Fancy a poem or ten? Don’t look at us like that – they’re jolly interesting ones, for today we consider the poetry of William Hope Hodgson, as part of our remembrance on this, the centenary year of his death. We don’t poet, ourselves, so we’re most grateful to have writer, poet and poetic scholar Frank Coffman to help us along our way. Not only does Frank offer us a commentary on, and analysis of, some of Hope Hodgson’s verse, but he has dug out more of WHH’s poems for the event (see second section below).

“The Unuttered Word”

Some Thoughts on the Poetry of William Hope Hodgson

by Frank Coffman

 

There are worlds of foam that I have known
And the songs of wild, young children blown
Make music in the glittering spray
In that strange world where I was grown
Where the light is not the light of day
Where the breath of life in the stounding breeze
Is at play on the foaming seas

—William Hope Hodgson

The great majority of enthusiastic readers of the work of William Hope Hodgson know him from his weird and speculative fiction. Almost all know him from his novels such as The Night Land, The House on the Borderland, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig,” and The Ghost Pirates; and collections of similarly-themed short stories in Sargasso Seas Stories and others. Some have discovered Hodgson through the few stories on his intriguing occult detective, Carnacki, the Ghost Finder. But Hodgson’s poetry has remained in general obscurity.

But in 2005, Tartarus Press did a very limited 150 copy run of The Lost Poetry of William Hope Hodgson, edited and introduced by Jane Frank that has since become more widely available in a Kindle and other editions. This book is a most welcome addition to the Hodgson corpus, and gives a fine overview of one side of the man relatively unknown prior to its publication.

As might be expected from Hodgson’s life, the theme of The Sea— with all of its mysteries, its pull upon the imagination, its contemplation-worthy immenseness, its beauties and its dangers, its place in his soul—is predominant. Jane Frank notes:

Hodgson’s long-time friend, A. St John Adcock, editor of The Bookman, wrote in his introduction to The Calling of the Sea: “in his poems, as in his prose, it is the mystery, the strength, the cruelty, the grimness and sadness of the sea that most potently appeal to him.”

But other themes like Death and the Question of Immortality, Love, Faith, Patriotism, the Pain of Loss, and the big one—The Meaning of Life—are all touched upon to various degrees. Hodgson’s overall poetic work can be seen as decidedly influenced by the later Romantics and the more Romantic of the Victorians, which should not be at all surprising. Even rebellious artists can’t help but be influenced by the cultural and artistic atmosphere of their own and the immediately previous era—if for no other reason that they ought to understand fully what they rebel against.

But Hodgson was no rebel. Frank calls his verse, “…largely of his time: mannered, grandiloquent, and oblique.” She also notes that “Sam Moskowitz blamed Hodgson’s clergyman father for Hope’s stylistic affectations, but… keep in mind the romantic, elegiac Victorian poetry Hodgson was striving to emulate, in which Biblical and archaic English forms were the norm” (“Introduction”). Some few of the poems display some maudlin sentimentality. One example of this would be “Little Garments” about a mother mourning the loss of a child, reminded that the “little garments” were the only physical things now left to her. Some few other poems do hypothetical, it seems, moanings over the loss of a loved one, death being preferable to the pain of loss and other such overdone sentiments.

As far as direct poetic influences to, Hodgson admired the works of Poe, Machen, and Blackwood, with Poe being, perhaps the (or one of the) primary poetic influences. He even parodies “The Raven” in a letter of complaint about the frequency of rejection letters to his friend, Coulson Kernahan (December 1905), he wrote:

Every morning for a fortnight have I pondered weak and weary
O’er letters still unanswered that are scattered round your floor
While I’ve pondered nearly napping, sometimes there has come a tapping
As of someone gently rapping, rapping on my outer door
Tis the Postman,’ I have muttered, ‘dropping MSS through the door—
Only that and nothing more’
Then my soul has leapt up stronger, and I’ve stayed in bed no longer;
For a glad idea has whispered that the Post is at the door,
And that all that gentle tapping which has stirred me in my napping
Is the postman dropping billet doux from C.K. on the floor
And at the thought (loud cheering) have I galloped to the door—
“REFUSALS”—nothing more.

All writers who have sought acceptance of their efforts and publication can relate to the sentiments in this parody. And, regarding, poetry, Hodgson clearly experienced the sad dearth of markets that has seemingly always been the case with work in that mode. Fiction is hard enough to publish, but the market for poetry has always been scantier. What Hodgson [and other writers clearly in love with the poetic mode, such as Robert E. Howard] experienced was that poetry is damned hard to get accepted and, beyond that—it doesn’t “pay the rent,” even if published.

Hodgson bundled many of his poems early in his career into three separate collections, presented in Lost Poems for the first time. These were: Mors Deorum [Death of the Gods] and Other Poems, Through Enchantments and other Poems on Death, and Spume. Each of these begins with a long musing monologue, the first two on Life and Death and the question of Immortality, the third—as the title suggests—mostly regarding the Sea, some in this latter collection perhaps derived from specific experiences, some seemingly based upon incidents in his journals and logs.

But most of the poetry is strong and striking in imagery, and some of it is distinctly metrically experimental. This in that Hodgson wrote very few poems in what we might call “fixed forms.” The rhyme and meter are there, but not in standard tetrameters and pentameters and often varied and randomly rhymed with some use of slant rhyme.

Most of Hodgson’s poetry seems to have been written between his retirement from the Merchant Marine in 1899 and about 1906. He was somewhat frustrated by the lack of good markets for his verse, but—as with all of his literary work—was tenacious to the point of obsession in keeping it in circulation, following each rejection immediately with a resubmission to another market.

As noted, the Sea and the effect it had on the young writer predominates. A sense of his poetic style and urge for distinctness can be seen in the opening section of “Song of the Ship”:

And I toss the blue from left to right,
And I leap the driving surge,
And the tall seas follow close behind,
And ever the moaning of the wind
Wails softly a solemn dirge

This pentastich (five-line section) is, essentially an expansion on the meter of the literary ballad from a four-line to a five line form, including an extra four-accent line in the fourth line, altering the normal 4-3-4-3 to 4-3-4-4-3 accents. The normal rhyme of ABAB or ABCB (with the even-numbered short lines always rhyming) is also changed to ABC[slant rhyme with C]B. Following this section the other two sections of the poem are 8 and 11 lines long, respectively.

Here and elsewhere, one distinctive feature of Hodgson’s verse is that it seems to flow organically and is not preconceived to be a sonnet, a ballad, or any traditional form. For him, traditional iambic metrics (with anapestic variety quite often) are kept, but often with a variety of line lengths [similar to what Matthew Arnold did in his most famous poem, “Dover Beach”]. And the poems rhyme, but often randomly, with the echoes close enough to be noticeable, but following no strict pattern. To those degrees, Hodgson’s poetry is at least formally atypical—if not distinctive.

Several poems are on Hodgson’s clear interest in Life, Death, and what, perhaps, lies beyond. The poem “Farewell,” evidently written around the time of his leaving the merchant navy in 1899—or certainly regarding that occasion—is brief enough to include in its entirety:

FAREWELL

And, now it is farewell,
Forever, O great Sea!
Yet in some distant world, my soul
Shall dream of thee.
For now, a far-off toll, I hear—
It is my knell
Rung out by solemn waves on mist-bound shores,
While overhead, the groan
Of opening, monstrous doors
Comes echoing down to me,
And streams of awful light
Shine o’er thy tumult, Sea,
As I pass up across the night
Into the great Unknown.

Here again we have Hodgson’s personally common (but for his period and the precedent traditions uncommon) “mix” of meter and rhyme. Essentially iambic, the line lengths ramble with various feet: 3-3-4-2-4-2-5-3-3-3-3-3-4-3. Thus, in effect, the poem is a most unusual sonnet with the required 14 lines, but with highly irregular and brief line lengths (except in the pentameter of line 7). My guess is that became a sonnet “accidentally” and, again, organically driven rather than being preconceived, but we can’t be sure.

The rhyme scheme [using a lower case letter to indicate a “slant” or “near” rhyme] is: ABaBCADEDBFBFE. This is most irregular, but it displays Hodgson’s organicism of poetic creation. The poem “evolves” and rolls on like the varied waves and moods of the sea. The distance of six lines between the E rhymes almost loses the echoing effect, and the lack of any echo for C is also unusual. The third line slant rhyme of “soul,” partly echoing “farewell,” is actually “picked up” in a full cross rhyme into line five with “toll.” The musical effects are there. The poet is not eschewing rhyme and meter, but he is using them in a distinctive way.

Hodgson was also interested in the theme of artistic inspiration itself. This can be seen in the poem aptly entitled, “Inspiration”:

INSPIRATION

Thou pursuest thy lonely way
‘Midst tortuous paths of brooding thought
Lit by no gleam of earthly day
Till, in a while, thy soul has caught,
Despite of flutterings to escape,
A formless thing of light —unwrought;
A misty, glowing spirit-flake,
Waiting thy fire, thy forge, to make
It into some great glorious shape.

All in all, a fine brief lyric, containing the loneliness, the “brooding thought,” the capture by the “soul” of that “fluttering” and fleeting thing, always threatening to “escape” —the essence of inspiration, the “thing of light” as yet “unwrought”—the spark that through the poet’s soul of “fire” and the “forge” of mind and imagination might, just might, become a “great and glorious” thing.

Perhaps the most poignant theme to be found in Hodgson is the same as that expressed by Keats in his famous sonnet, “When I Have Fears”: that of the artist who is aware of his own genius and fears that the potential creative work that might yet be—will never be done:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;…

We see this also in Hemingway, in his masterful short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The character of Harry, dying of gangrene, thinks:

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.

And in Hodgson’s important poem, “The Death Cry of Young Genius,” sub-titled, [In understanding of G’s feelings, as he lay dying, speechless; his message undelivered—his personality unexpressed. WHH] we find the same somber theme in its opening:

I am here for a little time;
I came from the great Unknown;
Life leaps from birth to death,
And then I am alone
In some unremembered clime,
Wondering—Without breath.
I am here, and when I go
I would leave some mark behind,
But I must haste, or I am lost
And wandering outward, blind,
Forgetting, ere scarce I know,
The gain of life for the cost.…

(emphases added)

And in its conclusion:

But overtopping much
Agony’s drearest goal
Is the agony now hurled.
Genius smothered unheard,
Ere the soul-tale is expressed,
Is the greatest terror the world hath known,
A double terror unguessed,
For with such dies the unuttered Word –
The genius dies not alone.

(emphases added)

Alas, William Hope Hodgson was not allowed to finish the tale of his soul; the amazing and wondrous works of both prose and poetry that might have been must remain forever unheard. And that dreaded thing—“the unuttered word”—must always be the plight of us all. But we know today that Hodgson’s genius was not truly “smothered.” No author or poet or artist in any art has ever succeeded in “[gleaning their] teeming brain.” There is not world enough or time. What we have in the compilation of the work of this young genius, including his little-known poetic output must suffice. And most believe it does.

Frank Coffman is a published poet, story writer and college professor

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TEN POEMS

A Selection of Poems by William Hope Hodgson

Selected and edited by Frank Coffman

THE NIGHT WIND

O, thou sad wind, drear and inscrutable,

I hear thy speech among dark mountain crests –
(Above their faces, calm and immutable,)
Sinking at whiles to rests
Like the slumbering creep of foam on quiet sands,
Or sleeping of mists and rain o’er silent lands,
Rising anon to speech which seems to sound
Out of the throat of some undreamt-of Pain –
Rising and rising, till the whole world round
Gives back an echo of thy mournful strain,
Till the mysterious deeps that lurk in space
Receive the sound in their engulphant maws;
And further off, where through tremendous doors
God peers, strangely it passes o’er
His face, Meaning of worlds in pain.

INSPIRATION

Thou pursuest thy lonely way
‘Midst tortuous paths of brooding thought
Lit by no gleam of earthly day
Till, in a while, thy soul has caught,
Despite of flutterings to escape,
A formless thing of light —unwrought;
A misty, glowing spirit-flake,
Waiting thy fire, thy forge, to make
It into some great glorious shape.

GONE

Thou hast gone on before me
Into the grave’s strange gloom.
Would that I could have gone with thee
To share thy tomb!
To share thy tomb, and thy waking,
If waking there be from death;
If not, it were joy forsaking
This life and the torture of breath
And the pain of my old heart breaking
And the fear of the years yet to roll
With their terror of loneliness aching
Within my hungering soul!

LOVE SONG TO THE DEAD

I stand upon the rim of death, and sing my song,
E’er I, stepping, pass along
Where the lonesome shadows throng
In the silent Underneath.
Whether I may come to thee
Who shall tell me? I go blind.
Just my life, a useless thing!
To the lone abyss I fling
Chance that, dying, I may find
Thee, who art all hope for me.
If I find thee not, then I,
Wand’ring ‘neath some awful sky,
Shall sup doom with every breath,
Past the easeful touch of death. . . .
Just a shape of agony
Craving for one sight of thee.
I stand upon the rim of death, and sing my song,
E’er I, stepping, pass along
Where the lonesome shadows throng
In the silent Underneath.

SPUME

A loud wind screams;
A sea-horse rushes past,
A form of raging water filled with gleams,
Hurling before the blast.

SONG OF THE SHIP

And I toss the blue from left to right,
And I leap the driving surge,
And the tall seas follow close behind,
And ever the moaning of the wind
Wails softly a solemn dirge

Through the lofty heights
Whence the tender lights
Of evening take their flight.
And the night comes down in gloomy waves,
And the growling thunders rise,
Till their booming echoes fill the night,
And the lightning throws its livid light
Across the murmuring skies:

Whilst mountainous steeps
And muttering deeps
Shape in the blast that raves.
And the light flies up across the waves,
And the dark gives place to dawn,
And I see the whirling clouds of spray
Break over half of the coming day
In the luridness of morn,
That lifts and flies
Far across the skies
Lighting a thousand graves.

THOU AND I

O Sea, in days Long past, thy bosom bore
My little craft upon thine endless ways,
From shore ‘cross thee, and back again to shore.
Thy solitude I shared with thee when thou
Didst sink to some great stillness, there to brood;
And loneliness lay coldly on thy brow.
Sad, solemn notes Chimed softly o’er thy breadths,
As though some secret rite in thy remotes
Wafted its harmony from slumberous depths.
And this poor shape I would commend to thee;
Treat it with tenderness—hide it, and drape
It with thy beauties submarine, O Sea.

CONQUEST

I saw the cold dawn stride across the East,
A ghostly light –a livid Shade, that stept
With quick’ning strides from the abyss of night.
Higher it strode and flashed a sword of flame,
Shearing the murky clouds of night in twain,
A riven gap that reached from sea to heaven.
And then a thousand glittering darts it flung
Of blazing rays that flamed across the void
And pierced the heart of night with quivering wounds
That bled a sombre glory o’er the wave.
Then o’er the dim sea’s edge I saw the targe
Of day—the Sun—loom grandly through the mists;
And night expired beneath the feet of day.

THY WANDERING SOUL

Thy spray-dewed soul o’er many a sea has ridden,
Borne unseen through the spume where tempests ever call;
Where seas in shuddering mountains, tortured, driven,
Heave smokily along, while over all
The deep continuous boomings and the moanings
Of some vast storm’s reverberating sound,
Fills the whole sky with screamings and with groanings
Rising above the shouting seas around.

Anon, the grim and murky night is riven
With some green serpent flaming from the vast,
With some cruel glitter lighting up the wildness,
Lighting the night-tide of that overcast;
One moment showing all that has been hidden—
Deep quaking valleys gaping ‘neath the blast,
Mad screeching fountains shooting through the darkness,
Leaping sea-horses roaming masterless.

And there, where spray, in foaming pillars forming,
Reaching the sky its canopy upholds—
Whitening towers of surge to save it falling,
Seen in the flash of some weird lightning’s glow—
There midst the din, the tumult and the storming,
Comes to thy soul the well-known, tortured cry,
Comes the wild scream of some poor sailor calling,
Calling for help beneath a lonely sky—

While through the wrack there drive up ghosts unbidden,
Even as thou art—driving through the surge,
Joining their eldritch cries to ocean’s weeping,
Joining their voices to that thunder-dirge;
Dirging for one, who sinking to his sleeping,
Sinking is gone where mystery unfolds;
Sinking, has passed until death shall awaken
From that sad sleep far in the deeps below.

FAREWELL

And, now it is farewell,
Forever, O great Sea!
Yet in some distant world, my soul
Shall dream of thee.
For now, a far-off toll, I hear—
It is my knell
Rung out by solemn waves on mist-bound shores,
While overhead, the groan
Of opening, monstrous doors
Comes echoing down to me,
And streams of awful light
Shine o’er thy tumult, Sea,
As I pass up across the night
Into the great Unknown.

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Works Cited

Frank, Jane. “Introduction.” The Lost Poetry of William Hope Hodgson. Tartarus Press, 2005.

Hemingway, Ernest. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” — pick any edition or online source.

Hodgson, William Hope. The Lost Poetry of William Hope Hodgson. Ed. Jane Frank. PS Publishing & Tartarus Press. Kindle Edition.

Keats, John. “When I Have Fears” — pick any edition or online source.

Are writers still perpetuating stereotypes? How do we portray women in speculative fiction? We’d like to believe that modern weird fiction has mostly moved on (we’d like to think that), but are we right? Have the fantasy and SF genres done the same? When US author Balogun Ojetade recently made a strong statement of his views on the portrayal of women in SFF, focusing especially on black characters, we paid attention.

The questions he asks can also easily be applied to how we present female characters of any colour in SFF – and horror.

“A closet misogynist has a vast array of words, comments, phrases and attitudes they can employ to subtly put a woman down, or disconcert her, but without it being immediately apparent that is what they are actually doing.”

 We asked Balogun if we could host his article here, and he kindly agreed. It’s worth some thought…

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Bombshells and Bae: Sexism in Afrofuturism

by Balogun Ojetade

I love reading and writing Afrofuturistic and Afroretroistic stories – particularly science fiction, fantasy and horror featuring larger than life heroes and sheroes and eye-popping action. I really do. But I am growing increasingly disgusted by the sexism within a lot of it. I can no longer read books in which people of color and women are constantly oppressed and seen as lesser beings in a world based on fantasy and science fiction – even if WE are the authors of it.

Lately – as the father of seven daughters who are all avid readers of Afrofuturism and Afroretroism – I have become particularly disgusted with the continuing sexism in the writing and in the visual art.

Writers, you can create a world with any rules you choose. In your world, you don’t have to continue to perpetuate the sexist tropes so prevalent in Fantasy and Science Fiction since its inception.

Are you that lacking in creativity that you cannot write something better? Are you that apathetic to the plight of our Sisters? Or have you convinced yourself you have to maintain some sexist status quo to sell?

Bruh. Do better.

Certain tropes have been formed and propagated. Given the overwhelming number of novels set in a sort of idealized, white, medieval Europe; given the grossly oversimplified and homogenized concept of medieval gender roles, stereotypes and sexist archetypes have arisen in Fantasy and Science Fiction and Black male writers are giving us the same old trite bullshit. Some examples of these played out, tired tropes are:

• The Spirited Woman Married Off Against Her Will To A Man She Doesn’t Love
• The Lone And Exceptional Woman Warrior In A Culture Of Male Warriors
• The Widowed Queen Fighting To Keep Her Throne Against An All-Male Cast Of Contenders
• The Woman Who Runs Away Rather Than Be Married Off Against Her Will But Who Then Needs Rescuing From Worldly Perils
• The Woman Whose Love Of Books And Scholarship Is Exceptional And Odd And Therefore Deemed Socially Awkward
• The Unmarried Woman Who Is Happy Being Unmarried And Therefore Considered An Oddity
• The Unmarried Woman Who Was Forbidden To Marry The Man She Loved And Is Therefore Sad And Unfulfilled
• The Woman Who Ran Away To Marry The Man Forbidden To Her And Who Is Now A Social Pariah
• The Penniless Woman Who Needs To Be Rescued From Penury As Her Gender Prevents Her From Working
• The Girl Forced To Dress As A Boy In Order To Live Out Her Socially Unacceptable Dreams
• The Adventurous Daughter Whose Parents Let Her Run Free But Threaten Her With Marriage Should She Fail
• The Female Scholar/Magician Trying To Make It In A Largely Male World
• The Lone Female Soldier/Technician/Magician/Scholar Whose Male Colleagues Don’t Take Her Seriously.

Come now. That’s all you got?

Bruh. Do better.

As writers, we are not bound by these tropes. We can choose to write otherwise. Or we can choose to take our exploration of sexism further.

In most Fantasy and Science Fiction, we are left with sexism as a background detail; a tool used to justify the plight or origins of women and girls in the story, but never actually addressed.

You, dear writer, can follow sexism to some of its natural conclusions rather than focus exclusively on those few exceptional women who have avoided it, forcing characters – and, by extension, the readers – to view sexism as more than an inevitable background detail.

Or, you can avoid writing default sexism in the first place by actually considering how gender roles work in your story, building a cultural, social and historical setting that usurps the expectations of the reader. You can create an equal society, or one whose inequalities are unusual; you could write a typically sexist society, but make sexism a major narrative focus. Lots of different ways to explore the topic… if you are willing.

If not?

Bruh. Do better

As writers, we should not perpetuate sexism by training readers to take its presence for granted: to refrain from so much as questioning or calling it out, let alone showing its worst consequences.

Most male authors write sexist stories without any conscious thought, simply because it never occurs to them to do otherwise. The freedom to ignore the relevance of women is just another form of privilege – a privilege more malignant than benign. And remember: if your equality looks homogeneous, then it’s probably not equality.

Modern sexism has become cunning, sly, codified. In the same way a closet racist would never dream of openly saying “nigger” but might refer to killing “zombies,” or make a pointed reference to someone Black having a natural rhythm, or liking fried chicken, a closet misogynist has a vast array of words, comments, phrases and attitudes they can employ to subtly put a woman down, or disconcert her, but without it being immediately apparent that is what they are actually doing.

Intelligent writers are particularly adept at this.

I have written several novels – Moses: The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman, Once Upon A Time in Afrika, A Haunting in the SWATS, A Single Link and Wrath of the Siafu and the just-released Initiate 16 – that attempt to turn these tropes on their heads. Read the novels and tell me if I succeeded.

Let us all strive harder for awareness of – and sensitivity to – sexism in our writings and our readings. Let us be more critical of it, for to do and say nothing about sexism is to help propagate it. Are you helping to propagate oppression?

If so?

Bruh. Do better.

As always, your comments are welcome and encouraged.

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Balogun Ojetade writes novels, short stories, and comics, is a martial artist, and champions speculative fiction by black creators. And you can find all sorts of interesting stuff on his site The Chronicle of Harriet:

https://chroniclesofharriet.com/

We’ll link the Initiate 16 book some time soon, but in the meantime, his dark novel  A Haunting in the SWATS is particularly worth a look:

“A substantial blockbuster, a type of urban fantasy, and brutal with it. This isn’t cute magic and laying small tricks – the book is dark and gritty. Savannah Swann’s strict rules are sometimes praiseworthy, sometimes highly objectionable; she’s a hard woman, torn over her loyalties and the strange nature of her own family, never mind what she has to fight. A blend of African source myths, demonic possession, shapeshifting – and dare we say even Lovecraft when the dirt really hits the fan. Read it as a big grimdark contemporary adventure, or as a twisted struggle of right and wrong, love and hate.”

We think we might have said the above, but we can’t remember.

http://amzn.eu/gk6ztOv

http://a.co/fL1Oa1M

He’s also in Terminus, an enjoyable new collection of speculative and horror tales set around black Atlanta, which has just become available in Kindle:

http://amzn.eu/hEWfD6L

http://a.co/bWLr7hV

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Do add your own thoughts – and join us in a couple of days for something entirely different…

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Whilst you’re here, we should also mention that the latest dark, thrill-packed issue of Occult Detective Quarterly has just hit the stands. Don’t miss out.

http://amzn.eu/5jnoZnz

http://a.co/hs5WkMZ

Want something different to read? Today we bring you news of eight books with it all – weird portents, a horror film tribute, essays on supernatural fiction, an eerie and literary novella, Afrikan historical fantasy, warped psychological horror, the weird West, and the scary fantasy of black Atlanta. Phew! Yes, dear listener, it’s a quick round-up of recent releases from small and independent presses, which ought to be enough to keep you busy.

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‘Son of Mfumu: A Changa’s Safari Adventure’ by Milton Davis

Milton Davis finally completes his Changa’s Safari series, an enjoyable alternative to Medieval Europe-type fantasy books.

From the frigid steppes of Mongolia to the illustrious heart of the Songhay Empire, Changa has sailed the high seas and trekked across treacherous landscapes. He has battled men and monsters, the living and the dead, survived countless perils, acquired and lost fortunes, commanded armies and allied with demigods. All along he pursued profit and adventure for the sole purpose of quenching his thirst for vengeance in the blood of the ruthless sorcerer who killed his father. Now, Changa finds himself alone, bereft of his faithful companions and the resources he intended to finance an army to help him seize his vengeance. Changa’s safari finally leads him back to his homeland, back to the place where it all began. And this safari is the most dangerous of all….

Book 4 of 4 in Changa’s Safari (4 Book Series)

from MVmedia

http://amzn.eu/9cv4s8G

http://a.co/7aPlmML

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‘Of Doomful Portent’ by Matthew M. Bartlett (Author), Yves Tourigny (Illustrator)

First released as a limited edition, Of Doomful Portent is now available generally in paperback, a great little (nasty) book to browse. Fabulous black and white illos throughout.

Pope Sevenius. The Segmented Man. Mister White Noise. Hurt Me Henry. These are just some of the monstrous characters you’ll wish you hadn’t met in the countdown to a catastrophic Christmas storm in Of Doomful Portent: An Advent Calendar of Grotesque Horrors

from Gare Occult

http://amzn.eu/901dMa7

http://a.co/byQ5Gkt

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C.H.U.D. LIVES!: A Tribute Anthology

Today’s top Horror and SF authors pay tribute to C.H.U.D. film in this anthology of original fiction. C.H.U.D. is a genre defying, cult classic film featuring monsters living in the sewers below New York. The stories in this anthology expand the world created by the film and add depth to the C.H.U.D. universe like never before. From stories of apocalyptic horror and all out monster action, to tales of underground parties interrupted by uninvited guests and evening strolls that end in death, this anthology will leave you both smiling and breathless. Also features in-depth interviews with Andrew Bonime (producer) and Parnell Hall (screenwriter).

from Crystal Lake Publishing

Universal Link: http://getbook.at/CHUD

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39327851-c-h-u-d-lives

Press release / Webpage: http://www.crystallakepub.com/chudlives/

FB event: https://web.facebook.com/events/232533167483283/

Official Webcomic: https://tinyurl.com/Chudonline

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‘The Three Books’ by Paul StJohn Mackintosh

A disturbing novella which explores the rare creations of a reclusive author.

“Tragedy, urban legend, Gothic romance, warped fairy tale of New York: it’s all there. And of course, most important of all is the seductive allure of writing and of books – and what that can lead some people to do. You may not like my answer to the mystery of the third book. But I hope you stay to find out.”

from Black Shuck Books

http://amzn.eu/eaa4DPv

http://a.co/3gWnvXE

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The Black Pilgrimage & Other Explorations’ by Rosemary Pardoe

Essays on supernatural fiction from the scholarly and widely read editor of Ghosts & Scholars.

The celebrated writer M. R. James (1862-1936) is the most significant author of ghost stories in the world. His macabre work has terrified and fascinated readers for over 100 years. Now collected in one volume, 29 essays on his ghostly tales and themes by editor and James scholar Rosemary Pardoe

In addition, a further eight essays on other authors, including Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, E. G. Swain and Many Wade Wellman and a fascinating miscellany of nine additional pieces on a variety of topics.

from Shadow Publishing

https://www.shadowpublishing.net/shop

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‘Trade Yer Coffin for a Gun’ by Mer Whinery

A foray into a sub-genre with a growing body of work, the Weird Western.

In the chaotic years following the end of the Civil War, Little Dixie is a brutal no-man’s land where life and death are dictated not just by gangs of lawless thugs, but by far more sinister things as well. Shadowy beings that walk the line in the dirt separating Jesus from the Devil, writing their names in blood, terror, and human suffering. Such is the woeful condition of Coffin Mills, a town cursed by a history of dark arts and shameful secrets. Something wicked has been stealing the town’s children, something not of this world, or even the next.

Salvation arrives in the form of a trio of mysterious gunslingers known throughout the South as the Haints, a legendary band of bounty hunters specializing in tracking prety of a supernatural variety. They kill monsters, plain and simple.

from Muzzleland Press

http://muzzlelandpress.storenvy.com/products/23683761-trade-yer-coffin-for-a-gun-by-mer-whinery-signed

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‘House of Sighs’ by Aaron Dries

Board for free. But the cost might be your life.

Local bus driver, Liz Frost, pulls the gun from her mouth and decides to live with her loneliness for one more day. She dresses, combs her hair, and goes to work. Nine souls board her route that fateful morning in rural Australia, nine souls who Liz drags back to her home against their will. She wants to build a new family from these passengers, men and women who are willing to kill to avoid becoming her kin. The bus leaves a trail of carnage in its wake as it rockets towards a house that has held its secrets for far too long, a place where crows now gather, ready to feed on whatever is left behind.

This award-winning, psychological experience is back in print, and includes the exclusive sequel The Sound of his Bones Breaking, a novella that will leave you leave you truly shaken.

from Crystal Lake Publishing

Amazon: http://getbook.at/HouseOfSighs

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40037614-house-of-sighs

Web page: http://www.crystallakepub.com/house-of-sighs/

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‘Terminus’ edited by Milton Davis

Another anthology for which we received the ARC. Very different takes on Atlanta, from light urban fantasy to gritty detection work, by a range of black writers.

Atlanta. ATL. The Rising Phoenix. The City too Busy to Hate. The Black Mecca. Capital of the Deep South. There, between flitting shadows and full moons, exists another world filled with dark creatures, demons, and immortals. Only a thin veil separates the Atlanta you know from this mysterious realm. Nine brave authors risk it all to reveal the crossroads of Southern charm and the Black Fantastic. Y’all ready?

“In the end, it becomes obvious that it doesn’t matter what country, culture or colour with which you identify – this is a lively anthology with some powerful moments and some wry laughs vying for your attention.”

John Linwood Grant

from MVmedia

USA Pre-Order Only at the moment

http://mvmediaatl.com/index.html

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That’s it for today, but more features in a day or so, including a return to our marking of 100 years since the death of William Hope Hodgson. And possibly something light-hearted thrown in as well…

Feeling paranoid? Want to muse over the nature of weird fiction and the philosophies of its creators? Then here’s one of our occasional guest posts by writer and journalist Paul StJohn Mackintosh, exploring  the views of Conrad, Lovecraft, Yeats and Borges, human nature, reality and occultism. Paul’s article ‘On Lovecraft’s Legacy’ was one of our most widely read pieces last Autumn, and whilst this level of thinking sometimes hurts our brains, we’re always pleased to offer interesting opinion pieces from others in the field. So here you go…

USUAL DISCLAIMER: All the views expressed below belong to the author of the article, who knows some quite long words.

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THE WEIRD, HORROR, SUPERNATURAL AND THE OCCULT

Paul StJohn Mackintosh

 

I used the quote from Joseph Conrad (later below) that kicks off this essay once before, in the preface to Blood Rust, my suspense thriller about contemporary Scandinavian neo-fascism. Why that quote, there, and why here? Because Conrad was writing a story on the borderline between the supernatural and the merely strange, and wanted to explain why he preferred the latter. And because my novel was all about fanatics who believed the most ludicrous occult and supernatural mystical doctrines, sincerely enough to massacre for them. And because that novel is a thin gloss on what is going on for real, right now. This essay is about occultism and the supernatural as the gateway drug for anti-rationalism and neo-fascism.

This topic was also prompted by the development of my work. When I published my first collection, Black Propaganda (a.k.a. Blowback on Kindle), it contained 13 stories, and I didn’t need long to work out that only 4 of those stories had remotely supernatural content. If many of the rest passed muster as science fiction, they did so only marginally, as soft SF of the loosest kind. Yet all, I reckoned, were utterly weird tales, and all but one, horror stories, that nonetheless went (almost) nowhere near slasher fiction. Some of the other stories that I’ve been proudest of are very weird tales that hardly depart from mundane realities at all.

Conrad wrote in his author’s note to the 1920 second edition of The Shadow Line as follows:

“This story, which I admit to be in its brevity a fairly complex piece of work, was not intended to touch on the supernatural. Yet more than one critic has been inclined to take it in that way, seeing in it an attempt on my part to give the fullest scope to my imagination by taking it beyond the confines of the world of the living, suffering humanity. But as a matter of fact my imagination is not made of stuff so elastic as all that. I believe that if I attempted to put the strain of the Supernatural on it, it would fail deplorably and exhibit an unlovely gap. But I could never have attempted such a thing, because all my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

“Whatever my native modesty may be, it will never condescend so low as to seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind with unutterable sadness. As to the effect of a mental or moral shock on a common mind, that is quite a legitimate subject for study and description. Mr. Burns’ moral being receives a severe shock in his relations with his late captain, and this in his diseased state turns into a mere superstitious fancy compounded of fear and animosity. This fact is one of the elements of the story, but there is nothing supernatural in it, nothing so to speak from beyond the confines of this world, which in all conscience holds enough mystery and terror in itself.”

Citing this passage in an interview in the Paris Review, Jorge Luis Borges said: “Conrad thought that when one wrote, even in a realistic way, about the world, one was writing a fantastic story, because the world itself is fantastic and unfathomable and mysterious.” He then quoted Adolfo Bioy Casares declaring: “I think Conrad is right. Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.”

I wouldn’t go that far, and above all, I wouldn’t bring dream into the waking world. Conrad specifically declares that the “marvels and mysteries” of “an enchanted state” are explicitly part of “the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part.” Reflect on the enormous imaginative richness and variety of his fiction, and you see very clearly that his creative power needed no help from the invisible and intangible.

My personal take on horror and/or weird fiction is that it essentially concerns disturbances of the normal expected order. It doesn’t concern the unexpected and completely different order of an entire imagined fantasy, future, or alternative world, because obviously there’s no shock of disturbance there. Those disturbances can include the supernatural. They can also include the visceral revelation that human beings are bags of gore that can be spilt and shed, or that the human personality comprehends incomprehensible obscenities. Or that life comes round in fateful circles. Or simply that one day we all die. None of this requires any supernatural explanation at all, never mind any fully worked-out occult system.

Lovecraft

The weird fiction community won’t need reminding that H.P. Lovecraft begins “Supernatural Horror in Literature” by asserting that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” The “oldest and strongest” in that statement may be open to dispute, but it should be obvious that literature which probes the limits, and especially the break points, of our comprehension of our condition will have enduring power and value. (Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller” could be considered as two attempts to do just that, from completely different directions.) As Lovecraft says, this probing of the outer limits “must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.” But unknown does not necessarily mean unknowable or occult; weirdly horrible does not have to mean other-worldly or supernatural. Tzvetan Todorov defines fantastic literature as narratives that “hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described.” The power of fantastic literature derives precisely from that hesitation, which never actually has to be resolved, and which can remain in doubt all the way through the story. The hesitation and irresolution can add even more power as it mimes the doubt and confusion we face at the limit conditions of our comprehension and being. Does anything explicitly supernatural happen in “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Tell-Tale Heart”? If not, does this mean that Poe wrote these tales in a completely different genre to “The Masque of the Red Death”? A writer can resolve that hesitation with either a natural or a supernatural explanation, and Lovecraft goes into immense detail on the instances and consequences of authors resolving those hesitations one way or the other. Vernon Lee, in her “Faustus and Helena,” devotes an entire essay to the proposition that the true supernatural is inherently hostile to any concrete artistic representation, never mind explanation, at all. Some writers, though, will go beyond a supernatural explanation to an explicitly occult one. Those writers, and their reasons, are what concerns me.

One such writer was W.B. Yeats, in his plays, and in the occult system of A Vision, which George Orwell dissected elegantly in his 1943 essay on the poet: “As soon as we begin to read about the so-called system we are in the middle of a hocus-pocus of Great Wheels, gyres, cycles of the moon, reincarnation, disembodied spirits, astrology and what not. Yeats hedges as to the literalness with which he believed in all this, but he certainly dabbled in spiritualism and astrology, and in earlier life had made experiments in alchemy.” And Orwell continues:

“Yeats’s tendency is Fascist. Throughout most of his life, and long before Fascism was ever heard of, he had had the outlook of those who reach Fascism by the aristocratic route. He is a great hater of democracy, of the modern world, science, machinery, the concept of progress – above all, of the idea of human equality. Much of the imagery of his work is feudal, and it is clear that he was not altogether free from ordinary snobbishness. Later these tendencies took clearer shape and led him to ‘the exultant acceptance of authoritarianism as the only solution. Even violence and tyranny are not necessarily evil because the people, knowing not evil and good, would become perfectly acquiescent to tyranny. . . . Everything must come from the top. Nothing can come from the masses’.”

The same essay goes on to outline the occult obsessions of fascists, already obvious in the French far-right press of the pre-war period, and of course, far more blatant in the post-war post-mortems of Nazism. “It is not clear at first glance why hatred of democracy and a tendency to believe in crystal-gazing should go together,” says Orwell, then explains: “the very concept of occultism carries with it the idea that knowledge must be a secret thing, limited to a small circle of initiates. But the same idea is integral to Fascism. Those who dread the prospect of universal suffrage, popular education, freedom of thought, emancipation of women, will start off with a predilection towards secret cults.”

Actually, there is a pretty obvious reason why hatred of democracy and a tendency to believe in crystal-gazing should go together. Occultism implies rejection of rationalism, which itself holds that the universe’s secrets are accessible to rational inquiry, and potentially to all rational beings, who are at least potentially equal; as per the Church-Turing thesis which holds that any real-world computing device can in principle manage the computing functions of any other such device, given enough time and resources. Rationality establishes an almost mathematical basis for human equality. Rational principles don’t require any elaborate hierarchy of initiation and personal growth to access them; they are as transparent and universally accessible as a mathematical formula. Consequently, anyone starting from a hatred of equality, from fear and disdain of the unwashed horde, will be driven to reject reason too. And they will likely do so by retreating to a system of deliberate obscurantism and exclusion.

Borges

Borges shared Yeats’s snobbish disdain for the masses, and loathed Peronism, and this pushed him even further than Yeats into active support of real fascism, when he served as window-dressing for the murderous Videla regime. “For a long time I believed in democracy. Now I don’t believe in it; at least not in my own country,” Borges declared in Chile in 1976. “Democracy [is] an abuse of statistics . . . No one supposes that a majority of people can have valid opinions about literature or about mathematics, but it is believed that everyone can have valid opinions about politics, which is more delicate than the other disciplines . . . Yes, it seems that to destroy liberty is bad. But liberty lends itself to so many abuses. There are certain liberties which constitute a form of impertinence.” Borges may have had a personal grudge thanks to his experience under the heel of Peronist demagogy, but notwithstanding, Yeats’s social and intellectual snobbery looms large in him as well. His literary scholasticism, and Mallarme’s attempts “to purify the dialect of the tribe,” may represent some of the closest attempts to push aesthetic refinement and the cultivation of connoisseurship to the edge of the occult. Other writers didn’t hesitate to take the plunge.

One such was Robert Aickman, who implicitly in his fiction, and explicitly in his introductions to his anthology work in the Fontana Books of Great Ghost Stories, eulogized “the submerged nine-tenths” of unconscious mental experience, and declaring that the ghost story “need offer neither logic nor moral,” and that “everything that matters is indefinable.” Aickman was apparently a persistent and convinced ghost hunter and spiritualist, though as with Yeats, how far he really believed in this, as opposed to wanting to believe, is open to question. He certainly went through all the motions. And again as with Yeats, hatred and disdain of rationalism, equality and the masses, all of which have “destroyed all hope of quality in living,” are there in full force in Aickman’s work. When he warns that “the one-tenth, the intellect, is not looking after us,” he is doing so in a very different vein to Nietzsche warning that “your bad impulses also thirst for freedom. Your wild dogs want liberty; they bark for joy in their cellar when your spirit endeavours to open all prison doors.”

What kind of literature are such personalities likely to produce? Psychology contributes some insights that occultists and fascists have done nothing to contradict. Occultism itself attempts to graft meaning and structure onto the world to satisfy inner impulses and subdue existential fears, without reference to external reality. This resembles apophenia, defined by German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad, in a study on the early stages of schizophrenia, as an “unmotivated seeing of connections [with] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness.” August Strindberg’s Occult Diary is riddled with instances, apophanies, that are now used as examples by psychologists researching the phenomenon. Apophanies have been described as “entirely self-referential, solipsistic, and paranoid,” which also sounds like a pretty good thumbnail description of the fascist mentality. And in genre fiction, you couldn’t wish for a more obvious example than The Lord of the Rings, which China Miéville has characterized as the “neurotic, self-contained, paranoid creation of a secondary world… an impossible world which believes in itself.” No wonder Tolkien’s work has so often been cited as crypto-fascist.

One of the key symptoms of paranoia is attribution bias, a cognitive defect that integrates observed behaviour into a personal, often self-focused worldview. This often correlates with abandonment of consensus social norms and ideologies, frequently by way of corrosive scepticism and nihilism. All of this helps explain why Lovecraft, the self-professed materialist, embraced eugenic theories with an extremely selective bias against competing scientific analyses, in blithe indifference to the actual processes of scientific enquiry. Paranoia is also strongly correlated with social marginality, exclusion, and low self-esteem, often compensated for by conspiracy theories – all of them characteristic of the founding fathers of fascism. Look at what happens to even a moderately independent mind like David Hume, when he recounts his personal experience as a thinker in society in his conclusion to Book 1 of A Treatise of Human Nature: “I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am placed in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expelled all human commerce, and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate. Fain would I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity. I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart.”

Paranoia and Fake News

Paranoid social cognition is linked to perceived social distinctiveness, perceived social scrutiny, and social insecurity (again, Lovecraft, anyone?). All of these may correlate with nihilism, and with the insecure, wounded self underlying narcissism. It shouldn’t be hard to see how already fragile personalities falling within this spectrum develop self-reinforcing, validating personal philosophies, opposed to communal norms and perceived domestic or external threats, especially when social and even economic factors can help trigger their personal pathologies. Some readers may object that this reduces philosophies to symptoms: I’d answer that this is not reductionism, but simply accounts for the ground that such creeds grow from, and which can bias their growth. You certainly don’t need to look much further to account for the proliferation of Julius Evola fans, and enthusiasts of other neo-fascist credos in certain byways of genre fandom, including bulletin boards, where cognitive bias runs rampant enough to satisfy any alt-right peddler of fake news.

Amid the glut of analysis on the 2016 US presidential elections, one strand that has emerged very clearly is the paranoid appeal of fake news to the same underlying drives and uncertainties that bolster both fascism and occultism. Confirmation bias is one factor. So is the allure of being part of the inner coterie of truthsayers who know the great hidden secret. So is social exclusion: the factors that trigger paranoia, including low self-esteem, compensatory narcissism, and lack of purpose, figure large among the audience for conspiracy theories.

Umberto Eco made an especially cutting critique of an earlier and very successful instalment of fake news and conspiracy theory, the “silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code. It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true.” On its relation to the occult in general, he said: “The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret ‘container’ with his or her own fears and hopes. As a child of the Enlightenment, and a believer in the Enlightenment values of truth, open inquiry, and freedom, I am depressed by that tendency. This is not just because of the association between the occult and fascism and Nazism – although that association was very strong. Himmler and many of Hitler’s henchmen were devotees of the most infantile occult fantasies. The same was true of some of the fascist gurus in Italy – Julius Evola is one example – who continue to fascinate the neo-fascists in my country. And today, if you browse the shelves of any bookshop specialising in the occult, you will find not only the usual tomes on the Templars, Rosicrucians, pseudo-Kabbalists, and of course The Da Vinci Code, but also anti-semitic tracts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” New Age rejection of reason, and the appeal to paranoid self-referential solipsism, are a far more important common theme on the shelves of those bookshops than any single ideology or shared, consistent creed.

What of the likes of Alan Moore or Grant Morrison, counter-culture far-left writers and practising occultists? Obviously, they don’t fall into the neo-fascist camp. Self-referential solipsism, though? Check. Narcissism? Check. Felt social exclusion? Check. Conspiracy theories and elaborate paranoid schemata? Check. The elan of being part of the inner circle of masters of reality who see through the grand conspiracies of the Establishment? Check. At least Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson had their tongues firmly wedged in cheek when they whipped up the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Remember that they were inspired by their stints at Playboy magazine fielding conspiracy rants from correspondents, to create a metafiction on the premise that “all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists”. Fnord knows, there’s now enough members of the public who believe the Illuminatus! Trilogy is literally true. And enough past literary radicals on the far left have bled over into the far right, from anarchism to fascist nihilism, socialism to National Socialism. Have we got to spend our time wondering whether Alan Moore believes in his occult systems? Neo-fascist Odinists in Scandinavia and elsewhere apparently do believe in theirs, and use them to guide and justify their actions, and that’s only one example.

Personally, I’m going to continue writing supernatural fiction, and enjoy doing so. But I’ll continue to regard my supernatural stories as far more contiguous with my SF, fantasy, slasher fic, thrillers, historical dramas, dark erotica, and just plain weird or disturbing tales, than they are with any actual occultism. All of them activate the imagination, rather than levering credulity. They invite a suspension of disbelief, rather than demanding belief. They probe the borders of our condition without presuming to project beyond it. Others clearly haven’t been so careful.

As all this suggests, I don’t find prosaic, mundane reality anywhere near as limiting, or as lacking in romance and imaginative inspiration, as some supernatural fiction writers and occultists claim to. Obviously, it didn’t hamper Umberto Eco any, even if there may now be an alarming number of readers who believe that The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum are literally true. And reality offers what occultists can’t – openness, fresh air, light. Hume again: “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther. Here then I find myself absolutely and necessarily determined to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life.”

c. Paul StJohn Mackintosh, 2018

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Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish poet, writer of weird fiction, translator and journalist. Born in 1961, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, has lived and worked in Asia and Central Europe, and currently divides his time between Hungary and other locations.

His previous greydogtales article can be found here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/paul-stjohn-mackintosh-on-lovecrafts-legacy/

And his latest work, a short novel entitled The Three Books, is out now from Black Shuck Books, available on Amazon.

“Tragedy, urban legend, Gothic romance, warped fairy tale of New York: it’s all there. And of course, most important of all is the seductive allure of writing and of books – and what that can lead some people to do. You may not like my answer to the mystery of the third book. But I hope you stay to find out.”

Amazon UK http://amzn.eu/1Cg4Og9

Amazon US http://a.co/e5WVk7A