'Qx and other pieces' in paperback

  

Zagava have recently issued a paperback edition of Qx and other pieces, a selection of fiction and non-fiction. This was first issued in a limited edition in 2024 and is now newly available. It includes over twenty pieces, among them the short stories 'Hark to the Rooks', 'The Man Who Made the Yellow God', the title piece and 'Stained Medium'. Only available here is 'Sivori Levey & His Masks', an experimental tribute to an Edwardian songwriter, Shakespearean, mime artist and Great War soldier. 

Also recently issued, Beasts with Five Fingers: Strange Tales of Disembodied Hands edited by Brian J. Showers in the British Library Tales of the Weird series, which includes my story 'The Late Post', about a most unusual copy of the W.F. Harvey book alluded to in the title. The anthology is dedicated to Richard Dalby, and it was a catalogue of Richard's that inspired my yarn. I had forgotten how many awful puns I included. The selection and editorial matter by Brian are excellent. 

Meanwhile, available online are Three Fictions, 'Mannequin', 'Mosaic' and 'There You Go' at The Fortnightly Review edited by Paige Blackburn and colleagues (20 May 2026), brief vignettes of images that caught my attention. 

(Mark Valentine)

 

Last Chance to Order Evangeline Walton Books

Two Evangeline Walton books, published by Nodens Books, including the novel Dark Runs the Road and the short story collection Above Ker-Is, will cease to be available as of midnight, Sunday May 24th 2026.  So if one is at all interested in getting copies, do so soon. (Click on the covers to read the text.)

 

Dark Runs the Road is available until then as a trade paperback (ISBN 9798304520089) or a Kindle e-book. 

Above Ker-Is and Other Stories is available until then as a trade paperback (ISBN 9798631395268) or a Kindle e-book. 

Order via the Usual Places.  

Also, Walton's short novel She Walks in Darkness (ISBN 9781616961336), first published by Tachyon Publications in 2013, is now in low stock and when remaining copies sell, it will be out-of-print. 

Reading Fantasy in 1928-29: Part Two

May Lamberton Becker published a reply to W.S.'s query (from the 22 December 1928 issue of The Saturday Review) in her column "The Reader's Guide" for 26 January 1929. This time the writer gave his full name, Richard Ely Morse, and fans of H.P. Lovecraft may recognize the name as that of one of Lovecraft's correspondents. Richard Ely Morse (1909-1986) was 19 at the time his letter appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature. He wouldn't meet Lovecraft until the summer of 1932, and their correspondence would continue until Lovecraft's death in March 1937. Lovecraft's forty-odd letters have been published, and, like Morse's letter below, exemplify Morse's devotion to fantasy and weird literature. 

Richard Ely Morse, Princeton, N.J., sends the following additions to the list of fantasies:—

I was interested to see that W.S. is planning a study of fantasy, for with the exception of Robert Hillyer, the poet, and myself, I did not know there were any in this country who had made it their special study. Your list was one of the most complete I have ever seen in print, but I am venturing to append a list of my own, fill­ing in the gaps.

"Fantasy, of course, has various subdi­visions, such as the macabre, where we find Arthur Machen, Leonard Cline with his 'Dark Chamber,' Donald Douglas with 'The Grand Inquisitor,' and Ben Hecht with 'The Kingdom of Evil.' These are the only ones which may be strictly classed as fantasies; the bounds arc easy to overstep into the grotesque and horrible.

"Under sophisticated fantasy one might put the icy brilliance of Laforgue in 'Six Moral Tales,' Firbank's intricate wit, Vir­ginia Woolf's 'Orlando,' and Van Vechten's 'Peter Whiffle.' Aubrey Beardsley's unfin­ished 'Venus and Tannhauser' might also be included here.

"Sentimental and satirical are two other varieties. The first named is usually the poorest, the type which 'A Little Clown Lost' best represents. Of the latter class, you have already mentioned the best expo­nent—Stella Benson.

"The list which follows here below can­not pretend to be complete, but with the list published in the Saturday Review on December 21, it makes up the most complete I know of. If W. S. knows of others, I wish he would let me know of them.

"No one who is interested at all in fantasy can afford to overlook James Branch Cabell; Walter de la Mare; James Stephens; Ken­neth Grahame; Norman Douglas (especially his 'They Went'); Gerald Bullett with 'Mr. Godley Beside Himself' and 'The Baker's Cart'; and perhaps, Ernest Bramah with his 'Kai Lung' series. We have also 'Doodab' by Harold Loeb; 'These Mortals,' by Mar­garet Irwin; 'Flower Phantoms,' by Ron­ald Fraser; 'The Street of Queer Houses,' by Vernon Knowles; 'The Siamese Cat,' by Leon Underwood; 'A Mirror for Witches,' by Esther Forbes; 'The Early Adventures of Peachum Grew,' by Roy Helton; 'The Eternal Moment' and 'The Celestial Om­nibus,' by E. M. Forster; 'The Adven­tures of Harlequin,' by Francis Bickney; 'The Marionette,' by Edwin Muir; 'The Worm Ouroboros,' by E. R. Eddison; 'Lud-in-the-Mist,' by Hope Mirrlees, 'Gandle Follows his Nose,' by Heywood Broun; 'Messer Marco Polo,' by Donn Byrne; 'The House of Lost Identity,' by Donald Corley; 'A House of Pomegranates,' by Oscar Wilde; 'Flecker's Magic,' by Norman Matson ; 'Nomad,' by Paul Jordan Smith; 'Twilight of the Gods,' by Richard Garnet!; 'Green Mansions' and 'A Little Boy Lost,' by W. H. Hudson; 'The Man Who was Thursday,' by G. K. Chesterton; and 'The Horned Shepherd¹ by Edgar Jepson."

To this admirable collection let me [May Lamberton Becker]  add Marie Cher's "The Door Unlocked," [correctly "The Door Unlatched"] which has given me deep delight and will please any lover of old Paris.

In the same mail with the letter above-quoted arrived a copy of "A Voyage to the Island of the Articoles," by Andre Maurois (Appleton), a fantasy just put into Eng­lish by David Garnett and embellished with woodcuts by Edward Carrick in precisely the vein of the text. This demure record is of an adventurer (and a lady friend) cast away upon an island on which since 1861 the aristocracy and masters have been literary artists, Articoles—served and ad­mired by the local Beos, short for Beotians. The allegory is transparent, but however light its texture, it is sound. It must cer­tainly figure upon this list. The idea of a trans-Atlantic journey in a little boat occurred to M. Maurois from reading Alain Gerbault's story of his lone-hand cruise from east to west across the Atlantic, and it is appropriate that the jacket of this book should carry a notice of the English ver­sion of Gerbault's book, "The Fight of the Firecrest" (Appleton), as unusual an ad­venture as any voyager has brought through.

I've already read a large number of these titles, but will have to report back on The Early Adventures of Peacham Grew (1925) by Roy Helton.

 

Reading Fantasy in 1928-29: Part One

In the late 1920s, May Lamberton Becker hosted a column in The Saturday Review of Literature (NY). The column was called "The Reader's Guide," and readers were invited to send in questions related to books. In the 22 December 1928 issue the following query appeared from one W.S. of Philadelphia, who was interested in doing a study on fantasy. So far as I know, the study never appeared, and I do not know who W.S. was, or what else this person might have done. One significant response appeared in the column some weeks later, and I will reprint it in a follow-up blog post. Meanwhile, besides commonly known titles, there are some real obscurities referenced herein. Has any one read Barry Benefield's A Little Clown Lost (1928) or René  Thévenin's Barnabé and His Whale (translated into English in 1923)?  Mark Valentine just wrote last month on Wormwoodiana of the centenary of Helen Beauclerk's The Green Lacquer Pavilion. Barbara Follett's The House without Windows (1927) was written when she was twelve. (In 1939, at age twenty-five, she had a fight with her husband and left their Massachusetts apartment and was never seen or heard from again. For more of the story, see here.) Christopher Morley was quite prolific, and there are more books and stories of fantasy interest in his oeuvre than the two mentioned below.  

W.S., Philadelphia, is planning a study of the fantasy and its technique, and asks for a list of books of this nature. He suggests as examples "Thunder on the Left" and "A Little Clown Lost." [by Barry Benefield]

The Viking Press, started upon a career of fantasy-publishing by the works of Sylvia Townsend Warner, "Lolly Willowes" leading, followed with Bea Howe's "A Fairy Leapt upon my Knee," one of the most successful examples I know of the art of making the incredible happen under your eye, Edith Olivier's unforgettable "The Love Child," and as a climax, T. F. Powys's "Mr. Weston's Good Wine" which manages somehow to get the cosmos upon the canvas. Meanwhile Miss Warner sent us through this house her "Mr. Fortune's Maggot" and another that I hear is now in press.

The nearest I know to pure fantasy un­complicated by allegory, is Garnett's "Lady into Fox" (Knopf), into which well-mean­ing people often try to cram a protesting moral, but without making it stick. "A Man in the Zoo" and "The Sailor’s Return" are still in this manner, but "Go She Must" gave warning that a change in Mr. Garnett's methods was impending, as it was clear by the deeper note in Stella Benson's "Goodbye, Stranger" (Macmillan) that her art had come to a bend in the road. In this beautiful novel, it will be remembered, a fairy marries an American girl in China, a sufficiently fantastic situa­tion. "Seducers in Ecuador," V. Sackville-West, disingenuously titled tale of the ef­fect of colored spectacles (Doran), Helen Beauclerk's disturbing "Green Lacquer Pavilion" (Doran), Walter de la Mare's "Henry Brocken" (Knopf), the melodious romances of Dunsany, especially "The Char­woman's Shadow" (Putnam), Ronald Fraser's effort to transmute into literature images called up by Chinese art in "Land­scape with Figure." (Liveright), Margaret Irwin's gentle, ghostly "Who Will Remem­ber?" [UK title, “She Who Wished for Company”] that was published here by Seltzer— her recent "Fire. Down Below" (Harcourt, Brace) returns, after a successful ex­cursion info artistic society, to her earlier manner—Thévenin's rollicking "Barnabé and his Whale" (McBride), the scarcely veiled satire of Eimar O'Duffy's "King Goshawk and the Birds" (Macmillan)— these are some of the fantasies I can call back from a grateful memory without con­sulting a catalogue. Four writers in America match in this respect anyone who writes elsewhere: Elinor Wylie with the un­forgettable "Venetian Glass Nephew" (Doran), Robert Nathan with a shelf-ful [sic] of subtleties crowned by this new one, "The Bishop's Wife" (Bobbs-Merrill), Barbara Follett, for whose "The House Without Windows" (Knopf) I must dust off the set-away word unique, and Christopher Morley, whose "Thunder on the Left" is approached only by his own "Where the Blue Begins." It stands out against the sky in contemporary American literature; I should not be sur­prised if this and Stephen Benet's "John Brown's Body" (Doubleday) were the two books by which this literary generation in America would be remembered. Certainly it would be a good thing for our post­humous reputation if these were the two that lasted.