Borderlands and Otherworlds by Mark Valentine, Tartarus Press, limited edition hardback, £45.00, 17
June 2025, ISBN 9781912586684
Sphinxes and Obelisks by Mark Valentine,
Tartarus Press, paperback, £17.95, 12 November 2021, ISBN 9798764096322
I’ve been meaning to write a review of one of Mark
Valentine’s collections of essays for some time now, but when the previous one was
released, I was right in the middle of my own six-part essay, “Weird Fiction
Old, New, and In-Between” (which you can find
here,
if you’re interested). That was less than a year ago and the next one is
already available so I decided I’d better get on with it before I have to admit
that he can write essay collections faster than I can read and review them. While
ordering the recently released
Borderlands and Otherworlds, I realised
I’d somehow managed to miss
Sphinxes and Obelisks and ordered it in
paperback at the same time. This is review of both volumes.
Valentine is best known as a short story author, an
editor and an essayist, but is also a biographer and poet. He has been
publishing short stories and essays for more than four decades, although these
have only relatively recently been collected in book form (In Violet Veils,
in 1999, is – I think – the first) and more recently still (with – again, I
think – The Collected Connoisseur, in 2010) made more widely available
in paperback. Much, perhaps even most, of Valentine’s output has been published
by Tartarus Press, a highly successful independent publisher famous for their
limited edition sewn hardbacks (usually 350 and signed, if publication
is not posthumous) with distinctive yellow dust wrappers and silk ribbon
markers. If you are a collector as well as a reader, these are well worth the
price at £45, with free postage and packaging in the UK. While I’m on the
subject, Tartarus paperbacks have similar production values, but are probably
overpriced at £17.95 (their Kindle editions appear to go for between £7 and
£9; I prefer paper or audio books so I have no idea whether this is
reasonable). Although I enjoyed Valentine’s The Collected Connoisseur,
co-authored with his long term collaborator John Howard, a great deal, I have
always preferred his work as an essayist and editor to his short fiction (my
review of The Black Veil and Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths, which
he edited in 2008, was published in TQF24).
As an essayist, most websites list Valentine as
specialising in book collecting, but his scope is much wider than that and
includes undistinguished, forgotten and obscure authors from the first half of
the twentieth century and before, many of whom were writers of speculative
fiction. Borderlands and Otherworlds is his sixth collection of essays published by Tartarus, the
first five of which are all available in paperback: Haunted By Books
(2015), A Country Still All Mystery (2017), A Wild Tumultory Library
(2019), Sphinxes and Obelisks (2021), and The Thunderstorm Collectors
(2024). I’d be exaggerating if I said every essay in every collection is worth
reading or that one or more of the collections shouldn’t be missed by
speculative fiction fans, but I don’t regret the time or money spent on any of
them. Rather than browsing their often diverse and always idiosyncratic tables of contents, I recommend watching this
interview with Valentine, which gives a very good sense of the man, his
interests, and even his prose style.
Sphinxes and Obelisks consists of 32
essays, 10 of which have been previously published, and a substantive
introduction. It is worth noting, for both volumes, that the periodicals in
which the essays previously appeared have often either ceased publishing or
were privately issued, meaning that many readers are, like me, unlikely to have
encountered them before and that they are simply no longer available anywhere
else (both of which makes these collections all the more valuable). A summary
of each essay would not only be tedious to compile, but almost certainly fail to do the collection justice and my intention is to expand Valentine’s
readership, not reduce it, so I shall restrict commentary to those I enjoyed
the most. The one on my shortlist that
will probably appeal the most widely is “‘The Wonder Unlimited’: Hope Hodgson’s
Tales of Captain Gault” (9 pages). William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) is now recognised
as one of the original pioneers of the
weird as a distinct genre within speculative fiction more generally and is
possibly best known for his serial occult detective, Thomas Carnacki (first
collected in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder in 1913), though he was also
the author of The House on the Borderland (1908), The Night Land
(1912), and various tales of the sea. Valentine discusses a group of the
latter, which featured the serial character Captain Gault and were some of Hodgson’s
most commercially successful work, while reflecting on the curious decline of
the nautical tale as a genre of its own. For me, the other highlights of the
collection are: “‘Change Here for the Dark Age’: Edward Shanks’ The People
of the Ruins” (12 pages), about a precursor to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker
Man (1973); “Sombre Gloom: The Macabre Thrillers of Riccardo Stephens” (8
pages), about an early mummy novel; “Cricket in Babylon”, about the
(surprisingly many) varieties of what I’m going to call armchair cricket (6
pages); “Three Literary Mysteries of the 1930s” (6 pages), about three talented
authors – Robert Stuart Christie, Petronella Elphinstone, and Seton Peacey –
for whom almost no biographical information exists; and “Passages in the West” (8 pages), an autobiographical account of a book hunting expedition in the West
Country.
Borderlands and Otherworlds also consists
of 32 essays, 8 of which have been previously published. My favourites are the
first and last. In the former, “Borderlands and Otherworlds: Some Supernatural
Fiction of the Early 1920s” (17 pages), from which the collection takes its
title, Valentine discusses the uncanny fiction of Edward Frederic (E.F.) Benson
(1867–1940), Mary Amelia St Clair (May Sinclair, 1863-1946), Forrest Reid
(1875–1947), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), Lesley Garth (who was probably
Lesley West Garth: born in 1900, married to William Ball in 1927, died in
1988), and George Oliver Onions (1873–1961). This is Valentine at his most
typical and at his best, unearthing hidden – or, more accurately, forgotten –
treasures. I am assuming, of course, that, like me, most TQF readers will be
familiar with no more than half of these authors (Benson, De la Mare, and
Onions in my case, although I have yet to read Benson). The last essay, “In the
Attic” (5 pages) is, as the title suggests, an (all-too-brief) rummage through
Valentine’s attic, which is full of all the forgotten treasures his regular
readers will expect. My other highlights are: “At the House of Magic: Mary
Butts’ Modernist Novels of the Occult” (6 pages), about Mary Franeis Butts
(1890–1937), a collaborator of Aleister Crowley who was praised by T.S. Eliot; “Priestess
of the Inner Light: The Magical Novels of Dion Fortune” (11 pages), about Violet
Mary Firth (1890-1946), founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light; “The
Last, Lost Novel of Phyllis Paul” (4 pages), about a novelist who retains a cult
following in spite of next to nothing being known about her life (1903–1973); and “The Serpent at Ashford Carbonell” (3 pages), about a mystery encountered during
a book hunting expedition in the Welsh Marches.
So far, The Thunderstorm Collectors is my first
choice of the six – I don’t recall a single essay where my attention
drifted for even a moment – but Borderlands and Otherworlds is a close
second. Regardless of precise preference, the same can be said of all the volumes: Valentine’s
essays are simultaneously fun and fascinating, clever and chimerical, enlightening
and exquisite.
