the ones that I've read such as those in the 'Shadows Over Baker Street' anthology have mostly disappointed but Weighell has a delicate touch and the weird is kept at a subtle distance with enough ambuiguity for Holmes' world view to remain mostly intact and for this to be a very enjoyable collection indeed.

NOTE - Due to quality issues Zagava have withdrawn their POD range which is a real shame as books as good as the ones they release deserve to be celebrated and hopefully the printing issues can be rectified soon. In the meantime there is a digital edition available at the link below. 

Buy it here - UK / US.

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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

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Heaven's Hill

R.B. Russell
Zagava

Ruth and Oliver grew up next door to each other on Heaven's Hill where, with the help of Oliver's invalid mother, they used to play a game of her invention called 'International Travel' that cast the pair as globe trotting adventurers.  Actual adulthood brought a more mundane reality as Ruth became a teacher and Oliver went off to work for - whisper it - GCHQ with an interest in number stations. Mundane that is until Ruth receives a visit from MI5 and learns that Oliver has gone missing following the receipt of some oddly specific messages that, impossibly, bear a striking resemblance to their childhood game.

What follows is a rollicking mash-up of all your favourite ITC shows such as 'The Champions', 'Jason King' and 'The Prisoner' alongside 'The Avengers' and a very healthy serving of 'Sapphire and Steel' through which Russell launches his characters on a mind bending journey through time that allows them to reinvent themselves as uber cool & hip super spies as they trace the source of the enigmatic messages.  

Lots of the comfortable old tropes are present and correct as Ruth and Oliver - at least in one reality - gallivant across countries in a sport car, display a fantastic array of remarkable skills, evade Russian and Chinese spies, come to the aid of a blackmailed air hostess and there's even mention of a dastardly criminal mastermind although, and I have mentioned this to Ray, I can't help but feel that he missed a trick by not including a criminal organisation with an unlikely acronym for a name in there somewhere.  

Don't be fooled though this is no mere pastiche but a love letter to a genre now pretty much consigned to history (and blogs like this one) but one written with an awareness of both it's absurdities and it's joie de vivre as the mundane, workaday Ruth, with her never ending piles of marking and lesson planning, and Oliver, with his slovenly lifestyle, not forgetting the grimy, black bag era spying of the MI5 agents is contrasted beautifully with the day glo adventuring of the 'International Travel' Ruth and Oliver.  

It's hugely good fun and, if like me (and Ray), you grew up intoxicated by the likes of Pertwee, Rigg, McGoohan and McCallum then 'Heaven's Hill' is going to transport you back to that spy-fi heyday of the late 60s and early 70s and leave you yearning for a cravat or cat suit of your very own as you drink martinis for breakfast whilst lighting your imported Turkish cigarettes with the laser lock pick hidden in the heel of your patent leather shoes.  

Available from the publisher at the link above.

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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.

The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things

Mark Valentine
Zagava

This is his first short story collection for five years and offers twelve previously uncollected stories and an unpublished journal of story ideas and reading notes. His fiction ranges from the Triple Headed King of Sancreed, Cornwall to the unknown god of Palmyra, from a Venusian commodore to the lost composer of Stonehenge, and takes us on a search for the cockatrice and a quest for books not found in any library.
All of the stories suggest that other dimensions may be encountered in the most unexpected ways, whether through the hymn-singing of an old tramp, or as part of a Shakespeare play. And in the previously unpublished ‘Notes on the Border’, Valentine explores bookshops, old churches, folklore and the uncanny, with insights into stories as yet unwritten..

This newest collection of shorts from Mark Valentine finds him exploring ephemeral landscapes of the unknowable and the inimitable.  Mark tells stories of the borderlands, of the thin places where glimpses are caught of the otherwheres or where the truly (un)lucky get to tread on soil unused to human feet.  He tells stories of those liminal places where a travellers only map would be the tales told of them.

In these handsomely presented pages - this is my first taste of Zagava's fare and huge kudos to them for producing a thing of real craft - we are introduced to faded gods and fading con-men ('To the Eternal One'), to musicians ('Listening to Stonehenge'), to artists ('As Blank as the Days Yet to Be') and to their devotees ('Goat Songs') who through their particular ways can open pathways to places and experiences beyond the mundane.  We are allowed a peek behind masks, both literal and figurative, of actors and audience alike as characters and character blur ('In Cypress Shades'), behind the mask of reality itself to worlds beyond ('The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things') and indeed behind the mask of the author as we are treated to extracts from Mark's diaries that reveal the genesis of some of his stories including some of his wonderful Connoisseur tales.

As ever with Mark we are taken on journeys both sinister and beautiful (often simultaneously) to places terrifying and beguiling (often simultaneously) in the company of the lost, the curious, the brave and the foolish and in each we can see ourselves as they react to the outrageous in deeply human ways.  It is this that for me is the true magic in Mark's writing in that as he conjures up the most deliciously unexpected experiences he presents them with such a beautifully real sense of humanity that they seem all the more genuine and all the more disturbing.

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'The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things' is available in two limited editions from the publisher.
The numbered edition is available here and the (more expensive but extremely limited) lettered version is available here.

You can follow Mark's terrific Wormwoodiana blog here.

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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