Votive Offerings

  

Sarob Press have announced pre-orders for Votive Offerings, edited by Robert Morgan, a new anthology of four long stories, with contributions by John Howard, Peter Bell, Colin Insole and me. It will be published in a hand-numbered, limited edition hardcover, with dustjacket art by Paul Lowe. 

As the notice describes, 'John Howard’s weirdly enigmatic “Desire Path” takes the unwary reader along pathways long forgotten and thought lost ~ but what if you could walk along ways that no longer exist? “Figures in a Landscape” by Peter Bell finds its heroine seeking a lost (or possibly mythic) Welsh hill figure and discovering the seemingly harmless to be anything but. Colin Insole’s “The April Rainers” is a tale of the re-emergence of something old, powerful and malevolent, and the story of the centuries-old fellowship pledged to protect the land and keep it safe from the terror.'

My contribution, "Roman Masks", is set on the Solway Coast, west of Carlisle, and draws on the rich remains of ancient altars and tablets found in the area, devoted not only to the classical Roman deities, but also to local gods, and to those from other far-flung outposts of the Empire. The story imagines what happens when some of these powerful forces are re-invoked.

I have been interested in this lonely, little-known shoreline for some years after I visited it just after the sea had encroached on the coastal road and was now gradually rippling away. It has relatively few visitors, since most people are more drawn either to Hadrian’s Wall to the north or to the Lake District to the east. The few villages on Solway seemed set apart, as if they were on an offshore island.

While I was writing the story I chanced upon two items that were just what I needed for the plot. One was an obscure archaeology pamphlet from a box at a book fair: the other was from a haberdashery stall at a village craft market. The first of these gave me an excellent framework for the story, while the other proved to be a key talisman.

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Vestige (A Story of Aubrey Beardsley)

The Zagava letterpress edition of my short story ‘Vestige’ has now been published, in a limited edition of 99 copies. Each of these has been hand-set, hand-printed and hand-collated. ‘Vestige’ is a book-collecting story about the reputed existence of a volume of verses composed by Arthur Malyon, an author conjured up by Aubrey Beardsley in a letter to Leonard Smithers, the publisher of The Savoy. But was that reference really the last of this shadowy figure? Is it possible that a copy of his fabled book exists? The text is richly illustrated with the artist’s work.

. . .

aswirl

aswirl is a quarterly literary magazine celebrating brevity. It arrives adroitly folded into a neat small envelope but opens out to reveal an eight page selection of adventurous texts. The Winter 2025 issue includes my three-line vignette ‘My Hat’.

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(Mark Valentine)