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The Sacrifice and Other Stories

by

Sarban

 

Sarban’s three books from the 1950s, Ringstones and Other Curious Tales, The Sound of His Horn and The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny, are highly prized by admirers and collectors of his beautifully-crafted, impossibly hard to find strange stories. The posthumous publication of this fourth book of newly-discovered tales by Sarban, The Sacrifice and Other Stories, will therefore be of great interest to devotees of classic twentieth-century horror fiction.

 

Four novella-length stories are included, two of which appear here for the first time. These are 'The Sacrifice', in which a young artist encounters an Eastern-inspired tragedy in an idyllic English country garden, and 'The Sea-Things', a marine mystery-story with a Red Sea setting. The conte cruel 'Number Fourteen', in which the followers of an obscure South American religious cult gain curious influence over a beautiful dancer in post-war London, first appeared in the Tartarus Press edition of Ringstones and Other Curious Tales (2000). 'The King of the Lake', where two young English-women are rescued from a Saharan sandstorm by mysterious horsemen and taken to a secret underground Lake, was first published with The Sound of His Horn by Tartarus in 1999.

 

All four stories, almost certainly written in the 1950s, display Sarban’s usual 'strange combination of daydream and nightmare', first noted by Kingsley Amis, and continue the skilful exploration of his characteristically opposed themes of wonder and fear, power and enslavement, paradise and purgatory.

 

The first edition of The Sacrifice is now sold out, but the individual stories are reprinted in The Sound of His Horn and Other Stories.

 

 

Reviews for The Sacrifice and Other Stories

Reviews:

"To find four splendid weird tales among a deceased writer's unpublished effects is a considerable bonus. . . . I am not alone in thanking Tartarus Press and Jocelyn Leighton of giving us, at last, the complete strange stories of Sarban. As always, the production of The Sacrifice and Other Stories is generally excellent, and the book as a physical object is a pleasure to handle." Roger Johnson, All Hallows, October 2002.

"All in all, consider Sacrifice a must-have for Sarban collectors and aficionados of atmospheric supernatural tales." Jack Lloyd, Cemetery Dance, 2003

"Each of the rare, dark treasures offered in The Sacrifice and Other Stories suggest the aesthetic power of subtlety. There is little if any blood shed in Sarban's mythologically informed stories of despairing beauty . . . Found in the unpublished effects of the deceased author, The Sacrifice and Other Stories provides an invaluable footnote to the career of one of dark fantasy's most superb, somewhat neglected craftsmen." Gauntlet