The Centenary of Claude Houghton's First Novel

Claude Houghton (1889-1961) is an enigmatic figure in the field of fantastic literature and the metaphysical thriller. He had a brief but intense vogue in the Nineteen Thirties for his strange and original novels in which, typically, a key figure is seen only at a distance, from the contrasting perspectives of a range of characters from different backgrounds. There is some mystery about the person they all know: often it is never exactly resolved. Some of the novels have a distinct supernatural element to them, involving spiritual perils: others have a crime plot; but in both cases these are presented obliquely. 

Houghton's first books, in the Twenties, were plays, poetry and mystical essays, and he seems to have had some involvement in Theosophy. But unlike other authors in the field, such as Charles Williams, Mary Butts and Dion Fortune, no record has emerged of any membership of an esoteric order. In any case, his novels are not overtly occult as such: as a rule, all but his elusive central characters are everyday people, and there are not the mythic symbols that these other authors deploy (alchemy, the Tarot, the Grail). 

It was not until he was 37 that Houghton published his first novel, Neighbours (1926), which celebrates its centenary this month. In many ways it presages the novels that were to follow, in this case exploring questions of identity and obsession between two figures in a boarding house. The work was reprinted by Valancourt Books in 2014, and they have also revived five more of his novels, including his most important titles.

I wrote about Houghton in my essay collection Haunted By Books (2015), in 'The Stranger Who Opens the Door: the Novels of Claude Houghton', where I described Neighbours as 'an erotically-charged study of a split personality, a sort of psychological doppelgänger story. The protagonist, taking an attic room high above London, records in minute detail the artistic and sexual affairs of another lodger, in rooms opposite. This character, a fevered and fervent would-be author, is passionately evoked, suggesting he is partly autobio­graphical. As the book unfolds, the reader feels uneasy about the obsessive voyeurism of the narrator. But then the realisation grows that we are really witnessing two aspects of the same man: a staid, dulled observer, trapped in the world of appear­ances, and a fervent, flaming visionary soaring too high towards the sun. The denouement is not entirely unforeseen but still strongly conveyed and thought-provoking.' 

Arnold Bennett at the Evening Standard recognised the strength of the debut: “Neighbours is a novel about ideas concerning life. It is full of dialogue, and good dialogue. It has beautiful moments. It is original." Unexpectedly, the rather traditionalist comic journal Punch got quite carried away: “[G]rew upon me with every page, until I came to the dramatic climax … often brilliant … [with] the brilliance of fever, almost of delirium.”

They were both right to see Houghton's originality and power, and in his interwar work this continued to be demonstrated and to develop. In later novels, Houghton would explore his themes with greater sophistication and subtlety, but his first novel is certainly a vivid, bizarre beginning which reveals his deeply-held visionary beliefs and strong imagination. I wrote further about the author in my essay ' "The Temporal is the Shadow of the Eternal": Claude Houghton's This Was Ivor Trent' (Borderlands and Otherworlds, 2025).

From about the early Forties, Houghton's star began to wane and there is a certain repetition in pattern in his novels, though they all continue to have unusual qualities. And in a curious way, he became himself not unlike his own elusive central characters. His work became forgotten, partly because of literary fashion but also because he had no known heir or literary executor. There was no-one to foster his work nor any route to gaining permission to reprint. Nor does he appear much in the usual memoirs of authors and publishers of the period, and seldom in guides or studies. 

This means that readers discovering Claude Houghton are in exactly the position of the minor characters radiating around the cryptic archetype at the heart of his books, trying to find out more, struggling to establish exactly who he was, and to understand his vision. It as if the spirits and atmosphere of his books continue to emanate from them. We become drawn compellingly into his books in more ways than one. 

(Mark Valentine) 

Two New Things from James Doig

Two new books to report on from James Doig. The first is an anthology Terror Australis: Dark Tales from Down Under (ISBN 9780712369619) from the British library's Tales of the Weird series. I have previously written about Doig's anthologies in "James Doig and the Australian Weird" here at Wormwoodiana in 2021. This post includes an index by author to all of the writers found in his anthologies (up to that point). The new book contains twelve tales. Only two tales (those by J.E.P. Muddock and Fergus Hume) can be found in his previous anthologies.  Three are stories by authors (Marcus Clarke, John Arthur Barry, and Hume Nisbet) represented by other stories in previous anthologies. And the remaining seven authors don't appear in any of the previous anthologies, including David Unaipon, A.J. Dawson, Rick Kennett, Terry Dowling, Margo Lanagan, Kaaron Warren, and Ellen Van Neerven. All these stories are more recent publications.  The cover illustration by Sandra Gomez is especially nice. I'm looking forward to reading this one. 

Out several weeks ago (and I'm half way through reading it) is a long-awaited reprint of Lycanthia by Frances Layland-Barrett, originally published by Herbert Jenkins in 1935. Doig has contributed an introductory essay on the author. The reprint (ISBN 9798176558104) is published in hardcover (without dust-wrapper) by Mislaid Books.  The striking 1935 dust-wrapper illustration credited to Eugène Hastain of H.B. Studio (see this webpage for more info) is reprinted in black and white on page vi. I reproduce it in color below the Mislaid Books cover. 

 

Mislaid Books 2026

 

 Herbert Jenkins, 1935 

 

 

 

Lawrence Atreides: The Roots of 'Dune' - A New Chapbook from Withnail Books

  

Withnail Books of Penrith have just announced pre-orders for the latest in their series of limited edition literary chapbooks, and this time it is a monograph, Lawrence Atreides, The Roots of Dune, a 10,000 words essay by Karen Kennedy Ph.D.This explores the inspiration of T. E. Lawrence in the character of Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), 'a foreign figure who immerses himself in a desert culture and helps lead the locals to overthrow their oppressors.'

Accompanying the text, the publishers offers 'a selection of rarely, if ever, reprinted illustrations, in black and white and full colour, from the original 1926 Subscribers' Edition of Lawrence's account of the desert campaign, Seven Pillars of Wisdom — some of which you'd be forgiven for thinking, from a sideways glance at least, were created for an edition of Dune.'

The chapbook is in a limited edition of 250 numbered copies, and to judge from past Withnail publications is unlikely to be available for very long. Publication is scheduled for 23 November.

(Mark Valentine) 

The Centenary of 'Notes for a New Mythology' by Haniel Long

It was during my work on Leonard Cline that I first encountered the name of Haniel Long. (According to Long himself, his first name was pronounced Han-eye-el, with the accent on the second syllable.) Long was born in 1888 in in Burma (now Myanmar) of Methodist Missionary parents, who returned with him to the US in 1890. Settling in Pittsburgh, they later moved to Duluth and then to Minneapolis. Long was educated at the Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University (Class of 1910), where he studied English literature. He married in 1913, and taught at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh for many years. For health reasons he spent 1924-25 in New Mexico, where he settled permanently in 1929. He died in October 1956, subsequent to surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.  

Long and Cline were in touch by 1922, and they met in New York in 1923, as Long was heading on a trip to Paris. They kept in touch occasionally over the next few years.  A mutual friend was the poet Witter Bynner (whom Cline had met in 1918), and all three were contributors to the Midland magazine, edited by John T. Frederick out of Iowa, and to the Laughing Horse, edited by Spud Johnson in New Mexico.

Long’s writings are neglected today, though six of his poems appear in the Library of America volume American Poetry: The Twentieth Century Volume One (2000). Long’s books include poetry collections, Poems (1920); Atlantides (1931); Grist Mill (1946); and two posthumous collections, If He Can Make Her So (1968); and My Seasons (1977). 

Long’s prose works include Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935); Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca (1936), a historical novella about a sixteenth-century Spanish explorer, retitled in 1944 as The Power Within Us; Walt Whitman and the Springs of Courage (1938); Malinche (Doña Marina) (1939), a fictional account of the controversial native woman that Cortes took as his consort in the early sixteenth-century; Piñon Country (1941); Children, Students and a Few Adults (1942), illustrated by his wife Alice Lavinia Long;  French Soldier: Home from Being a War Prisoner (1942); and A Letter to Saint Augustine: After Re-reading his Confessions (1950). A final novel Spring Returns, appeared posthumously in 1958, with a preface by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. 

In a letter to Cline of 17 November 1924, Long noted that he was “collecting my short stories” and asked Cline for a blurb to send off with the manuscript. Long apparently had difficulties placing the book, for it took two years to come out. The Bookfellows, a literary society founded in 1919 in Chicago, published the book; it was printed in September 1926 by the Torch Press of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in an edition of 435 numbered and signed copies. They were bound and published on November 2nd, making today the book’s centenary. 

Notes for a New Mythology was Long’s second book. It collects twelve stories and two poems (most previously published in periodicals), along with an introductory “To the Reader Who Reads Prefaces” and a concluding note “To the Reader Who Reads Postscripts.”  The former gives Long’s intentions as to what he was attempting with his stories.  Several quotations are apt:

All poets and story-tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are all engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, re-assembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own. Outr living poets and writers are creating a spiritual world for us which shall be as wide and as deep as their mingled consciousness can make it. (p. 13)

Fantastic is a word of many applications, it is true; undoubtedly the fantastic tale in its purest form invites the reader to look on a play in which the actors are not flesh and blood all the time, but sometimes symbols and portents. (p. 14) 

I am a lover of the gods. There are people who say that the gods are dead; but the gods I love are not dead. There are people who say there will never be any more gods.  No doubt they speak for themselves; so as far as I am concerned, whenever I need a new god or a new goddess I create one. . . . I want all the gods: at least, I want the chance to investigate the private life and family circumstances of any god in danger of being forgotten. (p. 15)

It remains to be proved that gods, like nightingales, have geographical limits. Because I live in Pittsburgh, must I relinquish the Greek gods? I see no reason why I should not house in my own mind as I please whichever of those white forms I choose to, even though am only a man and not a museum. Aphrodite and Psyche may not be good enough for the critics, but they are for me. (pp. 15-16)

I want to re-possess all the gods I love; I want to see them in an American landscape. We have been anxious of late that American writers should be aware of their landscape, of the particular flora that covers it, of the particular birds which visit its flowers and trees. (p. 16-17)

Do Long’s tales achieve any of these goals?  With qualifications, they do. Yet the end results do not completely conform to what twenty-first century (or even twentieth century) readers might expect from stories of the fantastic. First is the matter of the writing style. Long’s tales are not like fairy tales, and not simpler narratives.  Also, they manage to mix into the tales aspects of modern business life that might seem antithetical to a fantasy story. For example, in “The Professor of Dreams” (perhaps the best story in the volume) a college administrator bemoans that his school has never produced a poet.  Enter Dr. Greenlaw, who encounters considerable trouble while trying to teach his students about things other than profits. Eventually Greenlaw succeeds with the administrator’s son. Dr. Greenlaw is revealed to be a satyr. In “The City of Chameleons” the new director of the city’s symphony orchestra is suspected of being Dionysos himself, and the performance of his wildly imaginative composition causes fits in the established business class. “The Great Lodge” deals with a late eighteenth century manuscript which tells of a beautiful and eternally young native girl who beguiles three generations of men. “How Pittsburgh Returned to the Jungle” tells of the successful ploy of a businessman to increase the profit of his business by adding an unnoticed clause to a local law. It has its desired effect, and much more. Themes of music and love pervade the stories, often with unexpected results. 

Long’s book Pittsburgh Memoranda is a kind of partial and personal follow-up to Notes for a New Mythology, in that Long has made a collection of memoirs and memorabilia that are buttressed by his own experiences in understanding the social and industrial background of the town and how it relates to himself as a poet and idealist.  

Long’s works are eclectic and a reader is rewarded by paying close attention. 

'Thirteen O'Clock Club' by Cardinal Cox

 

Thirteen O’Clock Club by Cardinal Cox is the latest publication from the Peterborough poet, with a particular interest for readers of supernatural fiction. The pamphlet draws on his work as poet in residence for The Dracula Society, and was produced to coincide with a joint visit to Peterborough this year by members of that society and A Ghostly Company.

The thirteen verses draw on themes from writers in the field of uncanny literature who also have links to Peterborough. Each poem is accompanied by an erudite footnote giving fascinating information. Charles Dickens, for example, complained that on Peterborough station he was given “a petrified bun of enormous antiquity”: evidently aspersions on railway catering have a long history.  

Here may be found also poems about M.R. James’ ‘Lost Hearts’, local parson E.G. Swain’s The Stoneground Ghost Tales, John Gordon’s Fenland mysteries such as The House on the Brink, and the work of the once quite popular J.D. Beresford, born in nearby Caistor. This piece, ‘Lecture’, adroitly captures the interwar interest in the possibilities suggested by radio waves, with the idea that perhaps waves from our memories and imagination might also survive: Beresford was deeply interested in both psychic research and Theosophy.

A contemporary author whose work I did not know, Anthony Oldknow, is also evoked in ‘Necromancers’ Guild Miracle Play’. Other pieces reflect images from folklore and film.

Cardinal Cox’s verse is written most often with the resonant qualities of traditional verse, including rhyme and regular rhythm, and sometimes in more free verse form, but in all cases with an evocative vocabulary and the use of lingering images. The collection certainly gives a strong sense of the uncanny history and literature of the Fenland cathedral city.

Thirteen O’Clock Club is available in the UK while stocks last in return for an SAE sent to: 58 Pennington, Orton Goldhay, Peterborough, PE2 5RB, or by emailing cardinalcox1[at]yahoo.co.uk

(Mark Valentine)

'The Cone' at Ice Floe Press

The rather raffish town of Wells-next-the-Sea, North Norfolk, is always worth a visit for The Old Station Books & Pottery, which sells an unusual selection of second-hand books, curios and ceramics. We once found ourselves locked in here as the proprietor did not realise we were still wandering around its many nooks, and had closed up for the evening. Fortunately, a hand-bell at the foot of the stairs summoned him from his upper quarters, though there are worse fates than an enforced sojourn in a second-hand bookshop. 

The bookshop once had for sale in a glass case a copy of Through Beatnik Eyeballs (1961) by R.A. Norton, depicting a bearded guitarist and a girl in a min-skirt. I must admit this was tempting, especially as it included a ‘complete glossary for squares’. I suspect there could be nothing squarer than my own liking for second-hand bookshops, tea shops, walled gardens and ancient monuments, so this might have been highly educational, but it is a collectible book, especially among what I believe are known as hep dudes, and it was priced accordingly.

There was a further mysterious second-hand bookshop in the town. Carousels of crumpled holiday paperbacks could be discerned through the window, and miscellaneous correspondence scattered on the doormat, but it was seldom found open. It did once display a rather sunned Len Deighton first edition, though this might, of course, have been a clandestine signal to an espionage contact. At any rate, it has now closed.

However, Wells proved to have other arcane attractions. In my story ‘The Prospero Machine’ I wrote about seaside fortune-telling machines, and we chanced upon one just like these at the entrance to an arcade: Zoltar, an exotic mannequin in the garb of a sultan, with tarot cards spread out in front of him. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he demands, ‘I am a magic gypsy’:  and, in return for £1 (it would once have been a penny) he issues a card with your ‘fortune’ on it.

It was while perambulating through Wells that I also had an encounter with a giant upturned plastic ice cream cone. This unexpected apparition made me wonder about a slightly alternative world where the cone has become the subject of rumours and legends.

The result was a brief one paragraph prose fiction, and associated image, and ‘The Cone’ has just been published at Ice Floe Press,  a website journal based in Canada and edited by Robert Frede Kentor, Moira J Saucer and colleagues. Their Autumn 2026 running issue has the theme of ‘Dis/enchantments/Anomie/Spectacle’ and includes a selection of multi-media, visual and literary work.

(Mark Valentine)