Newly published: 'The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things'

Tartarus Press have announced a new edition of my short story collection The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things, originally published by Zagava in a limited edition seven years ago, in 2018.

This new edition includes all of the short stories in the original volume and now adds nine briefer stories or vignettes. It omits the journal of notes and ideas in the earlier version. The stories include ‘Vain Shadows Flee’, selected for Best British Short Stories 2016 edited by Nicholas Royle (Salt Publishing), and ‘Yes, I Knew the Venusian Commodore’, which was later translated into Spanish by María Pilar San Roman in an award-winning anthology.

The artwork depicts the mysterious Three Headed King motif from the ancient church at Sancreed in the far west of Cornwall, which appears in the title story. Other stories are about the ancient mysteries of Palmyra and Jerusalem, the music of Stonehenge and of the fabulously rare record Goat Songs, the uncanny in performances of Milton’s Comus and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and the wondrous influences of a toy cockatrice.

The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things is available as a 350 copy limited edition hardback in dustjacket, printed lithographically, in sewn sections, with silk ribbon marker, printed boards, and head and tailbands.

(Mark Valentine) 

Lautréamont’s Apocrypha

Infinity Land Press have announced pre-orders for Lautréamont’s Apocrypha translated by R.J. Dent and with artwork by Karolina Urbaniak. They note that the new hardback volume is 'a comprehensive collection of all of Isidore Ducasse’s written work that he created before and after he had written and published The Songs of Maldoror. This volume includes the first English translation of the first draft of The First Canto of Maldoror (known and published as the Chant Premier), Poésies, the fragments, and the letters.' The first 28 copies come with a signed print. 

Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), who took the pen-name of Le Comte de Lautréamont, was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, of French parentage. An enfant terrible of late 19th century French literature, on a par with, perhaps even beyond, Rimbaud, he was a precursor of the Surrealists, who celebrated his work. Maldoror is both a grotesque re-imagining of Gothic literature and Poe, and yet also a remarkably modern, audacious work. I encountered it as a young explorer of strange literature, rather surprisingly in a chain store newsagent on a new town housing estate, in the sombre-covered Penguin paperback of 1978. I did not know what to make of it exactly, but knew that it was experimental and exciting and utterly different from anything else. It is good to see this new translation into modern English of the rest of his work.

(Mark Valentine) 

Le Fanu Le Fanu Le Fanu

Recent publications by and about J. Sheridan Le Fanu deserve some attention here. Tartarus Press has just published Some Strange Disturbance: Selected Ghostly Tales, edited by Jim Rockhill, who contributes a twelve page introduction to the selection of thirteen stories by Le Fanu. There is a long tradition of publishing selections of Le Fanu's tales (some of which were originally published anonymously, with posthumous attributions to Le Fanu of varying degrees of certainty), from M.R. James's Madam Crowl's Ghost (1923), through two volumes from Arkham House, Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories (1945) and The Purcell Papers (1975), through two volumes edited by E.F. Bleiler for Dover Books, Best Ghost Stories of J.S. Le Fanu (1964) and Ghost Stories and Mysteries (1975), on to single volume collections like Michael Cox's Illustrated J.S. Le Fanu (1988), Leonard Woolf's Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales of Mystery (1996), and Aaron Worth's volume in the Oxford World Classics series, Green Tea and Other Weird Stories (2020). But the sort-of father to Rockhill's selection is none of these volumes; instead, it is the three volume set Rockhill himself edited about twenty years ago, Schalken the Painter and Other Ghost Stories, 1838–61 (2002); The Haunted Baronet and Others, Ghost Stories 1861-70 (2003); and Mr. Justice Harbottle and Others, Ghost Stories 1870-73 (2005). Rockhill's 2025 selection contains five stories from the first volume, five from the second, and three from the third.

 

In terms of Le Fanu scholarship, Rockhill's lengthy introductions to the three volumes from twenty years ago have long needed to be collected into a volume on their own, and Swan River Press has also just published Rockhill's A Mind Turned in upon Itself, which includes updated versions of the three introductions plus several stray writings by Rockhill, including one on stories mis-attributed to Le Fanu ("The Faux and the Spurious: False Ghosts and Doubtful Le Fanu") and another which discusses "Lovecraft's Response to the Work of Le Fanu." This makes for an essential volume for anyone wanting up-to-date views on Le Fanu.

 

Finally, Swan River Press has also just published The Green Book no. 26 (Samhain 2025) which collects a number of oddities about Le Fanu (including a story by his sister, and extracts from a volume by his brother, as well as a survey of his contemporary obituaries and a discussion of the very faded inscription on the capstone of Le Fanu's grave). Issue 26 is a follow-up to The Green Book no. 25 (Bealtaine 2025) from earlier this year, which is also entirely concerned with Le Fanu.  

 

 

 

At Moon's End: Francis Ashton's 'The Breaking of the Seals'

The Breaking of the Seals, the first novel by Francis Ashton (1944), is an unusual timeslip fantasy. The dustwrapper flap notes: ‘A brief description cannot do justice to this astounding novel, which has an affinity of dimension with C.S. Lewis’s fiction, and makes the early chapters of Genesis and the Book of Revelations [sic] come alive. It is also distinctive in being set in a modern framework of the latest scientific knowledge.’

In his preface the author notes: ‘When H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine he provided a precedent for using a novel as a vehicle for its author’s opinions about the nature of Time’. The reader may wonder, he continues, if this is the case here. Not so: the theories outlined ‘have been advance for the purposes of the novel and not as a contribution to the solution of metaphysical problems.’

However, he goes on, he is serious about some of the propositions in the novel. He distinguishes, if I follow him correctly, between time ‘as presented to consciousness’ and the Time ‘of physics and dynamics’. To the consciousness, Time and Space are intuitively different and cannot be merged in a four-dimensional world. But to physics, he avers, Time is Space. He discusses theories of time in both Einstein and J W Dunne, who had a great success with his An Experiment With Time (1927), a study of precognitive dreams. Dunne’s theory was that all time is simultaneous: our perception of past, present and future is an artificial construct of consciousness. As my physics teacher once remarked that a monkey would have performed better than me at the multiple choice exam paper by selecting answers at random, I may have got some of this wrong. However, as the author avers, it is not strictly necessary to tangle with it for the enjoyment of the yarn.

The novel has an entertaining beginning in which the narrator, a callow, lovelorn youth, joins a salon house-party. The tactless hostess has invited a former flame of his and her current beau, and equally awkwardly the guests include two rival scientists who are bitter rivals. Hot dinner-table debate is followed by the revelation of a recent archaeological find which puts a new light on prehistory.

Nettled by challenges to his theories, one of the scientists reveals that he is trialling a form of time travel and the young hero volunteers to undergo a journey under hypnosis into the antediluvian past, when the disintegration of the moon Bahste led to deluge and disaster on Earth. We are then plunged into an imaginary society before this catastrophe occurred and at this point the novel becomes similar to lost race or classical age fantasies, essentially a costume drama of power struggles, erotic rivalries and scheming priesthoods. Some relationships in the antediluvian world are presented as the precursors to those back in contemporary times, suggesting a reincarnation dimension too.

The chapters setting-up the time travel are entertaining, in an almost Wodehouse sort of way, with the obtuse hostess, the awkward social complications, and the bristling professors. The triumphant introduction of an object from the distant past is also neatly handled, and the method of access to deeply ancient time is deft and does not involve any elaborate scientific apparatus. The drama in the ancient society is perhaps a bit predictable, with the likely influence of Rider Haggard, and seems somewhat out of line with the thoughtful introduction: a more complex society or greater mystical elements would have enhanced this part. The book seems to belong with a cluster of novels in the Forties and Fifties involving reincarnation and/or Atlantis.

The idea that there is or was another moon orbiting Earth besides the one we now see occurs in various forms in occult and astrological circles. The astrologer Walter Gorn Old, known as ‘Sepharial’, claimed to have identified a second moon which he named Lilith. He said this was a 'dark' moon invisible for most of the time, but that he had observed it as it crossed the sun. He included Lilith in his star charts and prophecies.  Old was a friend of Yeats and Arthur Machen: the latter recalled that when Old and Yeats once speculated together on Machen’s star sign, they were both wrong (he was born under Pisces). 

According to online sources, Francis Leslie Ashton was born at Chapel-le-Frith, Derbyshire, on 24 June 1904 and died at Ely in July 1994. The Enyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as an ‘analytical chemist, painter and author’. He also wrote Alas, That Great City (1948), set in Atlantis, with a similar theme, and, with his brother Stephen, Wrong Side of the Moon (1952), about space travel. Moons were evidently a preoccupation. Three short stories, by Francis Ashton only, are recorded in periodicals in 1950-51. The Breaking of the Seals is a lively tale evidently informed both by knowledge of occult thinking and scientific theories, which give it, as it were, extra dimensions. 

(Mark Valentine) 

The Centenary of 'The Region Cloud' by Percy Lubbock

The Region Cloud (1925) by Percy Lubbock celebrates its centenary this month. An epigraph gives the source of the title, Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxxiii: ‘But out, alack! He was but one hour mine,/The region cloud have masked him from me now.’ We are prepared, therefore, for a story of transience and loss.

There is a slow, meditative opening in which the protagonist, Austin, notices as he dines in a French café a haughty figure seated in an alcove who is treated with high respect by the patron and the other guests. He finds he cannot help but steal looks at him, though at first these do not seem to be returned. He assumes he must be some aristocrat. The opening sets up an elegant sort of mystery, but is perhaps rather too measured, at times verging on the ponderous.

At length, however, the object of his fascination joins him at his table and discourses to him. It emerges that he is a famous artist, Channon, who is pleased that the protagonist apparently does not know of him, so that they can converse naturally: he takes to him, and calls him his ‘ghostly friend’. The revelation of the stranger’s identity does not quite live up to the mystique built up: we might have looked for something more unusual and elusive. Still, there is a certain curiosity about what happens next, and how their relationship develops.

The scene shifts from France to Bintworth, the artist’s country house estate in England, where Austin becomes part of the menage and negotiates his position via a vis the rest of the household. There is an air of gentility and formality which conveys a certain graceful quality. We observe how he melds into the rather studied, poised ambience of the place. In a sense, he almost becomes a sort of emanation of the great artist, and we seem to be witnessing a very subtle, visionary, type of haunting. In other hands, this might have turned into a tale of emotional or spiritual vampirism, but that is far from Lubbock’s idea.

There are, however, to my view two weaknesses in the book. Firstly, we are not told enough about the artist’s work, so the portrait of him as a great figure lacks depth or detail: we have to take it on trust. Though Channon is the focus of the narrative, his work seems oddly unrealised. Secondly, the novel over-elaborates its narrative. The same point is repeated in variations over several pages without taking matters much further forward. This might be seen to impart a measured, meditative quality to the prose, with a scrupulous care to convey the finest shades of meaning, but it does not make for compelling reading. There is neither strong incident nor even the sense of the ethereal that might be found in, say, a Walter de la Mare story.

The explanation for the novel’s theme and its style is that Lubbock was an earnest disciple of Henry James, indeed for a while his literary secretary and then the editor of his letters.  The novel seems to depict their relationship and to convey the great respect he had for James, as well as their mutual attraction. But the author emulates rather too closely his master’s elaborated style, without the concomitant narrative qualities: there is no aspiration towards the elements of mystery and suspense in The Turn of the Screw. 

Percy Lubbock had earlier published a somewhat lighter and more engaging novel, Roman Pictures (1923). Here, the narrator is in a reverie in a square in Rome, delighting in the dreamy mood he is in but ready, after his stay of a few weeks in the city, for some new experience. As if conjured up, an old school-friend saunters across the square towards him. He had never been a close friend but always seemed an unusually assured individual, and even now makes the narrator feel somewhat gauche. 

The friend has taken lodgings far away from what he calls ‘the English ghetto’, where all the tourists stay. Along with his air of effortless superiority, he also has charm and appeal. Guided by him, the narrator finds himself introduced, as the title suggests, to a fascinating gallery of people, each with vivid personalities. There is almost a sense here of a Ronald Firbank novel, though without quite the oblique wit and satirical zest. This book is more successful as a novel than The Region Cloud, part of the genre of the rather awkward Englishman abroad encountering new aesthetic and bohemian dimensions. 

Percy Lubbock’s first editions were always nicely produced, with good quality paper and fine printing, and such touches as paper labels, and they exude discernment and fastidious taste, as does his prose. They do not seem to be greatly pursued today, but may still attract readers of the rare and recondite.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: World of Books.