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 last 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.
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