David Tibet

Mark Valentine

A compendium of strange fiction and hallucinatory tales by both renowned innovators of the weird and little-known scribes of the macabre. An arcane compendium of strange fiction and hallucinatory tales, There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man collects chilling stories by renowned innovators of the weird and by many little-known and underrepresented or forgotten scribes of the macabre. Selected by artist, writer, and musician David Tibet, this widely-sourced collection of supernatural rarities continues the bibliographic archaeology initiated with The Moons At Your Door (Strange Attractor Press, 2016), offering lyrical portals into worlds of strange beauty, elegant unease, and creeping decadence. Authors include Lady Dilke, Edna Underwood, Thomas Ligotti, L. P. Hartley, R. H. Benson, Walter de la Mare, Hugh Walpole, Colette de Curzon, L. A. Lewis, Edith Wharton, and others. The volume also features translations from Coptic, folk songs, and other surprises. Comprehensive biographical and publication histories are provided by noted scholar of bibliographic arcana Mark Valentine. There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man offers an unnerving, serpentine tributary to the canon of supernatural literature.

More Strange Fiction and Hallucinatory Tales

There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man

John Howard

Venturing from his fire-lit study in an English cathedral city, The Connoisseur encounters, among other phenomena, strange masquerades in country houses; a Scottish island whose Prince may not be named and a poignant relic from the Black Sea region, sought after by a ruthless order.

The Collected Connoisseur

Secret Europe

The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things

In Haunted by Books Mark Valentine explores the more curious byways of literature. He presents the author who was always being told he had nearly written a masterpiece, and the genius of the short story who brewed his own cider and lived in a railway carriage. Then there's the figure of the 1890s, praised by Max Beerbohm, who liked to wander around London wearing horns and chewing railings, and the young man in the 1930s who tried to sell his poetry door to door. There are also new angles on key figures: the strange case of Robert Aickman, sailor and philosopher; the book that Sax Rohmer really wanted to write; the enigma of Walter de la Mare's 'Seaton's Aunt'. And there are literary mysteries; what was the MS in a Red Box? Who wrote Shakespeare's Gunpowder Plot? What became of Dr Ludovicus? Other essays celebrate neglected writers worth discovering, such as Mary Butts, Claude Houghton, and Vernon Knowles, or offer fresh perspectives, looking at Lewis Grassic Gibbon's fantasies, Malcolm Lowry's reading in occult fiction. There are even studies of books that were never written. Haunted by Books will delight all readers and book collectors who like to leave the beaten path and wander in the wild woods, forgotten lanes and lonely houses of literature.

Haunted by Books

Claude Houghton

A young writer living in an attic finally meets his neighbor in the adjoining room and grows to hate him with a terrible obsession.

Neighbours

What is the secret of the house of days? Who are the shadowy figures gathered along an old green road? What is the winged thing seen flitting from an ancient church? Herald of the Hidden collects ten adventures of the occult detective Ralph Tyler, inspired by William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Algernon Blackwood's John Silence, and Arthur Machen's Mr Dyson of The Three Impostors. But Ralph Tyler is different. He is without private means, or any special esoteric knowledge. Sometimes he doesn't play fair with his clients or his friend, the narrator. He smokes foul cigarettes, slumps in his chair, and wears a threadbare jacket. And he's from an obscure shire in the darkest heart of England . . . Mark Valentine's Ralph Tyler stories first appeared in hard-to-find small press publications. Three of the stories in this volume are previously unpublished, including two newly written for this collection. Along with six further supernatural tales, all the stories are previously uncollected in book form.

Herald of the Hidden

'The English landscape was made . . . not just for food and shelter and pleasure, but also for the journey of the soul. There is a field of supernatural stories set in this "other" country, the country of the spirit . . .' In A Country Still All Mystery, Mark Valentine explores how certain writers have used their fiction to convey the idea of numinous terrain, places where we might at any moment stray into the realms of the unearthly and uncanny. These essays continue similar literary and antiquarian themes to his well-received earlier volume, Haunted By Books (2015). When and where was the last wolf seen in England? Why were certain lonely houses left beyond parish boundaries? Is there a missing book by T.E. Lawrence? What was the secret history of Cope & Fenwick, liturgical publishers? What became of the original Tower of Moab? A Country Still All Mystery will be read with pleasure by those who enjoy the out-of-the-way, the obscure, the eccentric and the outré. It will appeal to anyone who has ever strayed into remote country which seems to be not quite fully in this world.

A Country Still All Mystery

Timothy J. Jarvis

The works of Anglo-Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863-1947) made an indelible and ever-expanding impression in the genre of horror and the supernatural, and have always inspired both ardent advocates and determined opponents. In the 1890s, Oscar Wilde, Jerome K. Jerome, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle admired his work, but the majority of critics were hostile, and he was often seen as part of the Decadent movement of the "Yellow 'Nineties." The first section of this critical anthology provides important contextual information about Machen's life and works, and gives a clear impression of how Machen was regarded in the 1920s, when his books began to emerge from the shadows. The following section offers contributions concerned with Machen's role as a figure of the 1890s and a participant in the Decadent movement. The third section presents discussions Machen's interest in ritual magic, occultism, classical mythology, the sublime, and his own individual and particular form of Christianity. In his later work, Machen never lost his deep interest in folklore and popular customs, eccentric characters and curious historical episodes, and the present volume's final section shows how these continued to inform Machen's work right up until his last writing. In sum total, this volume presents an extended critical assessment of Machen's work, early and late. The volume has been edited by Mark Valentine, a leading authority on Machen, author of Arthur Machen (1995), and editor of Aklo, All Hallows, and Wormwood; and Timothy J. Jarvis, instructor in creative writing and author of the novel The Wanderer (2014) and numerous works of short fiction.

Critical Essays on Arthur Machen

The Secret Ceremonies

Sphinxes and Obelisks

The Gateway of the Monster...The Red Hand...The Ghost HunterTo Sherlock Holmes the supernatural was a closed book: but other great detectives have always been ready to do battle with the dark instead. This volume brings together sixteen chilling cases of these supernatural sleuths, pitting themselves against the peril of ultimate evil. Here are encounters from the casebooks of the Victorian haunted house investigators John Bell and Flaxman Low, from Carnacki, the Edwardian battler against the abyss, and from horror master Arthur Machen's Mr Dyson, a man-about-town and meddler in strange things.Connoisseurs will find rare cases such as those of Allen Upward's 'The Ghost Hunter', Robert Barr's Eugene Valmont (who may have inspired Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot) and Donald Campbell's young explorer Leslie Vane, the James Bond of the jazz age, who battles against occult enemies of the British Empire. And the collection is completed by some of the best tales from the pens of modern psychic sleuth authors.

The Black Veil and Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths

Oliver Onions

"A striking contribution to the literature of darkness." - Humbert Wolfe "A disturbing study of spiritual domination . . . subtle and terrifying." - Daily Telegraph "Mr. Onions is an inspired writer . . . A poet of prose." - John Betjeman When Peter Byles's father dies shortly before the boy's thirteenth birthday, the young orphan is sent to live at the Victorian Gothic mansion of his father's friend, Dr. Kornelius Voyt. Peter arrives at the dreary house, surprised to find that he sees nothing of the enigmatic Voyt, instead passing his time in lessons with a young German tutor. But it soon becomes clear to Peter that these lessons are only preparations for something much more sinister that Voyt intends to teach him. Voyt, unable either to hear or speak, has learned to compensate for his disability by developing extraordinary powers of the mind, powers which allow him to communicate telepathically, control the wills of others, and even inflict pain on those who anger him. Voyt has a terrifying vision of the world's future, and he is determined to use Peter as a pawn in his inscrutable plans. . . . Best known today for his ghost stories, Oliver Onions (1873-1961) was also a masterful novelist, and all his talents are on display in "The Hand of Kornelius Voyt" (1939), which, as Mark Valentine writes in the new introduction to this edition, "is a formidable achievement in sustaining an atmosphere of uncanny dread." This edition, the first in nearly fifty years, reprints the unabridged text of the rare first edition and features a reproduction of the original dust jacket illustration.

The Hand of Kornelius Voyt

R. C. Ashby

Ruby Ferguson

"In reading it I had several splendid shudders. . . . It is a piece of living literature, not merely an evening's entertainment." - E. B. Osborn, "Morning Post" "A bang-up ghost-murder-detective story with a background of bleak Northumberland moors, an old house full of haunts, [and] a Roman Centurion who appears . . . with death in his wake." - "Scribner's Magazine" "A well nigh perfect admixture of eerie horror, romance and good detecting." - "Saturday Review" "Truly a little masterpiece of a book. Reminiscent of Christie at the height of her powers in its brilliant use of misdirection. . . . Really a classic of its kind." - J. F. Norris, "Mystery File" From the moment William Mertoun arrives to catalogue the library at Colonel Barr's old mansion on the desolate Northumbrian moors, he senses something is terribly wrong. Barr's brother Ian has just died, mysteriously and violently, and the Colonel himself is hidden away in a locked room, to which his sinister nurse denies all access. As strange and supernatural events begin to unfold, Mertoun learns the local legend of a ghostly Roman centurion, slain on the site sixteen centuries earlier, who is said to haunt the estate. Mertoun is sceptical at first, but after another murder, a harrowing seance, and an actual sighting of the spirit one lonely night on the moor, he realizes that he and everyone at Barr's mansion are in mortal danger. What does the ghost want, and can it be stopped? This first-ever reprinting of "He Arrived at Dusk" (1933), R. C. Ashby's classic tale of mystery and the supernatural, features a new introduction by Mark Valentine and a reproduction of the original jacket art.

He Arrived at Dusk

Davis Oldham

Kristy Webster

Alex Emerson

Gregory Crowther

Vince Barnes

Amber True

Denice Calvetti Michaels

Micheal Mills

Carla Shafer

Michael Overa

Amanda Osgood Jonientz

Katie Johansen

Stephen McCloskey

Mary Leach

Minnie A. Collins

A Journal of Literature and Art, Crosscurrents is published by the Washington Community College Humanities Association

Mark Valentine

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