Violet Books

The US edition of The Street of Queer Houses (Boullion-Biggs, 1924) has a slightly different contents that the UK edition, which it precedes. The tales involve such themes as invokation of a demon, time-travel to Elizabethan times, lingering pagan divinities, & a suicidally vengeful house that daily creeps nearer & near a cliff's edge. Author Vernon Knowles was an Australian expatriot to England.

Lady Stanley's Miss Pim's Camouflage (Boston: Houton Mifflin, 1918) shows the ghostly, transparent spinster Miss Pim amidst dead on the battlefield. World War I tales frequently incorporated the fantastic, & this tale of powers & invisibility is a typical case. The author was the widow of Sir Henry Stanley whose posthumous autobiography she edited.

R(ichard) B. Ince's At the Sign of the Sagittarius (Ln: Faber & Gwyer, 1927) includes several ghost stories, leaning toward the satiric. As the dustwrapper says, "there is much wit, some schjolarship, & a real touch of poetry." The author is better known as a Christian scholar & this ghostly collection has been completely overlooked by anthologists. The best story is the demonic "The Thanatists."

The Specimen Case (New York: Doran, 1925) is a grand overview of Ernest Bramah's many talents, including tales of the Chinese storyteller Kailung, one tale of blind detective Max Carrados, & several weird shorts. You can view some of his Kailung bindings in my Orientalia galleries; & you should visit Mike Berro's Ernest Bramah website for a lot of information on this author -- with thanks to Mike for the loan of this rare jacket.

James L. Ford's rather redundantly titled Hypnotic Tales & Other Tales (New York: George H. Richmond, 1894) is illustrated throughout by Puck magazine artists C. Jay Taylor, F. Opper, S. B. Griffin, & L. Dalyrumple. A mixed collection, there's a detective yarn, a spiritualist yarn, a handful of christmas yarns including a peep at at the circus freaks' christmas, a modern Arabian Nights fantasy, a couple of amusing prohibition tales, a haunted house & other Connecticut regional spoofs, &c.

James Huneker was the leading American Aesthete. His collection Melomaniacs (Scribners, 1902) is one of his rarer books. There are several supernatural pieces amidst these tales of musicians, theatrical performers, & artists pitting their own angst & vision against the callous, unseeing world. "Avatar" is about the reincarnated Chopin who has become the servant of an inferior pianist. One of the most interesting pieces is "The Corridor of Time" which intercalates several Baudelairesque poems-in-prose.

Stephen McKenna's The Oldest God (Boston: Little Brown, 1926) was obviously inspired by Arthur Machen. As this gothically "cosy" tale unfolds, a mysterious houseguest (the god Pan) weirdly impacts the lives & fates of everyone attending a Christmas gathering in a castle. McKenna wrote a handful of similarly egg-heady fantastic mysteries.

Dana Burnet's short ghost story The Pool (Knopf, 1945) was done up as a handsome slim gift book for grieving families of slain soldiers. It essentially updates the type of war legend that was ever so popular in WWI. Burnet was a leading magazinist in his day & wrote a number of grand ghost stories nearly without equal, but as there was never a collection of them these great works are all but foregotten.

The Devil Comes to Bolobyn (London: Percival Marshall, 1951) provided Sydney Horler with one of his most colorful dustwrappers. It's a tale of the Black Mass and diabolism in a small West England village. The village happily does not actually exist. Sydney's admitted influence was Karl-Joris Huysman's satanic masterpiece La-Bas which he read in its Fortune Press edition.

Karl-Joris Huysman wanted us to believe the Devil was a powerful & scary guy, but Don Marquis (pronounced Mark-us) is of a less Catholic persuasion. Chapters for the Orthodox (Doubleday Doran, 1934), as the dustwrapper says, is crammed with "Brilliant & audacious tales of modern miracles & witcheries -- adventures of Satan & Jehovah in New York." A typical tale regards Old Man Murtrie, a revolting sod who lives forever because neither God nor the Devil could stand the idea of having him about. One of the few books I cannot read out loud to anyone because I get choked up from laughing.

Paul E. Eldridge is best remembered for the sweeping epic fantasy novels he co-wrote with poet George Viereck, i.e., the Wandering Jew epic beginning with My First Two Thousand Years (1928). When Viereck afterward became a Nazi propogandist, Eldridge's career was trashcanned without anyone even bothering to find out whether he enjoyed his collaborator's political stench. Eldridge's own books were never common, but as he fell onto the "taboo & uncollectable" lists, his independent career never fully recovered & his few books have become exceedingly rare. The best of his deserving volumes is And the Sphinx Spoke (Boston: Stratford, 1921) filled with short & short-short Aesthete fantasies.

W. T. Linskill's St. Andrews Ghost Stories, here shown in a fifth edition trade paperback (J&G Innes, St Andrews Citizen Office, 1935) was probably never distributed outside of St. Andrews College. These are pleasingly old-fashioned antiquarian ghosties, as Dean Linskill died at age 74 late in 1929 & his tastes were formed contempory to M. R. James.