Category: Ex Occidente
Review – An Emporium of Automata
D.P. Watt
Each year here at Speculative Fiction Junkie ends with a Top 5 Reads post. Many of the books that make these lists have been reviewed here during the previous twelve months, but occasionally a book is included on the list that has no accompanying review. This was the case with D.P. Watt’s stunningly excellent collection An Emporium of Automata, which was initially printed in a very limited print run by Ex Occidente Press. It beat out some serious competition to make it onto my Top 5 Reads of 2010 list, so when I learned that Eibonvale Press would be reprinting an expanded edition of the collection, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to give this collection the review it deserves.
This edition of Emporium collects most of D.P. Watt’s short stories that have been published to date and includes three stories that were published after the collection’s initial Ex Occidente Press run. While there are a few that do not leave much of an impression, a majority of them are outstanding works of weird fiction.
“Of Those Who Follow Emile Bilonche” has been a favorite of mine since I first read it a few years ago. It is an engrossing tale of one man’s descent into madness as a result of his obsession with the elusive works of one Emile Bilonche. Irrational obsessions are a frequent subject of weird fiction, but this tale is especially effective because of the slow revelation that despite the protagonist’s high praise for Bilonche, he actually knows almost nothing about him.
Another excellent story is “Room 89.” On the surface, it is a horror story involving a haughty academic vacationing on the Isle of Wight. But beneath the surface, something far more interesting is going on. A closer reading reveals the protagonist to be unwittingly ambling through a carnival fun house hall of mirrors bursting with disorienting reflections, only some of which are accurate. In this respect, the “Room 89” is a perfect example of the way in which Mr. Watt’s fiction can work on multiple levels.
A final favorite is the first story by Mr. Watt I ever read, “Dr. Dapertutto’s Saturnalia.” This tale opens with a Soviet Inspector being outraged when he receives a package containing a roll of film from Dr. Dapertutto, self-described “Direktor, Entertainer, Reveller, Charlatan and Misanthrope.” To the Inspector, this is the most “blatant and insolent manifestation of bourgeois decadence” he has ever encountered. When a subordinate sent to arrest Dr. Dapertutto returns and reports that the theater had been destroyed the previous November for staging “theatre of a form unfit for the education and betterment of the Soviet State,” the Inspector decides that he must watch the film and seek out the Direktor himself. The theatrically violent scene that plays out on the film contrasts sharply with the regimented worldview of the Inspector, but the thing that makes this story so effective is the brutally stark way in which the Direktor, rather than the Inspector, is revealed to be the true master of the story’s world.
These stories make clear that Mr. Watt is a master storyteller in every sense of the word, but–as you should expect by now–there is actually more going on here than simple storytelling. Consider a story like “They Dwell in Ystumtuen.” It begins with a bored and distracted historian trying to recall the details of a public hanging that took place in 19th century Britain. But this image is then juxtaposed with the heart-wrenchingly tragic and brutally violent story of what actually happened to the person who was hanged. The contrast couldn’t be clearer and Mr. Watt states it plainly:
Imagine, if you can, dear reader (mindful, kind or otherwise) the infinite neglect of history by the historian. Imagine the millions of lives heaping up, untold, forgotten, yet undead in the graveyard of memory; begging, or praying, with skeletal hands to be brought back to mind, if only for an instant.
This is as concise and as beautifully written a statement as one can find of a theme that seems to be a near obsession of Mr. Watt’s, which is the overwhelming weight of the absent mass of humanity that has been lost over the ages. This same concern is seen in “The Condition,” when a character exclaims that “There is nothing remaining that has not had its song darkened by this century’s deeds. The world will have to begin art again. And from what it has lost it will realise the value of everything.” Another beautiful illustration of this theme can be found in “Beware the Dust!” from The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller (review here) and indeed this is a theme intricately woven throughout much of Mr. Watt’s work.
This preoccupation with not just the humanity before us but with all of the individual humans who are absent is, I believe, at the root of several of the other strengths of Mr. Watt’s work, including the extreme beauty of his prose and the way that his narrators directly address the reader. While these traits obviously owe a debt to the author’s roots in the theater, their real impetus is the urgency that results from the dizzying work of confronting such a terrible vision.
An Emporium of Automata is a truly landmark collection and is as rich a treasure as literature is capable of producing.
The True First
An Emporium of Automata was first published by Ex Occidente Press in 2010 in a limited edition of 150 copies. Thankfully, Eibonvale Press has done the world the service of republishing the book as both a hardcover and a paperback, with an electronic copy to follow shortly. I purchased a hardcover copy and was very impressed with the physical quality of the book, my first from Eibonvale.
[This review was not based on a review copy]
Review – The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller
D.P. Watt
After reading D.P. Watt’s debut collection Pieces for Puppets and Other Cadavers (review here) a few years ago, I was struck by how little attention it was garnering. The situation was much the same by the time I read his follow up collection, An Emporium of Automata. Lately, however, I have seen Mr. Watt’s work mentioned more frequently and I think he is slowly gaining the reputation he undoubtedly deserves as one of the best authors of weird fiction working today.
It had been a while since I had read anything new by Mr. Watt so I was anxious to get hold of his latest effort, The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller. I read the book. Then I reread it. Then I reread it again. And then I read it a fourth time. I even discussed it with others before writing this review, which is something I don’t normally do. After all of that, I’m still not sure I’m any closer to fully grasping its greater depths. What I can say is that it is an entrancingly beautiful and puzzling book, one that begs to be reread and pondered.
There are three main characters in The Ten Dictates, two of whom are dead. It is probably easiest to mention the unnamed narrator first, because it is he who connects the other two characters. These other two are Alfred Tesseller and an unnamed person who is the audience for the narrator’s account. I call this person “the Audience” rather than “the Reader” because the Narrator talks to him as though he is not a generic reader but instead a particular person who shares a history with the other two characters and who can be interacted with. The very first paragraph in the novella will give you a sense of what I’m talking about:
You remember Alfred Tesseller — the quiet one who arrived, all those years ago, in our decrepit country classroom. He had that accent that was so strange and yet so enchanting. We thought his family were ancient gypsies and the tales we told about him rivalled any myth performed around immortal fires. You must remember him!
As the book opens, the Narrator recounts for the Audience how he met Alfred Tesseller in the place that the latter had instructed him to:
There in the undergrowth I found his body, preparing himself for transformation.
But Alfred Tesseller could never be content with the ease of death. He has many places left to visit, and many decades to dismantle. The low hum of working insects around him jittered into words and through them he told me what I would do for him.
And as I grappled with maddening thoughts I rifled his corpse. I do not wish to unnerve you, merely to pass on the few lines I found in his notebook before his metamorphosis, or should I say resurrection, began.
They are simple words, written in the beauty of his flowing foreign script.
In the next few pages, we learn that the Narrator’s own death is what enabled him to accompany Alfred Tesseller on his journey backwards through history:
Beyond the fear we learned brotherly love for all the rotten things of this earth, and many others. We learned how to cascade through memories and fall through lives. Initially my spirit reeled with the monstrosity of this new existence–how at each moment I might collide with Alfred Tesseller’s form and inhabit him as he strode through history. In other moments he set me free, like some demented dog. On our first dreadful journey I learned the loneliness of war.
What follows is a series of loosely related vignettes, glimpses of Alfred Tesseller’s and the Narrator’s journey back through human history, to such places as a World War I battlefield, a bombed out city, a hospital room, an ancient Mediterranean religious ceremony, and more. These are told in some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever encountered. Consider this, for example:
I was death–no longer my own futile erasure but all possible deaths. I illuminated her own death–so hidden from each of us but so entirely our own–and she reflected back my own impossible moment in pupils now dark and wide. Two deaths for me, meeting somewhere far back in her brain to fuse into an image–a moment of cognition that silently sounded out my departure.
Despite the beauty of the prose, however, part of the reason I read the novella four times is because from time to time it can be difficult to understand what is actually happening from one page to the next. And while I understand that obsessively grasping for the finite in a work such as this can be counterproductive, I found myself wishing that Mr. Watt would have provided the reader with a little more explanation as to what was happening, even if this had diminished somewhat the book’s poetic power.
Because my understanding of The Ten Dictates is necessarily filtered through my only partial understanding of it, I may be completely off base when I say this but in my opinion the book’s chief effect on the reader is to convey a mystical sense of the wholeness and completeness of all of the many dramas acted out by humanity over the millennia. Mr. Watt accomplishes this feat by juxtaposing some of our disparate highs and lows with one another and by revealing the illusory nature of time by speeding it up. Take the following for example:
I lay here in the mud trapped inside the bloating body of Alfred Tesseller, strung upon the wire. Beside me lies a broken revolver, a musket, a cannon, a halberd, a sword, a dagger, a club–each mutating into each other as the landscape collapses into fields of grass, expanses of desert, swamps, ruined buildings crumbling into jungle palms.
The result is that the reader is forced to view these scenes from a far greater distance than is ordinarily possible and cannot help but see them as the stuff of myth and drama.
I am sure that there is a lot that I am missing about this most interesting book. I attribute most of this to my own failings as a reviewer and perhaps a small bit to the inscrutability of the book itself. Perhaps I am not alone in having this reaction: while I have seen several enthusiastic reactions to the book, I have yet to come across a single intelligible review of it anywhere. D.P. Watt is one of my favorite writers, and this book shows that he is not afraid to take his work in bold new directions. The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller contains more of what makes D.P. Watt’s voice such a powerful one: prose that is almost unbearably beautiful and a way of speaking to his audience so directly that it lends the work a seldom encountered intensity. I only wish that the book was a little more comprehensible.
The True First
The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller was first published by Ex Occidente Press in 2012 in a limited edition of 171 copies.
[This review was not based on a review copy]
Review – This Hermetic Legislature
Dan Ghetu & D.P. Watt (Editors)
If short stories in general are under appreciated by the reading public, then I think short stories written and collected as an homage to a particular author are even more so. I have no real proof to support this suspicion, but if you search the Internet for reviews of such collections, I suspect that you’ll find that there are far fewer out there than there are for single author collections.
This Hermetic Legislature: A Homage to Bruno Schulz is the third homage volume from Ex Occidente Press. The first, Cinnabar’s Gnosis, was an homage to Gustav Meyrink, and as I am not a huge Meyrink fan I gave it a rather cursory read at best. The second homage volume, The Master in Cafe Morphine, was a tribute to Mikhail Bulgakov, and as I have never read anything by Mr. Bulgakov before, I passed this one up completely. Bruno Schulz, by contrast, is a writer I am more familiar with and as such, I thought it was time to finally see what these Ex Occidente homages are really all about.
I am by no means a Schulz scholar, but I have read and enjoyed his two major works and am of course familiar with his infamous murder by a Nazi officer. And while I am sure that many of the nuances and references contained within the stories contained in This Hermetic Legislature escaped me, I grasped enough to really appreciate what a wonderful job the editors and authors have done of paying tribute to the vision and style of Schulz. Some of these tales pay tribute to Schulz by including him as a character or reworking events in his life; others do so by telling stories in what one might call Schulzian prose. All of them, though, contribute in one way or another to the formation of a picture of the regrettably absent man and his work.
To me, the two main characteristics that distinguish Schulz’s work from the work of others are its extreme nostalgia for lost days and its intense playfulness with the laws of time and nature. While these two facets are separate in a sense and are each fully mature in their own right, they also work together in a way that is almost magical. Nostalgic tales of lost youth are not simply retold but are instead transformed through Schulz’s willingness to tinker with time and natural laws into myths. And this playfulness with reality often works to transcend the inescapable sadness that is inevitably at the heart of much of Schulz’s work.
As I mentioned above, each of the stories in this collection contributes in some measure to the overall project, but four stories in particular are worth singling out. Surprisingly, none of the four was written by Speculative Fiction Junkie favorites Mark Samuels, D.P. Watt, or R.B. Russell even though all three contributed pieces to the collection. Instead, all four were penned by authors whose work has never been reviewed here before. These four stories are among the best short stories I have ever read.
The first is the extremely nostalgic “Letters in Black Wood” by Joel Lane. In it, a man recalls the time spent with his father in his youth, and the hole left when not only the father but the whole world that the family inhabited together is gone. Mr. Lane’s prose is so poetically evocative and beautiful that my eyes nearly burned out when I read this story. I will definitely be reviewing more work by Mr. Lane in the future and can’t really explain why I haven’t done so yet.
On the more playful end of the Schulzian spectrum is the marvelously imaginative “The Messiah of the Mannequins” by Rhys Hughes. It is the story of a clockmaker in a town populated by deformed individuals who decides to animate all of the town’s mannequins because he is convinced that the imminent return of a comet means that the mannequins’ Messiah will soon make an appearance. The vibrancy of the town is reminiscent of the locales that appear in Schulz’s work, as is the playfulness of the plot and the way that Mr. Hughes bends the conventions of normality. Statements like “Unlike so many fanatics, Barabas had a conscience; but he kept it in a jar at home and never took it out with him on a mission” are found throughout.
Another story that will forever be one of my favorites is “With Shadow All the Marble Steps” by Oliver Smith, who I have never heard of before. While it addresses some very weighty matters at points, it is on the whole a playful tale and has absolutely hilarious moments. It takes place in Argentina and opens with a government spy enjoying breakfast with the man he has been assigned to spy on and explaining to the man’s servant that he has been tasked with spying on this particular individual because the latter’s tangoing is a grave threat to the Republic. One of its main characters is the still conscious brain of Adolph Hitler, which has been preserved in a pickle jar that it shares with other cucumbers. This leads to one of the most hilarious passages I’ve read in some time:
Adele was propelled before Dr Fausto’s Panzerfaust. Through the glass, Senor Adolpho was shouting in German. From what I could make out, he was demanding a larger jar. The cucumbers tumbled and dived like frenzied lampreys. I was disturbed to see his eye bulging towards my own temporarily vacated vessel and under Senor Adolpho’s direction the pickles were charging at the thankfully impenetrable glass barrier. He was shouting about being keen to see our living room. He seemed to think it would make a nice new home for his cucumber people.
Adele was staggering beneath the weight. They emerged from their circumnavigation of the orchestra and at last Dr Fausto spied Father. Through her hand Adele could feel the strengthening vibrations of ‘Deutschland Uber Alles” rising from the glass.
The final of the four standout stories in this collection is “A Calendar of Cherries” by Colin Insole. Seven years after most of the town’s men left to fight in the Great War and were captured, they unexpectedly return to their home town. But instead of arriving at the town’s modern train station, they arrive on a track of the old empire that has been unused for years. During the men’s captivity, the entire world has changed, including their own town, which is now dominated by the poster board people. Instead of reintegrating into this new world, the men increasingly retreat to the rooms at the top of their houses and there attempt to hang onto the world that they knew. I will definitely be reading more by Mr. Insole if I can get my hands on his other works.
These four stories are absolute masterpieces, and while understanding their connection with Schulz gives them an added dimension, one can fully enjoy them without ever having read any of Schulz’s work at all.
My only major complaint about this collection is one that will be familiar to readers of this site. Namely, only 122 copies of this book were printed, and yet the stories in this collection deserve to be read by so many more. I truly wish that Ex Occidente Press would partner with a press like Chômu Press to make some of the former’s releases more widely available. My only other two minor quibbles with the book are that it did not come with the slipcase it was supposed to and that it failed to include this awesome image of Schulz that can be found on Ex Occidente’s website:
I don’t think there will ever be a more powerful tribute to Bruno Schulz than This Hermetic Legislature: A Homage to Bruno Schulz. This collection contains far more beauty than I would have thought possible. And that beauty isn’t generic, it’s of a sort that Schulz himself created and made possible.
The True First
This Hermetic Legislature: A Homage to Bruno Schulz was first published by Ex Occidente Press in June of 2012. It is limited to 122 hand-numbered copies.
[This review was not based on a review copy]
Read Some Jean Ray Stories!
Even now, almost fifty years after his death, the short stories of Belgian author Jean Ray are notoriously difficult to find in English. There are in fact only three collections of his work available in English and all of them can be difficult and expensive to acquire. Any small increase in the availability of his work is therefore a cause for celebration.
As if the inclusion of two Ray stories in the VanderMeers’ mammoth The Weird (table of contents available here) wasn’t enough, they have now posted two additional stories on the book’s companion site, Weird Fiction Review.
That means there are now four Ray stories that should now be permanently in the easy to find category:
- “The Mainz Psalter” (in The Weird)
- “The Shadowy Street” (in The Weird)
- “The Formidable Secret of the Pole” (available here)
- “The Horrifying Presence” (available here)
If you haven’t ever read Jean Ray’s work before, you are in for a treat. You can read my review of his latest collection, The Horrifying Presence and Other Tales, here. It made #2 on my Top Reads of 2010 list.
Look for The Weird to be reviewed here at some point in one fashion or another.
Review – Old Albert – An Epilogue
Brian J. Showers
Brian J. Showers has quietly been one of the stars of short fiction horror writing since the publication of his first collection of stories, The Bleeding Horse and Other Stories (review here). That collection made it onto my Top 5 Reads of 2010 list and I’ve been impatiently waiting for him to publish a follow up collection for some time. For those who have found themselves in a similar position, the wait is finally over; that is if you can get your hands on one of the merely 60 copies of Old Albert – An Epilogue that are being offered for sale.
Old Albert is effectively a continuation of The Bleeding Horse and Other Stories and so like its predecessor, the stories that comprise Old Albert are set in the Rathmines district of Dublin. Specifically, these stories tell the purported history of an estate known as Larkhill, which we’re told was first permanently settled in the middle of the nineteenth century.
In the first tale, “Ellis Grimwood of Larkhill,” we learn that the estate was built by a wealthy ornithologist who made his home there because, at the time, a profusion of larks and other birds made their homes there as well. As time progresses, Grimwood becomes increasingly eccentric and reclusive. Next is “This Terrible, This Unnatural Crime,” which is essentially a retelling of an actual famous killing and subsequent murder trial. While complete in their own right, these two tales also set the stage for what is to come.
“An Exaltation of Skylarks,” is the firs tale in Old Albert to occur after Mr. Showers has hinted to the reader of the peculiarities of Larkhill. It is the tale of a wealthy wine importer who comes to occupy Larkhill with his new wife. His wife proves to be far more popular than her businessman husband and let’s just say that this tale ends poorly for all concerned.
Forty years later, as recounted in the next tale, “Thin and Brittle Bones,” the General Council of the Holy Ghost Fathers decides that Larkhill is the perfect place to house a new secondary school. While renovating the property, a troubling discovery that sheds light on the history of Larkhill is made, but the school nonetheless opens shortly thereafter and remains open until World War I. After a decade during which the property is leased to various tenants, the school reopens and has operated ever since.
The final tale, “Come Like Shadows, So Depart,” is the crescendo to which the previous tales have been building. I am not going to say anything about it other than to mention that it is the story of a friend of the narrator who once attended the school at Larkhill. It makes a very fitting ending to this collection.
In the final analysis, Larkhill turns out to be a place with its own essence and power; one that draws its occupants to it and never lets them go. And the unique fate that a schoolyard rhyme called “Old Albert” warns against afflicts those who pass through the place regardless of the particulars of their individual lives.
Ex Occidente Press has given this book the beautiful treatment it deserves. I just hope that one day it will be more widely available, and perhaps reunited with its predecessor in a single volume.
All of the strengths that The Bleeding Horse and Other Stories possesses are also on display in Old Albert. Old Albert isn’t just a subtly powerful work of supernatural fiction, it’s also a work that demonstrates the profound ability Mr. Showers has to infuse a seemingly nondescript locale with a sense of history, with a sense of place in the flow of time. I have not come across any other writer working today who is writing quite like Brian Showers is. Get your hands on this one if you can.
The True First
Old Albert – An Epilogue was first published in 2011 by Ex Occidente Press in an astoundingly low print run of 60.
Review – The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Stories
Mark Samuels
Speculative Fiction Junkie just celebrated its second birthday and, fortuitously, the book I happened to be reading on that day was one worthy of the occasion; a book that is almost guaranteed to appear on my Top 5 Reads of 2010 list. That book was The Man Who Collected Machen & Other Stories by modern master of the weird tale Mark Samuels. If ever there was a book that I didn’t want to end, this is it.
The occasion was made even sweeter by the fact that it marked a successful return to ordering books directly from the publisher, Ex Occidente Press. To put it mildly, I’ve had problems in the past ordering books directly from the press, I hope that my success in acquiring this book marks the dawning of a new day for Ex Occidente Press.
The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Stories starts off strong with “Losenef Express,” in which a successful but unhealthy and disillusioned American writer attempts to get away from it all by retreating into an anonymous alcoholic haze in Eastern Europe. After drinking a lot of whiskey one evening, he spots a fellow bar patron staring at him with contempt and decides to follow his antagonist into the misty night when the latter departs. What he does to the man when he catches up with him, and the chain of events it ignites, is chillingly effective.
Also excellent is “Glickman the Bibliophile,” the story of a retired bibliophile who goes to meet with the publishers of his latest collection of weird tales only to find that they are not as friendly towards his work, or indeed to the written word in general, as he expected. He discovers, in fact, that the publisher’s operations are part of a larger endeavor that is concerned with the dissemination of literature in a peculiar and shocking way.
“Thyxxolqu” is another highlight among a book filled with them. It is the tale of a man who starts to notice that the writing on familiar objects has been replaced with an unfamiliar script. Eventually, the ability to see the script looks more and more like a disease, one which comes with a physical deformity that enables the afflicted to speak the strange dialect better. What the protagonist learns of the language is classic Samuels.
“The Age of Decayed Futurity” is also a tale that only Samuels could write. This story, which originally appeared in Cinnabar’s Gnosis, tells of Joanna Wolski, who takes a sojourn in a hotel on the Baltic Sea to work on her fourth novel. While there, a hideously disfigured guest tells her of the Reassembly Cartel, which, he alleges, has absolute power over human society and is to blame for his disfigurement. The precise nature of the conspiracy is shocking and its ultimate effect on Wolski no less so.
My final favorite is “A Contaminated Text,” in which a librarian finds among the recently acquired stock of an occultist a book that tells of the Voolans, evolutionarily decayed creatures who dwell in the center of worlds and relish in the piecemeal destruction of the universe. The book soon starts to exert an influence that explains why its previous owner attempted suicide.
While the five tales I’ve singled out are excellent, the remaining five are also wonderful. The main thing that distinguishes Mr. Samuels’ work from that of many other modern writers of the weird tale is how cerebral it is. If writers like Simon Strantzas and Adam Golaski affect the reader primarily through their imagery, Mr. Samuels’ work derives most of its potency from the core idea that is at the heart of most of his stories. These ideas are often stunning notions about the nature of time, the world of the dead, language, the universe, or any number of other things, but what they all have in common is that if you distilled them into their fundamentals, they would be absolutely fascinating even without the narratives that Mr. Samuels constructs around them.
But of course, Mr. Samuels does create narratives around them, and in this he excels too. His prose is targeted and economical and is the perfect vessel for elevating his ideas into true works of art.
Mr. Samuels is a genius and the value of his work has not yet been fully appreciated. He is an absolute original for which there is no substitute.
The True First
The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Stories was first published by Ex Occidente Press in 2010 and is limited to only 170 copies. If you are on the fence about getting this one, trust me: make the jump.
[This review was not based on a review copy]
As a bit of an aside, I thought I would mention that Mr. Samuels’ work can even affect creatures of the feline variety. Take a look at this picture of one of my cats:
Now look at the same cat after she had just finished reading Mr. Samuels’ debut collection (scary!):
Review – Putting the Pieces in Place
R.B. Russell
You will never this read book. That’s right. You will never read this book. The reason has nothing to do with its quality but instead is attributable to the fact that it became nearly impossible to find shortly after publication. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that I had to work harder to get my hands on a copy of R.B. Russell’s debut collection of short stories, Putting the Pieces in Place, then I have ever had to work to find any other book.
My initial interest in the book was a result of the praise heaped on it by two of my favorite book bloggers: Colin of Tales from the Black Abyss and Mihai of Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Reviews. Interest blossomed into a more pressing hunger after I finished reading Mr. Russell’s second book, Bloody Baudelaire (review here), which was excellent and stood out enough to make it onto my Top 5 Reads of 2009 list.
After months of searching every nook and cranny of the internet, I finally managed to find a copy of Putting the Pieces in Place. While it was definitely worth the wait and effort required to track down a copy, Bloody Baudelaire is the superior work in my opinion, which is good news for Mr. Russell’s potential readers since copies of the latter are still available.
Putting the Pieces in Place is a collection of five short stories. The first story, “Putting the Pieces in Place,” is the most conventional of the five and is more or less a traditional ghost story. It is the story of a man obsessed with collecting everything that has any connection with Emily Butler, a violinist who he clandestinely heard play one evening when he was young and who died tragically. The distinguishing characteristic of this story for me is the great gulf of melancholy that it leaves in its wake.
Next is “There’s Nothing That I Wouldn’t Do,” a disturbing tale about a young woman studying abroad and the consequences of her relative indifference towards a young man’s affections. This is probably the most straightforward story in the collection.
The next story, “In Hiding,” is my favorite of the five. In it, a British politician seeking refuge in a small Greek village from a scandal back home is invited to visit an island off the coast. While happy and tranquil on the surface, the two men he meets there are not what they initially seem. This is the most subtle and satisfying tale in the book and in several ways reminds me of the stories of Jean Ray.
“Eleanor” is my least favorite in the collection. An elderly author and creator of a famous science fiction character encounters her at a science fiction convention.
In the final story, “Dispossessed,” a young woman finds herself without a place to live when the elderly woman she cares for dies. As she is about to leave, a member of the family informs her that he owns some apartments and that she is welcome to stay in one of them until she finds her bearings. What follows is a series of creepy and ultimately violent events.
The hallmark of these stories is their subtlety. The best of them embed a grain of quiet unease in the reader which swells as each story progresses. Mr. Russell, more so than most authors of horror and the strange tale, knows that the greatest source of unease isn’t necessarily the obviously odd or frightening, but is often the slow weirdness that can creep into a conversation that is slightly off kilter or the wanderings of the mind and feelings of a character who lacks direction. Putting the Pieces in Place is a wonderful debut from an author who is among those leading the way in blending horror and the strange tale. I prefer his second book to this collection only because Bloody Baudelaire contains a sense of atmosphere and layers of tension that Putting the Pieces in Place does not.
The True First
Putting The Pieces in Place was first published by Ex Occidente Press in January of 2009. There were only 400 copies made and good luck finding one of them! However, as I said above, copies of Bloody Baudelaire are still floating around and Mr. Russell also has a forthcoming collection being published by PS Publishing in the not too distant future.
[This review was not based on a review copy]
Review – The Horrifying Presence and Other Tales
Jean Ray
What a fantastic drawing on the cover. 
I may have had some serious problems with small press of the moment Ex Occidente Press, but it is beyond dispute that they are publishing some of the best works of strange fiction being produced today. If one manages to navigate the many obstacles that stand in the way of acquiring their books, the reading experience is usually a very rewarding one. The Horrifying Presence and Other Tales, a collection of twenty-seven weird tales by Belgian author Jean Ray, is the second Ex Occidente book to be reviewed here at SFJ. The first was the excellent Bloody Baudelaire by R.B. Russell (review here), an absolutely beautiful book that made it onto our Top 5 Reads of 2009 list.
Jean Ray (1887-1964) is often called the Belgian Poe and comparisons of his work to that of Lovecraft also abound. A journalist, novelist, short story writer, and translator, he wrote profusely. Curiously, some of his most famous tales were written while he was serving a prison term for embezzlement.
His work is notoriously difficult to find in English. Aside from The Horrifying Presence, I am aware of only two other collections of his short stories in English: Ghouls in My Grave, an unassuming paperback published in 1965, and My Own Private Spectres, published in 1999 by another small press I have yet to investigate: Midnight House. Both of these two volumes are virtually impossible to find today. The Horrifying Presence is therefore the best and only opportunity to read Mr. Ray’s short fiction in English that has come along in some years.
Having just finished reading The Horrifying Presence, I am stunned–stunned and saddened–that Mr. Ray’s work isn’t more widely available in English. His tales are some of the best and most effectively eerie I’ve ever come across.
There is not a single disappointing story in this collection, a considerable accomplishment for a book that contains so many tales. If I were forced to whittle it down to, say, five favorites, I would include:
“The Graveyard Guardian,” in which the narrator takes a job as one of three guardians of an old cemetery purchased from the impoverished town it borders by the recently deceased duchess Opoltchenska. Presumably hired to guard the riches he suspects reside in her newly constructed mausoleum, he eventually discovers that his role is far different from what he initially thought.
“Cousin Passeroux,” an unforgettable tale of revenge in which a man on the run shows up on his cousin’s doorstep looking for a place to hide. His flight is a result of his less than polite treatment of the inhabitants of a remote island. One of the characters in this story utters a haunting refrain every time he makes an appearance and the way this story progresses stays with the reader long after the story is finished.
From an imaginative audacity standpoint, “The Formidable Secret of the Pole” is unquestionably the most standout piece. In it, a Professor and one of his students respond to a summons to a remote island that they found in a container floating in the sea. What they find when they get there is mind blowing. This one is just as accomplished of an adventure tale as it is a weird tale.
“The Choucroute” reminded me of Ligotti a bit , in its setting at least. It is the story of a man who decides to spice up his life by taking the train to nowhere in particular and getting off at a random stop. The town this leads him to is not what it seems.
“The Moustiers Plate” was another story that feels almost as much like an adventure tale as it does a weird tale. In it, a man falls asleep on a docked ship after finding an old plate in a cabinet and awakens to find that some unwelcome guests have commandeered the ship. He soon finds himself on an island with a very peculiar resident. As the reader soon discovers, everything that subsequently happens to him is directly connected to the plate.
Mr. Ray is a good writer, but his real strength is his top notch, unrestrained imagination. His world is largely water-covered and feels vast and forbiddingly perilous; a gray, storm-chased globe of seemingly perennial autumn, peppered here and there by small, often remote, outposts of humanity. His characters frequently discover that the darkness of the outer world dwells even in these places, the villages and taverns, and sometimes it is they themselves who have brought the darkness with them.
While it is difficult to find anything negative to say about this book, there were a few instances of oddly worded sentences. Perhaps these are minor translation problems or perhaps Mr. Ray’s prose is just a bit antiquated. In any event, these do not significantly detract from the reading experience. Mr. Ray also has a habit of making characters expressly state what’s happening at a given moment when other authors would simply tell the reader; a character might utter an exclamation like “He was throttling me!” rather than Ray simply telling us that one character throttled another.
The Horrifying Presence was a complete surprise. I didn’t think it was possible for writers of this quality to languish in relative obscurity for so long. Why are all of this man’s works not widely available in the English speaking world? As soon as I finished reading this book and found to my dismay that the few works of his available in English are out of my price range, I searched libraries across the Southeastern United States for them. I found only one copy of one of his works in English two states over and hundreds of miles away. Infuriating!
The True First
The Horrifying Presence and Other Tales was first published by Ex Occidente Press in March 2009 and was limited to 300 copies. There are still a few copies floating around on the secondary market but they are getting expensive quickly.
[This review was not based on a review copy]
Review – Bloody Baudelaire
R.B. Russell
I can’t think of a better way to usher in the Halloween month than with a review of the latest offering from R.B. Russell. Mr. Russell is not only an author of highly esteemed supernatural tales, he also runs Tartarus Press, one of the most highly respected publishers of weird and supernatural fiction operating today, the output of which a recent article said amounts to “a secret library, a catalogue of weird fiction from its roots in Victorian Britain through to the modern day.” While it has been extremely difficult for me to acquire his work, I was recently able to procure a copy of his newest work, Bloody Baudelaire, and it was with much anticipation that I sat down to read it a bit ago.
The story opens with five people spending a weekend together in a dilapidated mansion known as Cliffe House. There is Lucian and Elizabeth, a young and seemingly rather new couple whose future is uncertain since they will soon be attending university in opposite corners of the country. Then there’s Adrian, Lucian’s friend from school. Finally, there’s Adrian’s beautiful sister Miranda and her unlikeable partner Gerald. After a day and night of drinking during which various relationship strains manifest themselves, Lucian finds himself playing cards with Gerald, who starts to lose and continues to do so until he’s eventually lost a fair amount of money, his painting talent, and even Miranda. Later that evening a fight ensues between Miranda and Gerald and Gerald leaves. He is shortly followed by Elizabeth for similar reasons and by Adrian, leaving Lucian and Miranda alone in the house. As they get to know one another over the course of the next few days, someone continues to work on Gerald’s latest painting.
Now, if that doesn’t sound like the most interesting story in the world this is partially because I’m not very good at plot summarizing but mainly because the real worth of this novella lies in the atmosphere that Mr. Russell creates and the things he insinuates interstitially. The odd interactions between characters, the dilapidated house, and the bizarre card game slowly combine to create the most superb atmosphere of weirdness. When the tensions that characterize nearly every relationship that is on display in the novella are thrown in as well as the sexual tension between Miranda and Lucian, the result is something truly special. At its heart, in other words, Bloody Baudelaire is a first rate weird tale wrapped in multiple layers of tension that Mr. Russell expertly stokes and manipulates.
Bloody Baudelaire has left me hungry for more weird dark fiction in much the same way that Bill Hussey’s Through A Glass, Darkly (review here) left me wanting more supernatural horror. I’ll be sure never to miss another opportunity to read Mr. Russell’s work. I don’t even need to know what the book’s about. If R.B. Russell writes it, I’m going to read it.
The True First
Bloody Baudelaire was first published in June of 2009 by Ex Occidente Press. There were only 400 copies made.
[This review was not based on a review copy]
Speculative Fiction Junkie 