Alexandria, 1966 Mark Valentine’s biography of Sarban, Time: A Falconer, is available from Tartarus Press. Three strange books were published in the early Nineteen Fifties by a man with the pen-name of ‘Sarban’. The three titles, all published by Peter Davies, were: Ringstones and Other Curious Tales (1951), which collected five stories; The Sound of His Horn (1952), […]
Let me be straight: Billy Fog is a dark book for kids. Scant pages in, the title character, a boy no more than ten, writes in a letter to Santa: Who is death? What is it? Where is it? Do we have to go there? Sometimes in bed, before I go to sleep, I look into the darkness all around me and […]
Reza Negarestani is the author of Cyclonopedia, perhaps our favorite weird book of the twenty-first century. — The Editors In order to think narration in a world that is devoid of any narrative necessity – an expanding space into which all ideas of embodiments dissolve and an absolute time whose radical contingency aborts any necessary difference to which […]
The reviewer, James Crossley, works for Island Books in Seattle and contributes to Message in a Bottle. I intended to read Joan Aiken’s retrospective collection methodically, one story at a sitting, but that’s not what happened. I first picked it up in the middle of the night, hours after being stung by a bee, unable to sleep because my […]
Over a blank white paper come a smirking, creeping, posturing devil horde of things, grotesque, weird, macabre, sinister, misgiving and alarming, before which the creatures in Comus and The End of Elphintown retreat abashed. And then with a seeming flick of his faery hand, we see only a harmless fop of George I, a charming little lady at her toilet, […]
The story that is the focus of this essay appears in The Weird compendium and can also be found in the out-of-print collection The Seventh Horse. This essay contains some spoilers. — The Editors Usually, I don’t advocate transposing the writer’s biography onto the writer’s work, especially since I am not going to dwell on it here, but in the case of Carrington […]
Note: This short essay contains spoilers. You can read “The Bloat Toad” here. “Bloat Toad or Escuerzo?” This question predicates the translation choices made in translating anew Leopoldo Lugones’ 1906 short story about a legendary vindictive amphibian that stalked those who had done injury to it. An earlier translation used the descriptive “bloat toad” throughout the […]
Steve Rasnic Tem’s Deadfall Hotel has been keenly anticipated by weird fiction geeks for more than two decades, ever since horror icon Charles L. Grant published the story “Bloodwolf” in his anthology Shadows 9 (1986). Now the novel has been published, finally, in a beautiful, gift-worthy limited edition by Centipede Press, to be followed by a mass […]
Ramsey Campbell (1946 — ) is an award-winning and iconic author of uncanny, weird fiction from Liverpool, England. In his stories, largely evoking working- or middle-class settings, Campbell manages to update the weird tale and apply his keen ability to evoke both subtle supernatural horror and portraits of modern life in England. One of the preeminent writers of his generation, Campbell […]
Liz Williams (1965 — ) is an English writer of science fiction and fantasy whose first two novels, The Ghost Sister (2001) and Empire of Bones (2002), were nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. She is the daughter of a conjurer and a gothic novelist and has a Ph.D. in science from Cambridge. From the mid-nineties until 2000, she lived […]