Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder V: The Horse of the Invisible | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

The ‘cover story’ of the Wordsworth Editions edition, which is a good choice in being one of Carnacki’s best adventures and a poor one for an illustration as the horse is, mostly anyway, invisible. There is another small variation on the familiar formula here as the narrative begins with Carnacki showing Dodgson a series of photographs before dinner and before the arrival of his other guests. The haunting is of a house somewhere in East Lancashire, but Carnacki quickly establishes that the ghost is tied to a person rather than a place. There is a legend that if the first-born child of a Hisgins generation is a girl, she will be persecuted by a huge horse from the time she reaches womanhood to the day of her marriage and this family curse has already put paid to five young women in a variety of ways. The tale is fast-paced, the ghost appearing before Carnacki is even briefed, and, unlike its predecessors, written in the style of a thriller rather than a mystery. Hodgson demonstrates his expertise as an author by alternating foreshadowing with gripping action set pieces. What also emerges here is that while Carnacki is a typically reticent English gentleman, he is very candid and very eloquent in describing the fear that he experiences during his investigations and Hodgson’s representation of fear across the Carnacki series is one of their literary strengths. ‘The Horse of the Invisible’ is capped with an ingenious conclusion in which Hodgson subverts the expectations he has created in the first three cases by presenting a solution that is both natural and supernatural. The “Black Veil” investigation is mentioned again as well as a potential competitor or rival of Carnacki’s, “Harford”.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder IV: The Whistling Room | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

Carnacki’s third case takes him back to the West of Ireland, to the fictional Iastrae Castle, near Galway. This time, the stately home has been purchased by a wealthy American named Sid K. Tassoc, who is engaged to a local lass, and one of the rooms in its East Wing is beleaguered by a demonic whistling (as indicated by the title). There is a slight variation on what is by now a familiar formula in that there are two dinners at 472 Cheyne Walk and two tales by Carnacki. When he tells the first, he has failed to solve the mystery despite spending many weeks at the scene and making use of his full repertoire of methods and equipment. The second dinner is much shorter and includes the most substantial q&a session thus far, with Carnacki’s guests putting him to the test, as well as a detailed explanation of the manifestation, which draws on Celtic legend and lore. What I liked about this instalment were the false clues set up early on, the hints that the local lads were trying to scare the rich foreigner off so that one of them could marry his fiancée. Hodgson makes good use of the series order, too, having just shown that the rural Irish are precisely the sort of folk capable of procuring supernatural shenanigans when it suits them in ‘The House Among the Laurels’. There is also the first suggestion that ab-human creatures hail from some distance away with “Outer Monstrosities”. My sole complaint is perhaps idiosyncratic: there are too many references to other investigations, at least six. Carnacki mentions the “Buzzing”, “Grey Dog”, “Yellow Finger”, “Silent Garden”, “Grunting Man”, and “Nodding Door” cases. Sometimes less is more.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder III: The House Among the Laurels | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

This is a somewhat disappointing second case and not because it is the first to have a natural rather than supernatural dénouement. The apparent haunting is of the hall of Gannington Manor, which is near the fictional village of Korunton, in the West of Ireland, and Hodgson’s attempts to reproduce the local dialect are amateurish, falling flat. There is also a slight variation in Carnacki’s yarn-spinning in that the first part describes the investigations of his friend, Wentworth, on inheriting the manor house so that what one reads is Dodgson’s report of Carnacki’s report of the sequence of events that happened to Wentworth, who seems very far-removed indeed. There have been two deaths in the hall in seven years and Wentworth does what Carnacki usually does, spends the night in the chamber, albeit with a host of locals and a big bull mastiff. When blood drips from the ceiling and the dog is killed (animal companions seem to have a tough time of it in Carnacki’s adventures), all forty-odd men flee the scene and Wentworth calls for Carnacki’s expertise. The ‘ab-human’ is used for the second time and the distinction between human and ab-human will form the foundation of the worldview embedded in the Carnacki oeuvre. Manuscripts, signs, and rituals are deployed, but, as always, Carnacki comes equipped with his revolver, camera, and flashlight. Two more dogs fare no better than the first and the case is solved by means of the camera, which exposes the device being used to create the haunting. There is a reference to another of Carnacki’s investigations, the “Steeple Monster case”.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder II: The Gateway of the Monster | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

The Carnacki narratives all have a similar structure or what one might less charitably call a formula. Each begins with a dinner for five at Carnacki’s home, 472 Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, which is the precursor to the story itself, represented as his post-prandial yarn-spinning. Once Carnacki has told his tale, there is time for one or more questions from his guests before he dismisses them with what is obviously meant to be a quirky, “Out you go!” Within this schema, Hodgson uses a device that appears contrived or even superfluous a century later: the cases are narrated in the first person, not by Carnacki or Hodgson, but an authorial surrogate, with the all too familiar name of ‘Dodgson’, so that what one reads is a report (by Dodgson) of a report (by Carnacki), which can make the sequence of events described feel remote and even lacklustre. The convention harks back to the origin of novels in histories and travelogues and was used to inaugurate literary modernism by authors such as Jospeh Conrad so Hodgson can hardly be blamed for what, in retrospect, is a poor artistic choice. ‘The Gateway of the Monster’ is one of Carnacki’s supernatural cases and an excellent introduction to the methods and equipment he employs, combining science and superstition with a camera, an electric pentacle, a water circle, and a cat. Less so, the case introduces the worldview that was so important to Hodgson and the other pioneers of weird fiction and also makes tantalising references to the “Black Veil” and “Moving Fur” investigations.

Carnacki, The Ghost-Finder I: Introduction | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

David Stuart Davies’ introduction to the Wordsworth Editions edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder contains several errors and insists on examining Hodgson as a contemporary of and counterpart to Conan Doyle so I shall replace it with my own here. As editor, Davies also presents the cases out of chronological order without any rationale and this rolling review will discuss each of the nine in the order in which they were originally published. William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an English author who was one of the pioneers of weird fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century and created one of the most famous occult detectives in literature, Thomas Carnacki. Hodgson was a prolific writer, who published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and is probably best known for two of his supernatural horror novels, The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912). He wrote dozens of short stories, across several series that included the Sargasso Sea, Carnacki, and Captain Gault. Hodgson went to sea at the age of fourteen, as a cabin boy, and was a third mate when he left the Merchant Marine in 1899. He used his time as a sailor to become a skilled photographer and his experiences provided material for many of his narratives. Hodgson was also an early bodybuilder and personal trainer, opening the School of Physical Culture in Blackburn on his return to England. In 1913, he married Betty Farnworth (1877-1943), another author, and the couple moved to Sanary-sur-Mer, in France, where the cost of living was cheaper.

Hodgson’s first short story, ‘The Goddess of Death’, was published in The Royal Magazine in April 1904 and is something of a precursor to Carnacki in combining elements of both the horror and crime genres. His first novel, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), is usually classified as horror, although there is no explicit supernatural element and it might just as accurately be described as a tale of survival at sea. Its significance to the speculative fiction canon was recognised when it was reprinted in 1971, as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. While Carnacki was not the first occult detective to appear in print, he was one of the most popular, following Arthur Machen’s (1863-1947) Mr Dyson and Algernon Blackwood’s (1869-1951) Dr John Silence when he first appeared in ‘The Gateway of the Monster’ in 1910. Hodgson’s motivation for Carnacki was apparently exclusively financial and his inspiration Blackwood’s Silence, but there is evidence of a philosophical worldview that is reminiscent of Hodgson’s novels and supports my claim that occult detective fiction is, or was initially, a subgenre of weird fiction. When war broke out, Hodgson and Betty, who, unusually for the time, had no children, returned to England. He was commissioned as second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in 1915, but was seriously injured when he was thrown from a horse and medically discharged the next year. Hodgson volunteered for a second time in 1917, was re-commissioned, and served on the Western Front. He was killed in action at the Fourth Battle of Ypres in April 2018, aged forty. I think it is fair to say that although he was not a great writer, he was a writer with great ideas.

Hodgson published six Carnacki stories during his lifetime, the first five in The Idler from January to May 1910. The sixth, ‘The Thing Invisible’ was published in The New Magazine in January 1912 and collected with the others in the first edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, published by Eveleigh Nash in 1913. Despite Hodgson’s oeuvre being largely forgotten after his death, a seventh Carnacki story, ‘The Haunted Jarvee’ (a ship, not to be confused with ‘jarvey’, a coach), was published in The Premier Magazine in March 1929. There was a revival of interest in him in the nineteen thirties, when he was brought to H.P. Lovecraft’s (1890-1937) attention and praised by him in the second edition of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (serialised in The Fantasy Fan from 1933 to 1935). Hodgson became a favourite of fans of weird fiction and an eighth Carnacki story, ‘The Hog’, was published in Weird Tales in January 1947, the same year that all nine of the stories, including the previously unpublished ‘The Find’, were collected in a second edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, edited by August Derleth and issued by Arkham House. Interestingly, Lovecraft was unimpressed with Carnacki, whose cases he regarded as Hodgson’s worst work. Like the rest of Hodgson’s fiction, Carnacki did not make the transition to other media well and there were only two adaptations of his cases for television, a single episode each in the Pepsi-Cola Playhouse in the US in 1954 and The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes in the UK in 1971.

There was, however, a revival of interest in Carnacki at the end of the century. Several continuations and pastiches were published, in a similar fashion to those of Sherlock Holmes, the most successful of which was No. 472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki, the Untold Stories (1992) by A.F. Kidd and Rick Kennett. William Miekle is the most prolific contemporary Carnacki author and has published four collections to date, the first of which was Carnacki: Heaven and Hell (2010). There have also been two anthologies devoted to Carnacki, Carnacki: The New Adventures (2013) and Carnacki: The Lost Cases (2016), both edited by Sam Gafford, numerous crossovers (including encounters with William Gravel, Doctor Who, Wilhelmina Murray, Sherlock Holmes, and the Lovecraft Mythos), and at least three parodies. Of these later offerings, only Kidd and Kennett’s cases have received consistent praise, with reviewers noting their faithfulness to the original. Unfortunately, interest has declined again and this edition, which was first published in 2006 as part of the Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series, is now out of print, as is No. 472 Cheyne Walk. There are, in fact, no editions of the collected Carnacki from traditional publishers available in print, although several, including this one (and No. 472 Cheyne Walk), are available as ebooks.

Why A Pulp Memoir? – Rafe McGregor

This year marks the emerald anniversary of my first professional sale and publication as an author. I’m not sure why, but I’ve never taken stock of my whole writing ‘career’ (if that’s the right word), which began in earnest four years before that sale, and two decades seems an appropriate (if extremely tardy) time to ask myself whether I’ve succeeded or failed at it. If nothing else, the answer might determine what I do with the next two decades (or, more realistically, whatever part thereof is left).

From one point of view, it’s been a success. By this summer, I’ll have authored twenty books (divided evenly between academic monographs on culture, crime, and politics and small press pulp fiction novels and collections) and three hundred shorter works (including several as editor). While I’d be lying if I said I was proud of every single long and short piece published, I’d defend one of the monographs and one of the short story collections as being right up there with the best. Though two good or better books and a few good articles and short stories isn’t much in twenty years, I’m happy with it. A slight change of perspective, however, tells a very different tale. None of my long or short works have ever been published by the Big Four or elite university presses such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, or Stanford or in periodicals with more than a few thousand readers so I may well be overrating the quality of my oeuvre. A quantitative evaluation is nigh mortifying: none of all those publications made me more than £1,000 and most of them didn’t earn anything at all. Forgetting about the money for a minute, which no professional writer can afford to do, with a mere two exceptions, my estimated readership has been in four figures (or less) for each. If the lack of quantity reflects a lack of quality, then I have indeed overrated myself.

Put like that, I’d have to say I failed, but it’s all too easy to compare oneself to the best-known writers – Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, James Ellroy, China Miéville, etc. – when the reality is that they constitute a tiny percentage of the profession. Let me try a different tack: what was my goal when I set out? To earn a ‘modest’ living from writing fiction and nonfiction which, for reasons I can’t remember, I set at £30,000 per annum in 2006. Given the various financial and cost of living crises since, that would probably be £50,000 now. The latest statistics suggest I set the bar outrageously high. At present, more than four in five novelists in the UK support themselves with other jobs, their median annual income from writing is £7,000 (less than a third of minimum wage), and the income of the top 10% is disproportionally high compared to the rest. I haven’t made £30,000 from writing in twenty years, let alone each year, which simply confirms my failure. In mitigation, in 2006 there was still a ‘mid-list’ of novelists, a host of magazines accepting article or story submissions from unknown authors, and readerships were expanding rather than shrinking, meaning my goal wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds in hindsight. All that has of course changed several times over, courtesy of the digitisation of everyday life, shifts away from reading novels and watching films to online gaming, and the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Perhaps, after all, there is some success in still being able to publish and still getting read, even if by only a few hundred people each time?

Or perhaps I’m asking the wrong question and the issue at stake isn’t success or failure but why I started writing for publication in the first place and why I’m still doing it two decades later? I didn’t start in 2006 to earn £30,000 (I was already making slightly more than that) – I started to earn a modest living by writing. Notwithstanding the failure of that goal, I managed to keep up a steady rate of publication (a book each year and a short work each month) in spite of never having more than 50% of my working week to write, edit, and research. Let me change tack one last time. If, as seems highly likely at the moment, that 50% drops to 0%, what will I do? I’ll do what I did from 2002 to 2006, write on weekends, holidays, nights…whenever time permits…which implies I’m doing it for pleasure. Call me naïve, but when Stephen King writes ‘I did it for the pure joy of the thing’ in On Writing, I believe him and I don’t begrudge a single cent of the many millions he was talented and lucky enough to earn while he was enjoying himself. If the ‘right’ question to ask is why I have spent so much time writing for the last twenty years, then the answer is for the pure joy. And spending that much time doing something enjoyable, something whose product a few thousand other people have enjoyed, is worth doing for as long as time permits.

All of which is why I collected seventy-five of my short nonfiction works in A Pulp Memoir: Essays, Reviews, Interviews 2006-2026. Is it a memoir? Not really, but it does include both my first and most recent publication, spanning the full range of the two decades. There are also autobiographical reflections on my experiences as a writer in the introduction and conclusion, in the three interviews (one from 2009 and two from 2024), and in the essays about my two novels (published in 2009 and 2017). Perhaps I should have called the collection ‘A False Memoir’, except that Jim Harrison beat me to that title fifty-five years ago with Wolf: A False Memoir (which, if anyone is interested, has absolutely nothing to do with the film Wolf, whose screenplay he wrote twenty years later). If it isn’t really a memoir, is it pulp? Most definitely. The essays, reviews, and interviews are divided into four parts, one each on crime, fantasy, weird, and climate fiction. While I don’t regard the popular distinction between artistic and genre fiction as either accurate or useful, as I mention more than once in the collection, much of what I’ve written about would be classified as pulp fiction by most critics, including: Sherlock Holmes across the centuries, the Lone Wolf gamebooks, H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy, and Sharksploitation movies. The earliest pulp fiction character I discuss is H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, who first appeared in King Solomon’s Mines in 1885 and the latest is Ice Cube’s Will Radford, the protagonist of the 2025 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which might just be the worst film I’ve ever seen. And if that doesn’t convince you to take a look, I’m not sure what will…

Notes I Never Wrote – Rafe McGregor

 

A Note on Notes

When I realised I’d published twenty books in twenty years (or, more accurately, will have twenty published or ‘in press’ by the time the anniversary arrives in a few weeks), my next goal was to have all twenty available in one form or another. Thanks to a belated and reluctant engagement with Kindle, I’ve now done that, with the five books that were published as large print paperbacks from 2008 to 2011 available on Amazon as of last month. They are all short and belong to two trilogies of short books. The Captain Jackson crime and espionage thrillers were all published in 2008 (ignoring my two amateurish attempts at self-publishing): The Secret Policeman (a novella), The Secret Agent (a collection of six short stories, originally published from 2007 to 2008), and The Secret Service (another novella). The two Forgotten Stories short horror collections form a trilogy with John Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in March 2010): Eight Weird Tales (September 2010, tales originally published from 2007 to 2010) and Six Strange Cases (February 2011, two of the cases originally published in 2009). These have been available on Kindle since 2024.

As I was putting the finishing touches on The Secret Agent, I realised that the three short story collections were published before a habit I subsequently adopted in imitation of Stephen King, including notes as a postscript. I prefer this to a foreword as there’s no need to avoid spoilers and I love reading other writer’s notes because they often mention the inspiration or origin of the stories – something about which most writers (and many readers) are curious. I wrote a short introduction to Eight Weird Tales, where I identified Conan Doyle, M.R. James, Anthony Hope, and H.P. Lovecraft as my inspirations, but it was so dull that I left it out of the Kindle edition. Instead, I thought I’d present the notes I never wrote here, excluding those on the two Roderick Langham stories, which were collected in The Adventures of Roderick Langham (published by Theaker’s Paperback Library in 2017, complete with notes). That leaves all six stories from The Secret Agent, seven from Eight Weird Tales, and five from Six Strange Cases. 

The Secret Agent

Two: The Captain Jackson stories were all written in a two-year period from 2004 to 2006 and professionally published from 2007 to 2008. As such, they are my oldest work, fiction and nonfiction included, and full of the usual mistakes one associates with a novice author. ‘Two’ was my first published short story, appearing in Hardluck Stories at the beginning of 2007 and is the only one in this collection not to feature Jackson (though I made a weak attempt to frame it as what might now be called a spinoff). It was never intended to be part of the collection, but I needed a sixth story to include and the one I was working on, which would have seen Jackson in Boston, was taking too long to write. I started another one, set in Geneva, but didn’t finish that either and decided to use what I already had, i.e. ‘Two’. The inspiration for the story was something that nearly happened, didn’t, and made me think about what might have happened.

Clock Work: At the core of each of the stories in The Secret Agent is a single action scene and, in retrospect, I was very naïve to assume that writing these well would be enough to sell them for professional rates. The scene at the centre of this story was inspired by the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by two Special Operations Executive agents, in Prague-Libeň in June 1942. I learned about it from a military history magazine that would inspire several short stories and articles, which I first read in a Starbucks in Oxford, which explains the setting. Heydrich was probably the most dangerous of all of Hitler’s inner circle and would later be the subject of a Roderick Langham memoir, The Naval Cadet. The story was also published as ‘Murder by Numbers’.

Contre Temps: Many of the locations in The Secret Agent (and The Secret Service) were places that my wife and I visited while on holiday in our first few years of living together. (We lived near an airport in the days of the 99p ticket.) This narrative was inspired by a disappointing trip to Quebec. (In fairness, Quebec was fine; it was Quebec City that was a disappointment.) ‘Contre Temps’ was the first time I tried something different with the Jackson short stories because the action scene at its core never happens: Megan misses Jackson in consequence of her monolingualism, which almost certainly works out better for both her and Ashley (yes, this is the spinoff connection). While I don’t think it’s the best, it is the most widely read of all the Jackson stories courtesy of its appearance in a trade paperback collection of crime fiction.

Fall Guy: I think it’s fair to say that most inspiration for stories, whether they end up being long or short, requires a minimum of two sources, a literal coincidence of some sort. In this case, the combination was a misadventure while skiing and reading Tess Gerritsen’s The Apprentice (2002), the second novel in her Rizzoli & Isles series. I can’t remember which came first, but it doesn’t matter because the second event resonated with the first and I had enough to start writing. Subsequently, I was lucky enough to meet Dr Gerritsen briefly. A clever, kind, charming woman who is very generous with her time and was treated appallingly by Alfonso Cuarón and Hollywood with regard to the blockbuster feature film, Gravity (2013). Her chapter in Hollywood vs. the Author (2018) is quite harrowing.

The Secret Agent: This is the longest Jackson short story at eight and a half thousand words and might be more accurately categorised as a novelette, i.e. somewhere in between a short story and a novella. ‘The Secret Agent’ is the first and only time I’ve set out to write a narrative of that length and it was also the first of all eight of the Jackson stories to be professionally published (The Secret Policeman and The Secret Service were both initially self-published, in 2005 and 2006 respectively). The scene at its core is a story told to me by a colleague some years before the writing and to this day I’m still not sure if he made it up or not. The coincidence that turned a scene into a story was the 7/7 bombings, during which my wife and I were in London (albeit very far from harm).

Hit and Miss: The last Jackson story to be written and published and the last in the chronology, which is: The Secret Policeman, ‘Clock Work’, ‘Contre Temps’, ‘Fall Guy’, ‘The Secret Agent’, and The Secret Service. The inspiration is the most banal of any of these notes. While possessed of many virtues, not the least of which is putting up with me for so long, my wife is indeed messy. She left a hammer outside the garage one day. I picked it up with thoughts of how it could have been used to break into the garage or house and then reversed direction, thinking how fortuitous it would have been if it had been left on the other side of a break-in. By the time this happened, I’d already been considering how many of Jackson’s enemies might want to interrupt his retirement and how they would go about it.

Eight Weird Tales

The Letters of Reverend Dyer: As will be apparent from both The Adventures of Roderick Langham and The Memoirs of Roderick Langham (forthcoming from Theaker’s Paperback Library), I’ve been fascinated by Whitby, the Yorkshire Coast, and North-East Yorkshire in its entirety for a long time. This story was inspired by Whitby, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu cycle, and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s ‘The Drowned Geologist (1898)’, which was first published in Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! in 2003. I spent a very enjoyable day researching it at the Whitby Museum, which was then and is still run by the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society. ‘The Letters of Reverend Dyer’ was my first attempt at writing speculative fiction.

Fleet: The inspiration was a curious combination of unrelated things: my return to university as a mature student, James’ ghost stories, a comment I’d read about one of his stories (I can’t remember either which story or where I read the comment), and an interest in medieval military orders. Though I visited the location of the final scene, I couldn’t see any sign of the Templar priory at all and remain unsure as to whether I was in exactly the right place. After my wife and I moved to the East Riding of Yorkshire, I spent some time exploring the surrounds, but many of these excursions were conducted in haste and at a time when information on the internet was relatively limited and smartphones restricted to the rich.

The Signal Station: One of the locations I did manage to find and visited several times over many years of days and occasionally nights spent in Scarborough. Not the least of the fascinations of North-East Yorkshire for me is the Roman occupation, although very little evidence of it remains. The inspirations are Lovecraft again, the series of comics and graphic novels that feature the Irish hero Sláine MacRoth and were first published in 2000 AD in 1983 and in Warrior’s Dawn in 2005, and the first year of my postgraduate studies. I did attempt to visit all of the signal station sights in my travels, but – once again – can’t be certain if I wasn't in the wrong place for one or two of them. The story was also published as ‘The Chapel on the Headland’ and is revisited in ‘The Screaming Man’.

Devil’s Own: Another location I visited, though my tour of the Towton battlefield was very haphazard and probably missed at least one important site. While the UK’s most brutal battle can hardly be called banal, the coincidence that inspired the story was, simply, that either shortly before or shortly after my excursion, I saw a military history book with ‘blood-soaked soil’ in the title. (I can’t remember which title and I’m sure there are many anyway.) A more insightful observation might be that another of my fascinations with North-East Yorkshire is the way in which there is so much under the soil – foundations, fossils, gemstones, and…bones. The story was also published as ‘Black Mac Sween’ and is revisited in ‘The Red Trees’.

Spurn: The geography and history of Spurn (the Spurn peninsular) and Spurn Point (Spurn Head) are both intriguing and I won’t bore readers with either here. Like Towton, I know I found the right place but am less certain that I saw everything I came for. The location aside, the inspiration was a combination of several things: a pamphlet I picked up somewhere in the East Riding about the drowned city of Ravenser Odd, Mark Valentine’s notes on one of his Connoisseur short stories (I can’t remember where the notes were published), and some very shoddy historical research on my part. In 2022, the precise location of Ravenser Odd was discovered and there was an exhibition at the Hull History Centre in 2024. Unfortunately, by that time I was living on the other side of the country and wasn’t able to visit. The story was also published as ‘The Stones at Spurn Point’.

Murder in the Minster: This is a Ruritanian pastiche and its inspirations are: Hope’s originals, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), Rupert of Hentzau (1895), and the lesser known The Heart of Princess Osra (1896); the various homages that have followed, including John Haythorne’s The Strelsau Dimension (1981) and John Spurling’s After Zenda (1995); and a website called The Ruritanian Resistance. If anyone notices a correspondence between Rassendyll and Bauer on the one hand and Forrester and Jackson on the other, it’s because this story could – and perhaps should – have been another Jackson outing. At the time of writing, I was disappointed with the lack of commercial success I was having and thought I’d try something different. The location is based on a visit to Howden Minster, which also appears in ‘Spurn’.

Letter from the Helmand: This is the most unlikely source of inspiration I can imagine and also the most shameful. I went through a brief stage of reading the autobiographies of retired generals, which were usually disappointing as most had prioritised promotion over action and most toed the party line in their narratives because they had too much to lose. One of my selections was It Doesn't Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (1992), which I read shortly before or after reading about the first combat death of a British soldier during the War in Afghanistan (in 2006). Schwarzkopf mentions a story he wrote while at West Point, in which he deliberately and cleverly conflated two wars nearly two millennia apart. I pretty much plagiarised the whole thing, compounding my crime by plagiarising Doyle, who begins his most famous series with a military doctor returning from…Afghanistan.

Six Strange Cases 

The Short Spoon: This was originally intended to be the first in a mystery series that would feature a retired police detective and have more of a commercial appeal than the Jackson short stories. The problem was that even in its leanest version the story was a novelette, significantly limiting the paying markets to which it could be submitted. At about the same time, I started what was intended to be a noir novel, one that might end up as either a crime thriller with an occult atmosphere or an occult thriller with a detective protagonist. The retired detective mystery was absorbed into the Titus Farrow novel, which gave me about sixteen thousand words of work-in-progress. When my literary agent couldn’t sell Bloody Reckoning (eventually published by Lume Books in 2017), I suggested The Short Spoon, but she wasn’t interested in anything that crossed genres. I didn’t want to waste all that writing, however, and thought it could be published in a collection rather than a magazine, which was how Six Strange Cases was conceived.

Meet El Presidente: ‘The Facts of the Demon Barber’s Demise’ aside, ‘Meet El Presidente’ is probably my worst short story and its origin is at least partly responsible for that. In contrast, there is nothing wrong with the inspiration: over a decade, I kept coming across the phrase ‘el presidente’ in unusual and incompatible contexts (unusual if you don’t speak Spanish, which I don’t) and started thinking about whether there was a thematic link. I could have made a respectable narrative out of that idea given enough time, but I was in a rush to publish Six Strange Cases. So I combined the offcuts of The Short Spoon that I hadn’t used in ‘The Short Spoon’ with parts of an unfinished story that was called ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ and threw it all into something that was more pot than plot. All unfortunate because the inspiration was promising and ‘Knight of the Black Cross’ was shaping up to be one of my better tales.

The Month of the Wolf: Very obviously inspired by my many visits to and stays in Whitby and my longstanding interest in the Black Dog phenomenon. Less obviously, the story has its origins in a cycle of stories that begins with Lovecraft’s ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1936), continues with Robert Bloch’s ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’ (first published in Weird Tales in 1950), and concludes (for now) with Hall’s Five Forgotten Stories. Like almost everything in this collection and much of what I was writing at the time, this was rushed to publication and I felt I’d once again wasted a promising premise. I was thus very pleased to have a revised and improved version, ‘The Barghest’, published several years later. I have a third version planned, though I doubt I’ll ever write it.

Blue Mail: Notwithstanding the Roderick Langham adventure in Six Strange Cases, this is the only story that was previously published. Notwithstanding a different Roderick Langham adventure, ‘Blue Mail’ is also the best short fiction I have written. That surprises me for at least two reasons. First, I’ve already explained the dubious origins of Farrow in my notes on ‘The Short Spoon’ and ‘Meet El Presidente’. He was my attempt to write noir, which is not my forte, and the first and third narratives in which he appeared were bits and pieces cobbled together from unfinished work. What were the chances this outing would be any better? Second, I have absolutely no idea what inspired ‘Blue Mail’ other than several pleasant visits to Cornwall and St Ives. What turns another pedestrian outing for Farrow into something that I hope is quite good is the ‘twist’ in the middle, who is blackmailing whom, and I just can’t remember how or why it came to me.

The Facts of the Demon Barber’s Demise: I’m pretty sure this is my worst short story. It was rejected everywhere I sent it, including by a publication that was specifically seeking absurd, nonsense, bizarre, or surreal stories (whose title escapes me now). It is also my only attempt to write flash fiction and that’s probably for the best. Having said all that it hardly seems to matter what my inspiration was, but I may as well finish the full set of notes. Once again, there was a coincidence and this particular combination was learning about Russell’s paradox (sets that are not sets of themselves) in a logic class shortly after watching Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), which my wife enjoyed but I didn’t. No, I didn’t force her to read the story as payback and no, I still don’t understand Russell’s paradox.

The Wolf of Whindale: A Tale of Northalbion | review by Rafe McGregor

 

The Wolf of Whindale: A Tale of Northalbion by Jacob Kerr

Serpent’s Tail, hardback, £16.99, October 2025, ISBN 9781800811522

 

It’s difficult to pinpoint The Wolf of Whindale in terms of genre. I’ve seen it advertised as both ‘folk horror’ and ‘gothic horror’. I can see why publicists or reviewers would choose one or both of these classifications, but neither is accurate. Is the novel even a horror story? Probably, but there are also elements of fantasy, especially if one takes the evocation of wonder as definitive of that genre. This difficulty should have been my first clue that it is in fact – and by my own definition – a weird tale, i.e. a fictional narrative that is philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. Does it have a worldview? Yes, definitely, albeit one that is admirably subtle, rising to the surface on rare occasions so as entangle the reader in a distinctly perspectival frame of reference. The antagonist, you see, is not just a medieval monster, but a modern one, a vampiric exploiter of the oppressed who might have leapt straight out of the pages of Karl Marx’s Capital (a Marxist pamphlet called First Principles of Political Economy also makes an appearance). Like many weird tales from the previous century, the story is also occult detective fiction and the horror and mystery elements are integrated effectively and efficiently.

The Wolf of Whindale is Jacob Kerr’s second novel, following The Green Man of Eshwood Hall (published in 2022, also by Serpent’s Tail), and is set in the same universe, an alternative Northumbria (the northeast of England, close to the Scottish border) called Northalbion. This is, I think, the purpose of the subtitle, which is otherwise superfluous. Where The Green Man of Eshwood Hall is set in Northalbion in 1962, the main narrative of The Wolf of Whindale takes place a century before, in 1845. There are seventeen chapters, including the prologue, which – along with three other chapters – are excerpts from a lecture on Mithras, a Roman deity popular with the soldiers occupying Britannia, delivered by Dr Erasmus Wintergreen in 1916. The rest of the chapters are narrated in the first person by Caleb Malarkey, a twenty-four-year-old lead miner and autodidact who suffers from seizures that might be epilepsy…or something more sinister. Caleb’s chapters, which constitute most of the novel, are written in a vernacular (or, perhaps more accurately, in the representation of a vernacular) that is perfectly pitched, with Kerr avoiding distracting punctuation and idiosyncratic diction. (For those that do get a little lost, though I can’t imagine many will, there is a glossary located between the final chapter and the acknowledgements.) Caleb plunges his audience into a world where hard manual labour is the norm, promoted and perpetuated by the austerity of ubiquitous Christianity, and there is a rigid social division between workers and owners, also with the church’s agreement and approval. 

Caleb’s narrative is set in motion very quickly, when the union steward in Caleb’s gang of miners is found dead on Windy Top, his body mutilated and head severed. His death follows the disappearance of another local union official three months before and both incidents have been connected to the eponymous wolf, which may or may not be anything more than a legend. Caleb’s sceptical reflection on the two incidents is one of Kerr’s first revelations of the novel’s worldview: ‘The illogic of it all overwhelmed me, and, though still light-headed from my seizure, I sat up and found myself holding forth on how the deaths of two such fellows, both leaders of combinations of miners, was an almighty coincidence, and that this wolf’s palate was certainly a dainty one in preferring flavours that secured the interests of the status quo.’ When the miners go on strike, they are beaten up by ex-soldiers and replaced with Welshmen. Caleb proves the accuracy of his self-description as a contrary and cantankerous chap by crossing the picket line and joining the ‘blacklegs’. The narrative presses forward into its complication when Caleb’s colleagues punish him for his disloyalty. Disowned by his mother and sister and despised by his neighbours, he leaves The Uplands for the Sill. The Sill, which is to the west of Northalbion, is a vast mine owned by a man named Master Siskin, who seems happy to employ anyone and everyone on an indefinite basis and has no shortage of work to offer. Once Caleb reaches the Sill, he finds out that it is an excavation rather than a mine and that the labourers have been hunting for a Mithraic artefact called the Knack. He meets the Welsh miners, who moved on after the strike, joins the dig, and eventually finds the Knack, after which he is taken to Siskin’s stately home, Brink House.

Before Caleb leaves The Uplands, there is mention of the Laidly Worm (of Spindleston Heugh or Bamborough), a Northumbrian shapeshifter in which I have a particular interest, and it made me think about Kerr’s options in terms of the wolf as one of England’s black dog legends, a subject on which I’ve written for nearly twenty years now. Essentially, there are only three choices: either the dog/wolf is corporeal (a particularly large and savage specimen of its species, as in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) or it is a ghost that can only scare people to death (the case with the Barghest and Black Shuck, England’s most famous black dogs) or it is a werewolf (my favourite example of which is Stephen King’s novella, Cycle of the Werewolf). Kerr plays with these different options very cleverly, teasing his readers with different takes on each – including whether there is any dog/wolf at all – before disclosing the truth, which is both complex and satisfying. This disclosure, however, is my sole criticism of the novel. There is a full chapter of retrospective exposition fairly late (chapter 10, the eleventh of seventeen), while Caleb is a guest and prisoner in Brink House and in spite of being fascinating, it almost grinds the tale to a premature halt. Notwithstanding, Kerr compensates with both a neat twist concerning Caleb’s work at the Sill and a heightening of the stakes when the Prince of Wales and his entourage arrive. The resolution is masterful, drawing together all of the murder mystery, the confrontation with the monster, and the relationship between Caleb’s narrative and Dr Wintergreen’s lecture. Overall, The Wolf of Whindale is a complete success, a rare example of a contemporary weird tale well-told and an exemplar for other tellers of weird tales to follow. 

Borderlands and Otherworlds & Sphinxes and Obelisks | review by Rafe McGregor

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.

Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between VII: Appendix – Rafe McGregor

The seventh of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post provides notes on a new series from the British Library, the cases of Kyle Murchison Booth, and the Southern Reach Quartet.

 

The Weird Tale: The British Library Tales of the Weird

Somewhat to my shame, I only discovered the British Library series while researching this series of posts. I really should have seen it sooner as it has been going since 2018 and published fifty-three titles to date (roughly one a month). The books are all sturdy paperbacks, with colourful, imaginative, and attractive covers and spines and cost £10 or less, depending on where and how one buys them. Each instalment includes a ‘Note from the Publisher’, which serves as a combined trigger warning and ethical rationale and which I reproduce here as exemplary practice:

The original short stories reprinted in the British Library Tales of the Weird series were written and published in a period ranging across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are many elements of these stories which continue to entertain modern readers; however, in some cases there are also uses of language, instances of stereotyping and some attitudes expressed by narrators or characters which may not be endorsed by the publishing standards of today. We acknowledge therefore that some elements in the stories selected for reprinting may continue to make uncomfortable reading for some of our audience. With this series British Library Publishing aims to offer a new readership a chance to read some of the rare material of the British Library’s collections in an affordable paperback format, to enjoy their merits and to look back into the worlds of the past two centuries as portrayed by their writers. It is not possible to separate these stories from the history of their writing and as such the following stories are presented as they were originally published with minor edits only, made for consistency of style and sense.

My only complaint, which prompted me to include this part of the appendix, is that there are no numbers on or in the books, meaning that it isn’t easy to read them in order. I’m sure there is a sound reason for this editorial decision, but all collectors and some readers will want a chronological list. There’s one on Medium compiled by Owen Williams, which is easier to navigate than the British Library’s and which I used as a guide in compiling my own:  

1. From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea 
2. Haunted Houses: Two Novels by Charlotte Riddell 
3. Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories
4. Mortal Echoes: Encounters With the End 
5. Spirits of the Season: Christmas Hauntings
6. The Platform Edge: Uncanny Tales of the Railways
7. The Face in the Glass and Other Gothic Tales by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
8. The Weird Tales of William Hope Hodgson
9. Doorway to Dilemma: Bewildering Tales of Dark Fantasy
10. Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic
11. Promethean Horrors: Classic Stories of Mad Science
12. Roarings from Further Out: Four Weird Novellas by Algernon Blackwood
13. Tales of the Tattooed: An Anthology of Ink 
14. The Outcast and Other Dark Tales by E.F. Benson
15. A Phantom Lover and Other Dark Tales by Vernon Lee
16. Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City
17. Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain
18. Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird
19. Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season
20. Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird 
21. Heavy Weather: Tempestuous Tales of Stranger Climes
22. Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth
23. Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird 
24. Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land’s End 
25. I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales of R. Murray Gilchrist
26. Randalls Round: Nine Nightmares by Eleanor Scott 
27. Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights 
28. The Shadows on the Wall: Dark Tales by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
29. The Ghost Slayers: Thrilling Tales of Occult Detection 
30. The Night Wire and Other Tales of Weird Media 
31. Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles 
32. The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan
33. Spectral Sounds: Unquiet Tales of Acoustic Weird 
34. Haunters of the Hearth: Eerie Tales for Christmas Nights
35. Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World’s Ends
36. The Flaw in the Crystal and Other Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair
37. The Ways of Ghosts and Other Dark Tales by Ambrose Bierce
38. Holy Ghosts: Classic Tales of the Ecclesiastical Uncanny 
39. The Uncanny Gastronomic: Strange Tales of the Edible Weird 
40. The Lure of Atlantis: Strange Tales from the Sunken Continent 
41. Dead Drunk: Tales of Intoxication and Demon Drinks 
42. The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
43. Roads of Destiny and Other Stories of Alternative Histories and Parallel Realms 
44. Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites
45. Doomed Romances: Strange Tales of Uncanny Love 
46. The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension by Jessie Douglas Kerruish
47. Fear in the Blood: Tales from the Dark Lineages of the Weird 
48. Out of the Past: Tales of Haunting History 
49. The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson
50. Deadly Dolls: Midnight Tales of Uncanny Playthings
51. The Human Chord by Algernon Blackwood
52. Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen
53. The Haunted Trail: Classic Tales of the Rambling Weird

 There are three more titles due for publication, all by the end of this year:

54. The Weird Tales of Dorothy K. Haynes 
55. The Haunted Vintage by Marjorie Bowen 
56. Summoned to the Séance: Spirit tales from Beyond the Veil 

 

The Occult Detective Story: Kyle Murchison Booth

 In parts III and IV of this series, I praised Sarah Monette’s Kyle Murchison Booth occult detective stories and mentioned that some are, unfortunately, difficult to find. The eighteen stories have been published over a period of twenty years (2003-2023), during which two books have been published: The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth (2007; second edition, 2011), a collection of ten short stories, and A Theory of Haunting (2023), a novella and the most recent story. This is a chronological list of all eighteen, with the original date of publication in parenthesis and my suggestion for the easiest way to find them… 

1. The Wall of Clouds (2003) – The Bone Key
2. The Venebretti Necklace (2004) – The Bone Key
3. The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox (2004) – The Bone Key
4. Bringing Helena Back (2004) – The Bone Key
5. The Green Glass Paperweight (2004) – The Bone Key
6. Wait for Me (2004) – The Bone Key
7. Elegy for a Demon Lover (2005) – The Bone Key
8. Drowning Palmer (2006) – The Bone Key
9. The Bone Key (2007) – The Bone Key
10. Listening to Bone (2007) – The Bone Key
11. The World Without Sleep (2008) – Somewhere Beneath Those Waves
12. The Yellow Dressing Gown (2008) – Apex
13. The Replacement (2008) – Sarah Monette
14. White Charles (2009) – Clarkesworld
15. To Die for Moonlight (2013) – Apex
16. The Testimony of Dragon’s Teeth (2018) – Uncanny
17. The Haunting of Dr. Claudius Winterson (2022) – Uncanny
18. A Theory of Haunting (2023) – A Theory of Haunting 

…I only hope that there are many more to come.

 

The Ecological Weird: Absolution

Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy – consisting of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, all published in 2014 – becomes a quartet tomorrow, with the UK release of Absolution in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and Audible. My original intention for this appendix was to provide a synopsis or summary of the trilogy for those who might not want to reread all three books before starting the fourth, but nonetheless need a reminder of the sequence of events. (This is what I wanted, in spite of having read the trilogy several times and having no doubt that I would return to it and the quartet in future.) To cut a long story short, I failed dismally, and will poach Mac Rogers’ reason: ‘There’s really no way to give the Southern Reach pitch without sounding high, so I won’t try.’ I do, however, recommend the first part of Adam Roberts’ review of the trilogy, which provides the best summary I could find with limited spoilers. (The second part is also worth reading, although it’s more interpretative than descriptive.) There was chatter some time ago about a prequel to the Southern Reach and it’s not quite clear whether Absolution is a prequel, sequel, paraquel, or some combination of these categories (reminding me of Heat 2, which nearly ruined one of my favourite films). Here is what VanderMeer himself has to say on his website:

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, the surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s blockbuster Southern Reach Trilogy.
When the Southern Reach Trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestsellers list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.
And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?
Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

I’m not sure that either more closure or more exposition are required or will enhance the trilogy as it stands, but I am confident that VanderMeer won’t ruin the masterpiece he created a decade ago. So far, there have been surprisingly few advance reviews: Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Scientific American.

 

More Recommended Reading

Fiction

John Hall (ed.), Five Forgotten Stories (2011).

Rafe McGregor, Eight Weird Tales (2024).

Rafe McGregor, Six Strange Cases (2024).

Nonfiction

Stephen Ellcock & Mat Osman, England on Fire: A Visual Journey through Albion's Psychic Landscape (2022).

Mark Valentine, The Thunder-Storm Collectors (2024).

Timothy Murphy, William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark (2025).