Tartarus Press

publishers

Borderlands and Otherworlds

by

Mark Valentine

 

Mark Valentine’s Borderlands and Otherworlds explores supernatural fiction of the 1920s, occult thrillers of the ’30s, and the English Fantastic in the ’40s and ’50s.

 

He discusses notable names in the field, such as Arthur Machen, Dion Fortune and E.F. Benson, and also lesser-known figures such as J.M.A. Mills, Humphrey Gilkes and Charles Whitton. He offers the reader an understanding of these writers in their wider literary context, drawing out links and resonances between them.

 

Valentine celebrates the byways of book collecting, such as old monographs found in obscure boxes, noticing unusual details and unexpected stories. Other essays celebrate landscape, legend and lore. The author writes engagingly, with a lightly-worn knowledge, a companionable tone, great enthusiasm and an undercurrent of good humour.

 

Contains:

Borderlands and Otherworlds: Some Supernatural Fiction of the Early 1920s

‘Striking a New Line’: David Lindsay’s Sphinx

‘A Study of the Literary Temperament’: The Counterplot by Hope Mirrlees

At the House of Magic: Mary Butts’ Modernist Novels of the Occult

Charles Williams and His Circle: Four Vignettes

Speculative Energies: ‘The Ideas of Lord Torridon’

The Tarot in England

A ‘Secret Science’ in Arthur Machen’s The Green Round

Priestess of the Inner Light: The Magical Novels of Dion Fortune

Past Lives and Cosmic Forces: The Occult Thrillers of J.M.A. Mills

Humphrey Gilkes’ The Unclean Spirit

‘A Man of Power’: Algernon Blackwood’s Julius Le Vallon

‘A Wild Crashing Outburst’: The Purple Trident by Charles Whitton

‘The Temporal is the Shadow of the Eternal’: Claude Houghton’s This Was Ivor Trent

The Last, Lost Novel of Phyllis Paul

Stalwarts of the Shelves

Strange Case of John Jasper: Decadence and ‘Drood’

Trying to Find a Corridor of Mirrors

Quarles’ Quest: Sun of My Life by Gillian M. Edwards

A Shilling Book from Praed Street

The Haunted ’Forties: Wrey Gardiner and Poetry Quarterly

Three Fantasias of the ’Forties

Modernity and Tradition: The English Fantastic in the ’Forties and ’Fifties

In a Remote County

Bliss on the Waterways

The Serpent at Ashford Carbonell

The Black Horse

The Pleasures of Ephemera

The Voynich Assistants

Bygone Booksellers

Aquarius, Arcania, Arcturus: Exploring New Age Shops

In the Attic

Acknowledgements