Tuesday, January 20, 2015

‘Ancient Sorceries’ and other chilling tales – by Algernon Blackwood

‘Ancient Sorceries’ and other chilling tales – by Algernon Blackwood

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ANCIENT SORCERIES and other chilling tales
by Algernon Blackwood
Capuchin Classics 2013
I received this book yesterday for my 67th birthday.
***I shall be real-time reviewing it in the comment stream below as and when I happen to read it…***
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12 responses to “‘Ancient Sorceries’ and other chilling tales – by Algernon Blackwood”

  1. nullimmortalis

    January 19, 2015 at 2:01 pm Edit

    The Wendigo
    Pages 13 – 20
    “…no mention in his book on Collective Hallucination for the simple reason (so he confided once to a fellow colleague) that he himself played too intimate a part in it to form a competent judgement of the affair as a whole…”
    …like the real-time reviewer dreamcatching a book’s gestalt via all its leitmotifs – or upon a moose hunt in the blackwoods…sorry, “his first visit to Canadian backwoods”…
    An ill-tantalising glimpse of a scent, this scene-set, a crafted atmospheric rugged place … a well-characterised foursome (plus Punk) of miscegenate political-incorrectness, whereby native guide gives us a tangible sense of fear whither civilised men like us plan to hunt their moose … with a couple of N-words used by the presumedly civilised narrator that would get us evicted from reality TV shows should we use them today!
    Reply
  2. nullimmortalis

    January 19, 2015 at 3:16 pm Edit

    Pages 21 – 43
    “It seemed as if a million invisible causes had combined just to produce that single visible effect.”
    Down to two as a splinter reconnaissance party, guider and guided. The forest ‘too big’, we shudder at its immensity and what lies there as part of or born from our earth more terrifying than any alien in the distant stars. With. Sweet. Pungent. Odour of lions. And vast leapfrogs from the tent of nightmare betraying the path of the human guider gone awol and ill-envisioned monster: Défago and Wendigo, even these two words resonate together as a smell, also a Crusoe as if crucified by the going, the wending. And the guided, woken, follows from the tent of broken confused sleep these impossible tracks, “and if it were really the case that something was hunting himself down in the same way that he was hunting down another–“
    Reply
  3. nullimmortalis

    January 19, 2015 at 7:23 pm Edit

    Pages 44 – 70
    “…the entire structure threatened to fly asunder and become – incoherent.”
    Reunited with the rest of the moose-hunting party, our ‘guided’ one tells of the lost ‘guider’ being carried along, according to the tracks, in increasingly fiery footsteps by the down-to-earth cosmic terror of the moss-eater: finally creating two versions of the same man as the hunter itself and the hunted that used to be himself, both entities made to be seen by us with the words becoming semantic footprints as well as being seen for real by those in the story. I claim that this story is the only story ever been written conveying inchoate terror straight into the room where you read this story. You will have ‘seen the Wendigo’. You will have been the Wendigo. When I Die, When I Go. “…the final Loneliness.”
    Reply
  4. nullimmortalis

    January 20, 2015 at 9:59 am Edit

    The Insanity of Jones
    (A Study in Reincarnation)
    Pages 71 – 79
    This starts as a fascinating study indeed, of things behind the curtain, as it were, that some of us see, although we don’t overtly study the occult or theosophy, or even believe in such things. Yet there is a preternatural sense of a power that we have not been able to explain before, and we now realise that this may be the power of past lives, and the meaningful settling of accounts, good and bad. This evokes for us, no doubt, the power of the Internet, i.e. a symptom of such a power, as we ‘meet’ people there who may be part of that reincarnative pattern, a feat of settlement now made electronically easier? But that is just speculation on our part, while this story concerns Jones, who works in insurance a number of years ago and he is fated to become assistant to a manager who is significant in such a reincarnative settlement that Jones sees beyond that curtain that few of us see behind. This sense of connections, similar connections to those within such a phenomenon as this or any gestalt real-time review, I guess, is built up intriguingly in this first section of the story.
    “Thus, while the great majority of men and women left him uninfluenced—since he regarded them as so many souls merely passing with him along the great stream of evolution—there were, here and there, individuals with whom he recognised that his smallest intercourse was of the gravest importance. These were persons with whom he knew in every fibre of his being he had accounts to settle, pleasant or otherwise, arising out of dealings in past lives; and into his relations with these few, therefore, he concentrated as it were the efforts that most people spread over their intercourse with a far greater number. By what means he picked out these few individuals only those conversant with the startling processes of the subconscious memory may say, but the point was that Jones believed the main purpose, if not quite the entire purpose, of his present incarnation lay in his faithful and thorough settling of these accounts, and that if he sought to evade the least detail of such settling, no matter how unpleasant, he would have lived in vain, and would return to his next incarnation with this added duty to perform. For according to his beliefs there was no Chance, and could be no ultimate shirking, and to avoid a problem was merely to waste time and lose opportunities for development.”
    Reply
  5. nullimmortalis

    January 20, 2015 at 2:11 pm Edit

    Pages 80 – 101“…to commune with the Invisibles that were the very sources of his real life and being.”
    Despite its intriguing start, this story degenerates into a run-of-the-mill explication-in-contrivance of that antipathy causing reincarnative retribution by Jones the clerk upon his manager, leading, for me, to an unsatisfyingly melodramatic ending. However, this is compensated for by that sense of the quote above not only serendipitously echoing my earlier thoughts on a prefigured Internet, but also in itself a prefigurement of some Machenesque moments when Jones visits the House that threads his audit trail of past lives. And the retributive force aiding Jones from a previous life is named Thorpe – and with some explicit connection to the ‘Essex Shore’ where I live, I suddenly thought of a nearby town called Thorpe-Le-Soken… And there is a ‘covering in blood’ as soaking upon the punished one… Names, you see, as this story explicitly tells us, do sort of sum up and label…if obliquely.
    Reply
  6. nullimmortalis

    January 20, 2015 at 3:59 pm Edit

    The Land of Green Ginger
    An engagingly short absurdity involving a shop in the byway of an alley, a bald shopkeeper, a customer who is also a writer, plus recurrencies of reflection in a mirror, a mirror that is for sale and entwined with murderous Fate and Death. Only to be fully understood, for me, in the reincarnative light of the previous story where Jones was a insurance clerk, as is this customer also an insurance clerk, or the character he writes about in this story is an insurance clerk very much like Jones. Insane, or what?
    Reply
  8. nullimmortalis

    January 20, 2015 at 7:51 pm Edit

    I read THE WILLOWS novella many years ago and again in 2011 when I reviewed it here for Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s massive THE WEIRD anthology. (I show the text of that review of the novella below). Furthermore, this Capuchin Classic book was given to me for my birthday as I had recently reviewed here the important novel by Jeff VanderMeer entitled AREA X (The Southern Reach Trilogy) which, I now see, could be classed, at least in part, as a tribute to THE WILLOWS. Even the unimaginative Swede can see that!
    It is also a novella of enormous strength that can be compared usefully to THE WENDIGO. And to THE INSANITY OF JONES where a leaping upon fiery footsteps is cure for Alzheimers as found by being able to keep in touch with one’s own past lives? But that is my own ‘insanity’ or self-deception speaking, I guess, as such factors often do in many of my dreamcatching reviews…
    “Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of. We had “strayed”, as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be carried over the border and deprived of what we called “our lives”, yet by mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be the victims of our adventure – a sacrifice.”
    ======================================================
    The Willows – Algernon Blackwood
    I. “It was an otter, alive, and out on the hunt; yet it had looked exactly like the body of a drowned man…”
    For me, a welcome opportunity to re-read this weird classic after a number of years. Lonely Literature’s ulitmate ‘genius loci’ (gestalt stätte): the boat trip of the narrator with his ‘unimaginative’ companion (the Swede) along the ill-differentiated Danube between land and water, nature and terror. Here we echo the stream of feral beasts or skulls of earlier stories in this book alongside the patternless, human-uncontrolled surge of currencies and debts that pervade our news today, joining a ‘parent river’ then we become another different unexpected parent-in-waiting of children that were misborn years before we were first alive. Here we have willow-prehensile land and water as a herd or swarm instinct – as accentuated by even Unimagination itself now being impeached by frissons and fears – not Three Men in a Boat with jokey bonhomie, but two men alone together in a clumsy Jungian canoe that is you and me… (5 Nov 11)
    II. & III. “It was we who were the cause of the disturbance,…”
    Not by (a) ‘our’ disturbing the disturbance into existence, but by (b) creating it at source, from the hands of the head-lease author via the creative narrator towards the even more creative reader? The story’s overt implication is (a), but re-reading this story in my later years I now feel it is (b) and – with the wind, the patterings, the heaviness of soul and the shapes emerging from some gaia – all take on a new meaning as I disturb – or create? – the story’s hidden gestalt. (5 Nov 11 – two and a half hours later)
    IV. & V. “Our thoughts make spirals in their world. We must keep them out of our minds at all costs if possible.”
    The above “them” actually being our thoughts themselves (any or all of our thoughts to be kept from our mind!) or is it THEM: the transcendents that lurk like Old Ones beyond the thinning or “veil” (veil or ‘door’, with the swarm of bees or humming gong sound, a la Stephen King’s Todash?) – or the strange disjointed fragments of phrases that make no sense and may be our thoughts disguised? This is all genuinely frightening to the reader who, as I hinted before, is more than implicated by just reading the story – despite the 3-men-in-a-boat laughter that breaks out at one point. Yet, there are three men here after all, the ego, id and nemo, but which is the Swede (cf: ‘the American’ in the Kubin story or ‘the Russian’ in Blackwood’s ‘The Centaur’ novel), which the equally anonymous narrator and which the anonymous victim ‘otter’? There will hopefully come soon my ‘hole in the toe of my shoe’ moment (rather than my ‘hole in the bottom of my canoe’ moment). A revelation, this re-reading, as I imagine the transcendents’ shapes made up of several animals from another ‘monstrous zoo’.
    “The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.”– John Fowles 1964 (from ‘The Necessity of Nemo’ in ‘The Aristos’) (5 Nov 11 – another 3 hours later)
    NB: ‘The Willows’ seems to be a treatment of self-deception (and indeed the expression ‘self-deception’ in this sense is used in its text). This is appropriate as I am currently reading an academic book by Robert Trivers about ‘self-deception’. (5 Nov 11 – another 30 minutes later)
    =================================================
    Reply
  9. nullimmortalis

    January 21, 2015 at 10:12 am Edit

    The Man Who Lived Backwards
    “…life lay between the book covers; it was present, any portion of it accessible by turning back the pages. Its end was vivid at the moment merely because he, Zeitt, focused attention upon that part, that moment. And so, as was usual with him, he realised that his own life, similarly, existed serially, complete, the whole map there, while he was conscious of himself at the moment…”
    This brief haunting story seems to encapsulate the whole tenor of my gestalt real-time reviewing or dreamcatching books, the retrocausal palimpsest, the spirit of the time, the zeitgeist, the ultimate clinching happiness or serendipity where we would otherwise expect a clinging sadness. It also evokes the mirror conceit (or here ‘pier glass’) of this book’s Land of Green Ginger.
    Reply
  10. nullimmortalis

    January 21, 2015 at 10:57 am Edit

    Ancient Sorceries
    Pages 177 – 190
    “To unravel a tangle in the very soul of things – and to release a suffering human soul in the process – was with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed, often passing strange.”
    This famous story is well worth the re-read, now with more life behind me than before me. It is told by another ‘unimaginative Swede’ – here named Arthur Vezin – to John Silence, the psychic doctor. That telling is as the previous story’s moment of complete past seriality. A telling of being flustered by brash holidaying British on a French train, and spontaneously alighting at an unknown town to escape them. The subtly glowing text is a honeyed flow of felineness, but more than that, it has isolated the soul that is ‘me’ as if within a drama being performed just for me, disturbing as well as pleasingly calmative, and conveying my lifetime sense of music…
    “And, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound of horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town band began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to the accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was very sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when no one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from an invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople wholly charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded as though they were simply improvising without a conductor. No definitely marked time ran through the pieces, which ended and began oddly after the fashion of wind through an Aeolian harp. It was part of the place and scene, just as the dying sunlight and faintly breathing wind were part of the scene and hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashioned plaintive horns, pierced here and there by the sharper strings, all half smothered by the continuous booming of the deep drum, touched his soul with a curiously potent spell that was almost too engrossing to be quite pleasant.”
    Reply
  11. nullimmortalis

    January 21, 2015 at 2:17 pm Edit

    Pages 190 – 202
    I think I may now have stumbled upon a discovery about ‘Ancient Sorceries’ (1908). The scene in this French town’s establishment where Vezin is staying, the eating, the sudden obsession with a fleeting sense of another ‘odour of lions’ (here, they are cats), a ‘strange perfume’, as in the Wendigo, leading here to a pervasiveness of an attractive girl with whom he seems to becomes obsessed, is a strong reminder of a similar ambiance of eating and staying in a hostel (sanatorium) in Thomas Mann’s famous novel ‘The Magic Mountain’ (1924), where the girl with whom Hans Castorp is similarly obsessed is named Clawdia Chauchat !!
    Hans Castorp also felt Vezin’s fear that “he could not leave!”
    How can any of this have been missed before? Or has it?
    A sense of Robert Aickman’s ‘The Hospice’ story (1975) is also strongly felt here, with which I have compared Mann’s Magic Mountain in a review of the latter some while ago.
    With Vezin’s fancy of “a great curtain”, there is a sense of the Insanity of Jones ‘curtain’, arguably creating a reincarnative thread here, too.
    “The people did nothing directly. They behaved obliquely.”
    Reply
  12. nullimmortalis

    January 21, 2015 at 3:14 pm Edit

    “Scarcely daring to venture, but following an inner compulsion, he passed behind the statuary, and through the double row of columns beyond. The bronze door of the sanctuary stood open, and the poor soul’s knees all but gave way beneath him at the sight within. Two grey old women, witchlike, with hanging breasts and dugs of fingerlength, were busy there, between flaming braziers, most horribly. They were dismembering a child. In dreadful silence they tore it apart with their bare hands—Hans Castorp saw the bright hair blood-smeared—and cracked the tender bones between their jaws, their dreadful lips dripped blood. An icy coldness held him. He would have covered his eyes and fled, but could not. They at their gory business had already seen him, they shook their reeking fists and uttered curses—soundlessly, most vilely, with the last obscenity, and in the dialect of Hans Castorp’s native Hamburg. It made him sick, sick as never before. He tried desperately to escape; knocked into a column with his shoulder—and found himself, with the sound of that dreadful whispered brawling still in his ears,…” — From THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann

  13. Pages 203 – 232
    “And though the thought of leaving presented itself again and again to his mind, it was each time with less insistence, so that he stayed on from day to day, becoming more and more a part of the sleepy life of this dreamy mediaeval town, losing more and more of his recognisable personality. Soon, he felt, the Curtain within would roll up with an awful rush, and he would find himself suddenly admitted into the secret purposes of the hidden life that lay behind it all. Only, by that time, he would have become transformed into an entirely different being.”
    And so, in this way, ANCIENT SORCERIES brings this whole book to a neat end as a gestalt, as I simply knew it would. Yet some of the Satanic implications, the girl like a ‘guide’ in the lands of the Wendigo, the over the top concupiscent passion and ‘evil’ that ensues, and the later over-neat speculations by Silence bring this separate story in itself to a merely workmanlike conclusion. Yet I am ever haunted by ‘the call of the old’ like a dead monument to once ancient hope, by the Lovecraftian Cats of Ulthar type vision across the rooftops (that ‘unholy exodus’ or reincarnative diaspora), by the reference to ‘inmates’ at this French town’s inn (bringing John Cowper Powys into this web of fiction, as well as Mann and Aickman), and by those who ‘leaped like human beings’ but ‘dropped like animals.’
    end
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Monday, January 19, 2015

Celebrity Big Brother - Winter 2015 (2)

CONTINUED FROM HERE
19.1.15
Marion wrote:
He is a very ugly blubberer. The sight of his swollen distorted features will haunt me.
Perez will haunt me too. And not in a good way.
The state he put Alexander in was a real shame, and he also seems to have put an evil spell on Nadia and maybe Patsy.
I wonder how many of the audience are now having bad nightmares.
Keith's nominations were so typical of him. He is in wanly confused denial; as hell breaks loose around him, he is more concerned with Kavana's lack of skill in aiming rubbish into the bin.
The two Katies will perhaps become an unlikely feisty gestalt, that will prevail against such an insidious nightmare! We can only wait and see if anyone can conquer the autonomously spreading beachhead of Perez' State of Hate.

22.1.15
At least Perez has a sense of the Theatre of the Absurd - putting a piece of cheese up his nose just one case in point.
Thought it mean of Katie H to bring back the alphabet as a weapon against Alicia. Mr. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse' could never get past P in the alphabet.
Kavana tried to come out of the shadows yesterday by fabricating drunkenness and persecuting a bewildered Cheggers for his continually sitting on the fence.

23.1.15
Image
Well, I was coming to this page, this morning, to say that I have not much more to say, as all of them continue in character toward some ill-behaved queue at the bus stop to Hell.
But then I read Marion's report. Wow! Thanks.
Nadia to go tonight.
25.1.15
It was like facing a glasgow audience - all jokes died at birth.
Keith was uproarious when he found out that he had been conned.
Yes, Keith was genuinely surprised at the inverse task.
Pro-biotics? Are they the opposite of anti-biotics?
I sometimes try to dream up the soul or gestalt of all current housemates. Today, a painting by Fuseli came to mind.

26.1.15
The Perez Hilton Tweet business is interesting. As far as I can tell, his whole career (other than being the brother of Paris Hilton?) is based on his use of Twitter with millions of followers. I assume he can't tweet from inside the house, so I guess he has appointed one or more people to tweet from his account as if it is him tweeting? If that is the case, he should assume responsibility for what comes out of his Twitter account. I thought Perez was floundering yesterday between sanity and insanity, between complete confidence and desperation.
26.1.15
It's all become clear tonight. It is no accident that Perez has long been referring to the Perez Show. He has been recreating a frightening retrocausal inversion of a bipolar Truman Show. CBB has finally realised this is the case and is now collaborating with him. 'The Perez Show Is Back!' The Tweet is a Plant. So is a Triffid.

28.1.15
Perez, in isolation, acted as if he felt he was an accomplished method actor with a tinge of the Avant Garde, soliloquising, gurning, narcissistically contorting...the Perez Show incarnate, with end to end Tourette's-like Tweets. He is, for me, however, a cynical self-publicist with an element of inchoate lunacy. Katie H's face, meanwhile, was a picture of horrified realisation that CBB has, ab initio, been using her as a stooge in The Perez Show. She is now even more angry with CBB than with Perez himself, I guess.

29.1.15
Thanks for your continued wonderful reports, Marion.
Whatever one thinks of Perez, his behaviour sometimes creates a memorable event for BB history, like his chasing Katie H round the room and into the garden, his tongue waggling prehensilely, with KH almost collusive in this event, despite her cries of outrage. They even clinked wine glasses together at the end.

30.1.15
Yes, BB has lost control of Perez. And Perez has lost control of Perez as he flounders between competing impulses and screams for escape not from the House but from himself, from that Social-Media Inchoate now made flesh before our very eyes.
Meanwhile, Cheggers plays Pop, the paternal exponent of extreme fence-sitting in the guise of letting the children find their feet.
Nadia to go tonight.

31.1.15
I don't know where BB can go after this one. But I said that before, and then they go another stage into mayhem and madness. Is there an end to this?
Perhaps they will go back to its original form of weekly secret nominations, weekly evictions, no surprise additions, genuine tasks...
2.2.15
Marion wrote:
Perez pretended to be very drunk and rambling. He said he regretted coming on BB (you're not the only one, mate). Almost everyone in the house hated him, he said wonderingly. The whole experience was more painful than when his father died (which must be the crassest thing ever said on BB). He says he was not prepared for Katie Hopkins and feels as if he's been dragged down to hell.
He then took himself off to a deserted corner, sat on the floor with his suspenders on display, and wept/
Here, he was turning his own behaviour on its head, as if others had created such crassness in him rather than the other way about. He is now, in an insidious way, behaving even more badly so as to prove that point of self-righteousness. Shakespeare couldn't have written it better.
Gross, gross, indeed, Marion. The whole show. And not even any Illuminati to leaven it.

3.2.15
Yes, the only possible leavening of this crass Perez Show by code or dreamcaptcha, Illuminati or not - the Kipling Code stemming from Two Impostors (Triumph and Disaster). Next will be Machen's Three Impostors.
Randomly throwing hard beans at the wall was reference to the I Ching, too.
The 'bombshell' of Emma going into the House was a damp squib. But the Cami interview was feisty enough.
I have no option but to hope Keith wins. A sad statement.

4.2.15
Callum did himself some credit last night in standing up to Perez and then talking about it so cogently in the DR.
I think Katie H enjoys baiting Keith to see if she can stir the dead embers of his personality. I always thought he was a bit robotic even as a youth on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop.
Perez, if nothing else, is a phenomenon. A frightening one to some degree. But I got an impression from somewhere that he is being paid by Channel 5 more than any of the others. Perhaps they knew what they were contracting to buy. Real (or role-playing?) manic obnoxiousness to take this show where others cannot reach.

5.2.15
Marion wrote:
He asked her [Katie H] what her husband would say was her embarrassing habit. She claimed she flashed her insignifant boobs at him as he was wetting off for work. The neighbours might see, and that was the jeopardy.
The mind boggles, but a bit of a cynical coming-out by KH. The Notice Queen, now taken over from the Notice King.
It was a bit of a surprise, all things considered, that Perez went. You know, whatever you say about him, he created discussion. And Marion seems relieved that he went out last night. But it hardly mattered anymore with only one summary programme to be shown, in which he will still appear before he was evicted!
I think we should have been told by BB, rather than by Perez after he left, that he had been given access to a doctor for two weeks, and given a prescription for sleeping pills (tranquillisers?) and whatever else doctors do over such a period.
It was ironic (suspicious?) that Perez and KH were getting along fine just before he left.

6.2.15
I think KH is being very clever. Tempting the voters to come on her side to see how she manages to cope with praise...try bring this hard nut to tears. She is only strong when she is insulted. So, yes, there is a reverse psychology going on here.
Not much choice. I think Callum will win. But I hope Keith wins.


6.2.15
Well, for me, that flop finale is a skewed result: probably because of the weight of her unquestioning fanbase. What did Katy Price actually do? Is she the first HM to win BB after coming into the house late? Anyway, Marion, despite that crazy result and Perez' nightmarish antics, I enjoyed your reports, as ever. Thanks for the Marion Show! It's been a good gig.
ALL COMMENTS ABOVE TAKEN FROM FORUM HERE

CONTINUED IN MAY 2015 HERE
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Saturday, January 17, 2015

Des Lewis Dreamcatcher Gestalt Real-Time Reviews Printed as Books

‘Text of Dreamcatchers Transcribed as Real Books’

image image image image image image image image image image image image image image image image image image image
Above non-profit books are raw transcripts from internet to print – please enquire if you would like to buy signed copies from me: dflewis48@hotmail.com

VERY RAW TRANSCRIPTS WITH ANY IMAGES IN BLACK AND WHITE AND/OR INCOMPLETE.
NON-PROFIT TO ME.

I don’t normally worry about signed books myself, but it seems to me that these books are a crystallisation of internet posts, i.e. making such posts ‘unchangeable’. The text flows from page to page without human intervention. For tangible provenance you may need them signed by me on any review you’re interested in or at the front of the book or both.

Or you can order them unsigned straight from the printer: Volumes ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR and FIVE. and SIX and SEVEN and EIGHT and NINE and TEN and ELEVEN and TWELVE and THIRTEEN and FOURTEEN and FIFTEEN and SIXTEEN and SEVENTEEN and EIGHTEEN and NINETEEN.

The first cover photograph is from the Glyptotek Museum, Copenhagen, taken by myself in October 2010. Coincidentally, my very first real-time review in November 2008 concerned a book entitled ‘Glyphotech’ by Mark Samuels.

Although these represent raw transcripts of text from the internet – they are very readable and the books themselves have turned out to be physically pleasing, in my view.

The contents are below (there are no contents lists printed in the books):


VOLUME ONE
Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes – by Mark Samuels…..3
Beneath The Surface – by Simon Strantzas…..8
Omens by Richard Gavin ….12
Divinations of the Deep – Matt Cardin ….17
Rain Dogs – Gary McMahon ….22
Teatro Grottesco – Thomas Ligotti ….24
How to Make Monsters – Gary McMahon….43
The Reach of Children – Tim Lebbon….50
The Impelled & Other Head-Trips – Gary Fry….53
World Wide Web And Other Lovecraftian Upgrades – by Gary Fry….67
Beneath The Ground – edited by Joel Lane….73
Unbecoming And Other Tales Of Horror – by Mike O’Driscoll….84
The Ephemera – by Neil Williamson….97
Somnambulists – by Allen Ashley…..108
The Villa Désirée and Other Uncanny Stories – by May Sinclair…..125
Sanity and Other Delusions – by Gary Fry…..138
Sleepwalkers – Marion Arnott…..142
Islington Crocodiles – Paul Meloy…..151
The English Soil Society – by Tim Nickels….163
The Cusp of Something – by Jai Clare…..181
Visits To The Flea Circus – by Nick Jackson…..199
Mostly Monochrome Stories – by John Travis….218
Bull Running For Girls – by Allyson Bird…..239
The Terrible Changes – by Joel Lane….261
Pictures of the Dark – by Simon Bestwick…..274
ANONthology (HarperCollins) ….294
Primeval Wood – by Richard Gavin….301
Ghosts and Grisly Things – by Ramsey Campbell…..302
The Exaggerated Man – by Terry Grimwood……317
Cold to the Touch – by Simon Strantzas…..328
The Nightfarers – by Mark Valentine….341
Black Static – issue 12…..353
The Alsiso Project…..359
Author’s Commentary on ‘Weirdmonger’….376
.
VOLUME TWO
Extended Play (Elastic Press)……3
Different Skins – by Gary McMahon…..17
CERN Zoo – the original DFL ‘Editor’s Commentary’….23
Black Static – issue 13……43
All God’s Angels, Beware! – Quentin S Crisp…..49
Cinnabar’s Gnosis (Ex Occidente Press)….66
Dancing on Air – Frances Oliver…..84
Slight review of Slights – by Kaaron Warren…..90
Children of Epiphany – Frances Oliver…..92
Black Static – Issue 15…..101
Pieces of Midnight – by Gary McMahon…..106
The Sixth Black Book of Horror….119
Back From The Dead (Noose & Gibbet)….129
The Peacock’s Eye – Frances Oliver……146
The Tourist Season – Frances Oliver…..156
All Souls – Frances Oliver….161
Literary Remains – by R.B. Russell…..167
The Terror and the Tortoiseshell – John Travis…..177
Putting the Pieces in Place – R.B. Russell……198
Tragic Life Stories – by Steve Duffy…..202
“Remember You’re a One-Ball!” – by Quentin S. Crisp…..212
The Man Who Collected Machen & Other Stories – by Mark Samuels…..225
Where The Heart Is (Gray Friar Press)….234
Dark Awakenings – by Matt Cardin…..250
The Silver Voices – by John Howard…..258
Groaning Shadows – by Paul Finch…..265
The Mascarons of the Late Empire & Other Studies by Mark Valentine….275
Null Immortalis – the Editor’s Commentary….279
Black Static – Issue 18….300
Interzone #230 ….304
The Old Knowledge – by Rosalie Parker…..309
The Places Between – by Terry Grimwood…..315
Never Again edited by Allyson Bird & Joel Lane….323
Tenebrous Tales – by Christopher Barker…..343
An Emporium of Automata – by D.P. Watt….354
Black Static – issue 19…..370
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VOLUME THREE
Lost Places - by Simon Kurt Unsworth
The Wounds of Exile – by Reggie Oliver
Mindful of Phantoms – by Gary Fry
Xargos – by Frances Oliver
Oblivion’s Poppy – by Colin Insole
Occultation – by Laird Barron
The Satyr – by Stephen J. Clark
The AUTUMN MYTH – by Joel Lane
The Coanda Effect – by Rhys Hughes
Mad Matinée in Baku – by Albert Power
Northwest Passages – by Barbara Roden
‘The Sons of Ishmael’ by George Berguño
The Ghosts of Summer – by Frances Oliver
The Defeat of Grief – by John Howard
PLUS SELECT QUOTES FROM ELIZABETH BOWEN FICTION IN VAST ENTRANCING AMOUNTS OF SPACE IN VOLUME THREE
.
VOLUME FOUR
GHOSTS (Crimewave Eleven)
 
Black Static #20
 
Full Dark, No Stars – by Stephen King
 
War With The Newts (Karel Capek); The Best of Alan Coren (1980): The Dark Tower I (Stephen King)
 
BFS Journal (Winter 2010) – My Real-Time Review
 
War With The Newts – by Karel Capek
 
The Dark Tower – The Gunslinger by Stephen King
 
I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like by Justin Isis
 
The Dark Tower – The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King
 
Holiday – by M. Rickert
 
THE DRACULA PAPERS: Book I: The Scholar’s Tale by Reggie Oliver
 
THE DARK TOWER: The Waste Lands by Stephen King
 
The Peacock Escritoire – by Mark Valentine
 
Black Static #21
 
Amerika – by Karim Ghahwagi
 
A Pallid Wave on Shores of Night – by Adam S. Cantwell
 
The Dark Tower – WIZARD AND GLASS by Stephen King
 
Revenants – by Daniel Mills
 
DARK MINDS – including an original story by GARY McMAHON
 
The Dark Tower – WOLVES of the CALLA by Stephen King
 
The Chômu ‘Man Who Collected Machen’ by Mark Samuels
 
The Life of Polycrates & Other Stories for Antiquated Children by Brendan Connell
 
SONG OF SUSANNAH – The Dark Tower by Stephen King
 
The Dark Tower: THE DARK TOWER by Stephen King
 
The Great Lover – by Michael Cisco
.
 
VOLUME FIVE
 
the abolisher of roses by Gary Fry
 
The Mauve Embellishments – by Charles Schneider
 
Link Arms With Toads! – Rhys Hughes
 
Allurements of Cabochon – by John Gale
 
The ‘Star’ Ushak – by Louis Marvick
 
Dying to Read – by John Elliott
 
Old Albert: An Epilogue – by Brian J Showers
 
The Bestiary of Communion – by Stephen J Clark
 
‘The Exorcist’s Travelogue’ – by George Berguño
 
The Master in Café Morphine Edited by Dan T Ghetu
.
 
VOLUME SIX
 
Real-Time Review of TQF #37 (Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #37)
 
Do Not Pass Go – by Joel Lane
 
Jeanette – by Joe Simpson Walker
 
Black Static #24
 
The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies
 
Mrs Midnight and other stories by Reggie Oliver
 
Quiet Houses – by Simon Kurt Unsworth
 
Black Static #25 – Fiction Review
 
The Orphan Palace – Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
 
The WEIRD: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
.
 
VOLUME SEVEN
 
Alcyone – Colin Insole
 
The Secret Life of the Panda – Nick Jackson
 
Black Static #26
 
Here Comes The Nice – Jeremy Reed
 
TARSHISHIM – Ron Weighell
 
Real-Time Review of TQF #39 (Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #39)
 
INTERZONE #238
 
Morbid Tales – Quentin S. Crisp
 
Shrike – Quentin S. Crisp
 
The Far Side of the Lake – Steve Rasnic Tem (my first ebook review)
 
Nowhere to Go – Iain Rowan (ebook)
 
Black Static #27
 
GHOSTS – R.B. Russell
.
 
VOLUME EIGHT
 
American Morons -stories by Glen Hirshberg
 
Nightingale Songs – Simon Strantzas
 
The Haunted Grove – Tim Jeffreys (ebook)
 
Secret Europe by John Howard and Mark Valentine
 
BLACK HORSE and Other Strange Stories by Jason A. Wyckoff
 
WILD JUSTICE – Edited by Ellen Datlow (ebook)
 
Sangria in the Sangraal by Rhys Hughes
 
The Two Sams – Glen Hirshberg (ebook)
 
INTERZONE #239
 
The Janus Tree and other stories – Glen Hirshberg
 
The Book of Bunk – by Glen Hirshberg (ebook)
 
Black Static #28
 
Glory & Splendour – Alex Miles (ebook)
.
 
VOLUME NINE
The Wind Through The Keyhole – Stephen King
Strange Epiphanies – Peter Bell
BFS Journal – Spring 2012
Real-Time Review of TQF #40 (Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #40)
Dadaoism – a new anthology (from Chômu Press)
This Hermetic Legislature (an anthology from Ex Occidente Press)
A Certain Slant of Light – Peter Bell
The Snowman’s Children – Glen Hirshberg
The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller by D.P. Watt
Black Static #29
BOOK – The InkerMen
Real-Time Review of TQF #41
The Truth Spinner – Rhys Hughes
Celebrant – by Michael Cisco
Instinct – ‘poems of desire’ by Joel Lane
Peel Back The Sky – Stephen Bacon
The Brothel Creeper – Rhys Hughes
A Cage For The Nightingale – Phyllis Paul
The Screaming Book of Horror Ed. Johnny Mains
Terror Tales of East Anglia Ed. Paul Finch
.
 
VOLUME TEN
January 2013: FIRST NOVEL and QUILT by Nicholas Royle (HERE.)
 
February 2013: DEHISCENCE by D. P. Watt
 
February 2013: The Last Gold of Decayed Stars by Colin Insole
 
February 2013: TALLEST STORIES by Rhys Hughes
 
February 2013: O Altítudo by Thomas STRØMSHOLT
 
February 2013: The Sea Change & Other Stories by Helen Grant
 
March 2013: THE NEW FATE by Jonathan Wood
 
March 2013: Rameau’s Nephew by Denis Diderot

March 2013: BFS JOURNAL Winter 2012 / 2013
 
March 2013: THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN – Thomas Mann
 
March 2013: Black Static #33 (TTA Press)
 
March 2013: INTERZONE #245 (TTA Press)
 
March 2013: ‘Onion Songs’ by Steve Rasnic Tem
 
April 2013: Star Kites – Mark Valentine
 
April 2013: The Madman of Tosterglope – Louis Marvick.
 
.
VOLUME ELEVEN
 
April 2013: Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
 
April 2013: The Inmates – John Cowper Powys
 
May 2013: Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #43
 
May 2013: SPIN – by Nina Allan
 
May 2013: WHITSTABLE – Stephen Volk
 
May 2013: DEFEATED DOGS – Quentin S. Crisp
 
May 2013: Black Static #34
 
May 2013: Interzone #246
 
June 2013: The Quarry by Iain Banks.
 
June 2013: Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce.
 
June 2013: The Adjacent by Christopher Priest.
 
July 2013: Virtue in Danger by Reggie Oliver.
 
 
VOLUME TWELVE
 
July 2013: Rustblind and Silverbright
 
July 2013: Black Static #35
 
July 2013: Interzone #247
 
July 2013: Horror Without Victims – An Editor’s Commentary
 
August 2013: The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange by Rhys Hughes
 
August 2013: The Transfiguration of Mister Punch
 
September 2013: Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #44
 
September 2013: Black Static #36
 
September 2013: Interzone #248
 
September 2013: The Light is Alone – Thomas Phillips
 
October 2013: Aornos by Avalon Brantley
 
October 2013: The Emperor’s Pavement by John Howard
 
October 2013: Cities and Thrones and Powers by John Howard
 
October 2013: The Art of Ventriloquism by AJ Kirby.
 
October 2013: THE MERCURY ANNUAL / PILGRIMS AT THE WHITE HORIZON by Michael Wyndham Thomas.

VOLUME 13
October 2013: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (a real-time novel taken back towards its static core)
November 2013: Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #45
November 2013: The Burning Circus edited by Johnny Mains
November 2013: MEMBER by Michael Cisco
November 2013: The Young Dictator by Rhys Hughes
November 2013: Flowers of the Sea by Reggie Oliver
November 2013: Report From The Interior by Paul Auster
November 2013: Elegies & Requiems by Colin Insole
25 Nov 2013: SABBATICESS – announcement
Dec 2013: The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (not real-time)
Dec 2013: Stoner by John Williams (not real-time)
December 2013: Transactions of the Flesh edited by D.P. Watt and Peter Holman
December 2013: Where Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane
December 2013: The Heaven Tree & Other Stories by Christopher Harman
December 2013 / January 2014: Crimewave 12: Hurts
January 2014: Black Static #37
January 2014: Interzone #249
.
Volume 14
January 2014: Delicate Toxins
January 2014: Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #46
January 2014: Strange Tales IV
January 2014: Terror Tales of the Seaside
January 2014: Black Static #38
January 2014: Interzone #250
January 2014: Dogs With Their Eyes Shut by Paul Meloy
February 2014: MENACE by Gary Fry
February 2014: Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (to be continued?)
February 2014: BFS Journal #10
February 2014: Tales of the Grotesque by L.A. Lewis
February 2014: Flash in the Pantheon by Rhys Hughes (first part)
.
Volume Fifteen
Flash in The Pantheon (part two)
February 2014: THE GALAXY CLUB by Brendan Connell
February 2014: HERE WITH THE SHADOWS by Steve Rasnic Tem
March 2014: A Dead Church by Harold Billings
March 2014: Rhysop’s Fables (part one)
March 2014: Letters of Oblivion by Andrew Condous
March 2014: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by HP Lovecraft
March 2014: TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne.
March 2014: Black Static #39
March 2014: Interzone #251
March 2014: Every Short Story (1951-2012) by Alasdair Gray (part one)
March 2014: The Horror Fields edited by Matt Leyshon
April 2014: The Function Room: The Kollection by Matt Leyshon
.
Volume Sixteen
April 2014: The Wide, Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies by John Langan
April 2014: Mr. Gaunt and other uneasy encounters by John Langan
April 2014: Journeys Beyond Advice – Rhys Hughes
April 2014: North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud
May 2014: Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #47
May 2014: The Dark Return of Time by R.B. Russell
May 2014: Black Static #40
May 2014: Cold Turkey – Carole Johnstone
May 2014: Descended Suns Resuscitate by Avalon Brantley
May 2014: The Moon King – Neil Williamson
May 2014: Interzone #252
.
Volume 17
June- October 2014
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
THE SPECTRAL LINK by Thomas Ligotti
Summonings – Ron Weighell
Burnt Black Suns – Simon Strantzas
Strange Gateways – Simon Kurt Unsworth
Fearful Symmetries – Edited by Ellen Datlow
Ana Kai Tangata – Scott Nicolay
Harvesting the Moon – Ursula Pflug
Infra Noir – Zagava: Ex Occidente Press
Malingerer – Thomas Phillips
The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies – Clark Ashton Smith
Black Static 41 & 42, Interzone 253 & 254
Captains Stupendous – Rhys Hughes
The Lunar Tickle by Rhys Hughes
The Grimscribe’s Puppets – A Season in Carcosa : two books edited by Joe Pulver
.
VOLUME 18
After the Fires – Stories by Ursula Pflug
‘Horror Uncut': Tales of Social Insecurity and Economic Unease
The Stream & The Torrent by Brian Howell
The Monk’s Bible by Harold Billings
The Sound of White Ants by Brian Howell
The King In Yellow – by Robert W. Chambers
Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #48 & 49
WRITTEN IN DARKNESS – Mark Samuels
Interzone 255 – Black Static 43
Year’s Best Weird Fiction – Volume One
AREA X – Jeff VanderMeer
.
Volume 19
In the Land of Time – Lord Dunsany
DREAMS of OURSELVES (anthology)
BFS Journal #12
BFS Journal #13
Encounters – Early Stories of Elizabeth Bowen
Wraiths by Mark Valentine
A Distillate of Heresy by Damian Murphy
Revival by Stephen King
Kafka in Brontëland by Tamar Yellin
At The Hairdresser’s – Anita Brookner
Bone Idle in the Charnel House by Rhys Hughes
Orpheus on the Underground by Rhys Hughes
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