'All the Fear of the Fair' edited by Edward Parnell: A Guest Review by John Howard

  

For several years now the Tales of the Weird series published by the British Library has been reprinting classic novels and story collections as well as a constantly growing number of anthologies based around an improbably wide and ingenious – but only if the imagination is limited, for they are really out there – range of themes. Intriguing selections with apposite titles are the rule. One of the latest is All the Fear of the Fair, the second anthology in the series to be edited by Edward Parnell, author of the rightly well-regarded Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2020).

Subtitled ‘Uncanny Tales of Circus and Sideshow’ All the Fear of the Fair prepares us from the outset for more than just a few roundabouts and coconut shies (the settings for which youthful memory inevitably recalls summer cold and damp). Luckily we are not to be treated only to stories of traditional British fairs, but to much more. As Parnell writes in his introduction: ‘Circuses, carnivals and fairgrounds are fleeting spaces. They arrive seemingly out of nowhere, occupying a strip of waste ground at the edge of a town for a few summer nights, before departing as quickly as they appeared. There’s danger and a hint of violence in these garishly lit corners too – the thrill of attractions that can send you spinning to the heavens, or plunge you into darkness…’

The earliest of the sixteen stories chosen is “Hop-Frog” by Edgar Allan Poe (1849), a delightful piece of grue now probably best known for its adaptation in Roger Corman’s film The Masque of the Red Death. The owner of the travelling circus in “Satan’s Circus” by Eleanor Smith (1931) might not be the Devil, but there must – surely – be some explanation for its bad reputation. “Circus Child” by Margery Lawrence forms one of the cases taken up by Dr Miles Pennoyer, her occult detective; it first appeared in Master of Shadows (1959). L.P. Hartley’s “A High Dive” (1961) is a wry glimpse into the mind of the performer – and what its motivation could be. “Spurs” by Tod Robbins (1923) formed the basis for Tod Browning’s film Freaks.

“Waxworks” by W.L. George (1922) does not surprise – yet certainly not disappoint, with its evocation of London grime and crime, with an innocence out of its depth. In “The Harlem Horror” by Charles Birkin (1932) innocence is perhaps swallowed in the depths of another great city. “Freak Show” by Robert Silverberg (1957) dates from his days as a machine writer, one of a group who would be contracted to provide the entire contents of a magazine, often using several pseudonyms. His story of a small boy’s desire coming true packs a poignant kick. So does Richard Middleton’s “The Conjurer” (1912), told with similar economy. Stage magic also forms the basis for “The Vanishing Trick” by Charles Davy (1931) – where timing is all.

“The Little Town” by J.D. Beresford (1918) is a memorably nightmarish vignette, described by the author as a story which ‘reveals the apparently commonplace as a vision of wonder’. “The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy” by Gerald Kersh (1939) is true to its title; it also formed the basis for the concluding section of the film Dead of Night. The death of a showman in Frederick Cowles’ “Punch and Judy” (1975) reveals what is not ‘the way to do it’. Although “The Haunted Roundabout” by ‘Simplex’ (1929) has little of the mystery of its unknown author, it sets briskly about its business and whirls us through a few thrills before allowing us to get off. Ray Bradbury, surely a master of the dark carnival, takes us into an October of childhood – and beyond, during a ride on “The Black Ferris” (1948). And our trip ends fittingly with “The Swords” by Robert Aickman (1969) – one of his strangest stories, with settings and imagery that will never quite go away, just as every attempt at rational explanation must also fail (and miss the point).

Each story is prefaced by a short essay giving some context along with biographical details of its author and information on first publication. All the Fear of the Fair admits us for a while to a ‘world that transgresses societal norms, drawing on our willingness to be lured towards the novel and the sleazy, the desire to step outside our regular bounds and experience a glimpse of the other…’

That is the way to do it.

(John Howard) 

The Magus of Mexico: Malcolm Lowry, Magic and Myth - paperback edition

Zagava have confirmed that the paperback edition of The Magus of Mexico: Malcolm Lowry, Magic and Myth has just been published. This offers an affordable copy of this anthology of nine essays exploring Lowry's interest in the esoteric, one of the first approaches to draw attention to this important area of his work. Among its many other interests, his classic novel Under the Volcano (1947), and his sequels and short stories, can be viewed as part of the occult fiction tradition, and these studies guide the reader through the many facets of his deep interest in the hermetic. 

(Mark Valentine) 

 

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.

. . .

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’.

. . .

(Mark Valentine)

 

The Magus of Mexico: Malcolm Lowry, Magic and Myth

  

I am very pleased to pay homage to Malcolm Lowry with a new anthology of essays from Zagava, The Magus of Mexico: Malcolm Lowry, Magic and Myth. This will appear in a highly limited collector's edition, followed in about ten days by an affordable paperback. 

My copy of Under the Volcano has faded to a sort of smoky lilac, and the back of the book is striped like a deckchair in bands of the original pale blue and the faded hue. It must have lain on a table where sunlight filtered through slatted shutters. 

It was given to me by my friend P J Beveridge of Crash Smash Crack Ring zine, who had already introduced me to Michael Arlen, Denton Welch, Ronald Firbank, Llewellyn Powys and others who became favourites. Malc, as we breezily called him, was soon added to these. My friend was studying to be a designer bookbinder and had made a striking binding inspired by Lowry’s poem ‘The Lighthouse Invites the Storm’.

I began to look out for Malc’s other work, which includes a short story collection, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven they Dwelling Place (1961) and several posthumous, reconstructed novels. Lowry was a jazz enthusiast and persuaded his long-suffering stockbroker father to pay for publication of two of his songs: ‘I’ve Said Goodbye to Shanghai’ and ‘Three Little Dog-Gone Mice’. For years I have rummaged through piles of sheet music in junk and book shops on the off-chance of finding them

Malcolm Lowry’s work is infused by a persistent interest in the esoteric. For example, in the first chapter alone of his classic work Under the  Volcano (1947), there are numerous specific references to the supernatural.

The deserted hotel on the hill in the Mexican town which is the scene of the book has a casino haunted by the ghosts of gamblers. The character of M. Laruelle, the French film director, visits the ruined palace and gardens of the Emperor Maximillian and his Empress, which seem haunted by their fate. And he remembers a visit to Chartres, the vista of the cathedral’s towers and the numinous ambience of the city.

All three of these could be regarded as poetic images, or simply personal impressions, but the book does not rule out that they are also a form of reality. The same chapter includes numerous other uncanny images, and allusions to Blake, Swedenborg and the Kabbalah It is, in short, an occult novel. And indeed we are told the Consul, the main protagonist, was a Cabbalist and is writing a book on Secret Knowledge.

I thought that this aspect of Lowry’s work was worth exploring further and so I invited fellow writers and Lowry enthusiasts to contribute to an anthology on this theme. I also wanted each piece to have a personal, creative element to it, reflecting Lowry’s own practice.

In The Magus of Mexico, Helen Tookey explores Under the Volcano with the help of Tarot imagery, Mark Goodall looks at Lowry’s use of alcohol as a magical practice, James Riley considers the book in the context of shamanism, and Michael Romer studies Lowry’s links to Aleister Crowley. Adriana Diaz-Enciso explores Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid, a sort-of sequel to Volcano, and its handling of the themes of friendship and returning.

Jonathan Wood offers a ‘meditative semi-fiction’ on Lowry’s fascination with the sea, my own essay looks at Lowry’s interest in supernatural fiction in his story ‘Elephant and Coliseum’, and John Howard discusses landscape mysticism in the story ‘The Forest Path to the Spring’. Finally, John Hyatt recalls his own acts of art-magic in response to Volcano and other work.  

 I am grateful to all the contributors for their celebration of Malcolm Lowry, illuminating the esoteric secrets of his work. 

 (Mark Valentine) 

 

A New Issue of 'Gramarye', Journal of Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction

The Winter 2025 issue (no 28) of Gramarye, the journal of the University of Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, has been announced. Pre-orders are now being taken: print copies are only available to pre-ordering customers or subscribers. 

 Edited by Paul Quinn and Naomi Foyle, this issue includes essays on ‘The Kinder Mermaid and the English and Welsh Lake Ladies’ by Simon Young; ‘“Places of a Lonely Character”: The Landscape of the Pooka’ by Natalie Hagar; ‘Reinventing the Green Man: Myth, Ritual and the Construction of a Modern Folklore Icon’ by Anil Balan; and ‘Of Technology and Fantasy: Fairy Tales, Fables, and the Transformation of Illustration in the Long Nineteenth Century’ by Susana Montañés-Llera.

The journal also includes fantasy and folklore poetry, and this issue has two poems by me. ‘Sea Myths’ draws on legends of Phoenician voyagers to Cornwall, while ‘Three Spells for the Conjuring Stone’ responds to the folklore associated with an ancient recumbent stone in North Yorkshire: this is accompanied by my note on the ghostly traditions associated with the stone.

There are also substantial reviews of books of interest, including faery encounters in the medieval world and Irish wonder tales of the otherworld.

(Mark Valentine)

Carnacki on Film

John Coulthart's blog { feuilleton } has a  post about the recent appearance on youtube of an early television adaptation of one of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories, "The Whistling Room." A version of this adaptation appeared on youtube in the 2010s, and the unusually crisp version up on youtube now is diminished only by the lack of quality of the adaptation.  Coulthart notes:

Whatever power the original story may possess is thoroughly absent from the TV adaptation, a mere sketch of a narrative that wasn’t very substantial to begin with. Alan Napier—Alfred the butler in the Batman TV series—is hopelessly miscast as Carnacki, being more of a bungling buffoon than any kind of serious investigator.  

Coutlhart dates the production to 1952, which is doubtful. Oddly, IMDB gives two separate listings for this show, the first, gives it as Season 1 episode 32 of Chevron Theatre, broadcast 22 August 1952.  The second, gives it as Season 1 episode 42 of the Pepsi-Cola Playhouse, broadcast on 18 July 1954.  The new youtube version, linked at Coulthart's blog but also here, sources it from the 1954 Pepsi-Cola Playhouse. 

I suspect the 1954 date is the correct one, for on 2 April 1953, Hodgson's sister Lissie wrote to August Derleth, pleased that she was imminently to receive $125:  "It is most exciting to know you may be able to sell other Carnacki stories to be 'televised'. I am afraid I am very foolish, but I don't understand what a 'television film' is! They surely cannot act 'The Whistling Room'!" Lissie was paid in May 1953, but no other Carnacki stories were sold to be filmed at that time. 

Coulthart suggests that the source of interest in "The Whistling Room" was probably the printing of the story in Dennis Wheatley's A Century of Horror Stories (1935),  but the above correspondence shows that the proposal came to Derleth and it was likely a result of the Mycroft & Moran edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, published on the 31st of December 1947. Derleth had spent much of the month of August 1952 in California working on teleplays of his own stories, so he certainly had Hollywood connections by that time. 

I previously wrote about the surviving Hodson adaptations at Wormwoodiana in 2009. I am pleased to add this newly discovered one to the short list.

 

 

 

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.