First, is the doorstop-sized anthology, Bruin's Midnight Reader (2022), the uncredited editor being Jonathan Eeds of Bruin Books. Over 760 pages, this anthology contains a host of worthy older materials plus a goodly amount of licensed and still copyrighted items. Similarly there are illustrations by classic artists and new ones made for this volume. One highlight is the 1924 version of The Thing in the Woods, a novel by Margery Williams (author of The Velveteen Rabbit), published as by Harper Williams. (The complicated differences between the original 1913 edition and the 1924 revision are described in a previous Wormwoodiana post, here.)
The subtitle of the book is "strange and engaging stories for the curious"--a remit the book certainly fulfills. Besides familiar classic authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Ralph Adams Cram, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, and Clark Ashton Smith, the more modern writers include Brian Aldiss, Theodore Sturgeon, Stanley Ellin, T.S. Eliot, Reggie Oliver and Paul Theroux. There is also a story by the editor, and a recent translation of a Hanns Heinz Ewers story too. All in all a nice amount of reading material for the price (US$ 22; ISBN 9781737210610).
Another new release comes from Gabbro Head Press, in the form of a first novel by Charles H. Fischer, titled The Eunuch. It tells the secret history of court life in an imagined ancient Babylon, through the stylus of a eunuch named Nergal, formalized in twenty two cuneiform tablets (represented as modern chapters). There is a learned mock-introduction credited to one Harris Bigg-Wither, discussing the (imaginary) translator of the work, Henry Poole. Bigg-Wither calls The Eunuch "more than your typical 6th century BCE, end-of-the-world sex novel" (which is true) and concludes that it is "not a piece of pornographic doggerel composed by a dead castrate and translated by a disaffected academic. On the contrary, it is art as magic, a ritual appeasement of the gods."
The publisher gives a concise but very apt description too, as follows:
The Eunuch is a laugh-out-loud funny narrative that begins as an effort to extirpate the lies of the hagiographic official history of Babylon, becomes a story of a very peculiar love triangle between a King with mental health issues, an alluring and manipulative concubine, and an obsessive eunuch slave-scribe, and then ends by describing the fall of an empire.
Available in trade paperback from the usual sources at US $18.95 (ISBN 9781732579941)
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