The British Library, in their Tales of the Weird series, has just published a reprint of E.H. Visiak's rare 1929 novel, Medusa. It is introduced by Aaron Worth, and he begins, appropriately, with the bizarre position that Medusa has come to occupy to moderns readers. Owing to hyperbolic nonsense from Karl Edward Wagner (in his infamous 1983 Twilight Zone magazine lists), most readers of Medusa in the last forty-plus years have come to the book with completely mistaken expectations. Forget them. Come to Medusa with a clean slate, and you might find some attractions that have no relation to the reputation that Wagner and others have put upon it. Forget as well the fact that E.H. Visiak was one of the few literary friends of David Lindsay, author of A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). Visiak was an idiosyncratic thinker, and though he wrote on Lindsay, he clearly didn't understand either Lindsay or his book very well.
Visiak gave Medusa a subtitle: "A Novel of Mystery, Ecstasy and Strange Horror." And it is that indeed. It begins as a kind of Stevensonian adventure, and shifts a few times to become something other, and something larger. Embedded in the narrative are Visiak's views on childhood as a ideal state of innocence, later spoiled by human passion---which was first formulated in one of Visiak's earliest published poems:
The Child State Thou Hast Lost
As one reads Medusa, it is worth bearing in mind how this relates to the main characters.
Below is the cover of the new edition, and under that, the rear cover with a blurb and a tentacled portrait of Visiak himself (c. 1910). (The art is credited to Mag Ruhig.)
