Buried Shadows by John Howard, Egaeus Press

After the authentic smell of coal-dust and the pulsing feel of blood shed pervading early Victorian Grand Guignol and penny dreadfuls in Egaeus Press's Murder Ballads, Howard returns us to his post-war European territory of metaphysical maps, submerged memories and echoes percolating from the past; topics at which he has established himself as something of a master.

  With this in mind, I do hope he might one day embark upon a novel. Over the past five years in particular, he has proven to his readership that he patently has the product knowledge to enlarge upon his well-researched secret histories. Several of his characterisations would thus benefit with the consequent fleshing-out; adding to the evidence that there is more to the uncanny than the long trodden tropes of horror. It is a pity that many of our generation appear so reluctant; so, for the rest of us, a loss.

  Buried Shadows features ten tales on one of Howard's pet themes; the objectification of city-scapes and their effect upon a protagonist's psyche. Five of the ten showcase Howard at his best. In 'To The Anhalt Station,' a Berlin train station, demolished post-war, has a submerged afterlife between what had been East and West Germany.

  In 'Mr. S and Dr. S,' a journalist arrives in Portugal to interview the country's military President; a man he is surprised to find seemingly enjoys a second life away from the stresses of his duties. But is this really the same man, an unwitting double or a pre-arranged imposter? Uncertain, the journalist knows he must tread very carefully. In 'Least Light, Most Night,' Mr. Bentley invites fellow office worker Mr. Thomas around to his home in a part of London unfamiliar to the latter. On arrival, Mr. Thomas finds the flat cold and in receipt of equally cold drinks and edibles. This coldness takes on a subtley sinister turn when a number of additional guests start to arrive. A successfully Aickmanesque entry.

  The title tale involves a brilliant vanished architect and the unspoken motive of one of his longtime admirers. More Ballard-ian in its clever melding of architectural and psycho-sexual envy. The final, and longest, tale, 'The Floor Of Heaven,' comprises stories-within-the story related to the mysterious fate of author, Stephen Vaughan, and his sole release, 'Lost And Changing London,' as seen through the eyes of the author himself and various obsessives; each intent upon the elusive, sought after edition of a street map that spawned the writing of the original book.

  Featuring illustrations based upon the drawings of the architect and theorist, Balthasar Holz; two of many quotes attributed to this little known figure being, 'each thing is growing and decaying at the same time, only at different rates' and 'a finished building is really unfinished; the first frame of a descent to destruction.' With the non-linear nature of the tales, so I belatedly discover Howard's primary points of departure.

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The Origins (Excerpt from Cemetery for the Living) by Lima Barrreto / Monsters by Alfred Jarry / Black Mirror by Leopoldo Lugones – Three chapbooks from Raphus Press, Sao Paulo

The greatest service this new independent imprint offers is in its desire to translate French, Spanish and Portugese authors into English. Introductory essays by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel, (Raphus founder and author of the novel, Lanterns Of The Old Night (Ex-Occidente, 2016)), link these releases of near-forgotten decadent and post-decadent era tales, long lost in literary periodicals and magazines. Released under the umbrella banner The Golden Age of Clairvoyance, the first have been rehabilitated in three well designed chapbooks, augmented by appropriately chosen classical art from public domain.

  'The Origins,' described as an 'excerpt from an unfinished novel,' is a glimpse into a man's reflecting upon the possible source of his self-loathing. Inevitably, we want more, to see where such brooding leads. Alfred Jarry, the one author I know here, based upon his cult status in inde circles, presents a short, descriptive rumination on "for the most part Indian and Indo-Chinese" iconic imagery in woodcut, also reproduced here. 'Black Mirror,' my favourite of the three, is a fully-fledged short tale.  An uncanny electrical charge is claimed to reflect those foremost in the mind while manifesting parallel emotions in colour on a perfectly flattened disc of coal. Inevitably, it becomes a warning to the curious, but, in Lugones pre-empting later Blackwood, draws me into wanting more.

  The initial print-run of all three is, of course, low, so any interested readers should make a quick decision; because I do hope Raphus continue on their path of intriguing little translations of the recovered uncanny and esoteric.

Sylvan Dread – Tales Of Pastoral Darkness by Richard Gavin, Three Hands Press / Pagan Triptych – Stories By Ron Weighell, John Howard & Mark Valentine, Sarob Press

Never a fan of Grand Guignol horror whose conclusions offer no hope, there is a strange kind of alternative offered in several of Sylvan Dread's conclusions; of renewal and re-birth as part of a lost primeval nature. Amoral, non-human perhaps, but not entropic. Outside each tale's protaganist are the secret motives of nature and its amoral drives for continued procreation. Gavin's philosophical trigger is from the theory of Rudolf Otto; the German scholar of comparative religion, whose Idea Of The Holy is quoted from at the top of the first tale. ('Thistle Latch'). Described by Otto as a "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self,” this might be an aposite definition for the uncanny as a whole.

  'Primeval Wood,' the second tale here, concerns Neil Keller and the hawthorn idol he discovers that appears to infect him with potent dreaming, just as his relationship ends, leaving him vulnerable to fight this unknown and unknowable foe alone. In 'A Cavern Of Redbrick' a boy's regular bike ride around a gravel pit is suddenly disturbed by the ghostly presence of a girl upon the roof of its shed. This 'presence' leads him, unwittingly, to the revelation of a terrible family secret and portentous conclusion.

  In 'Fume' the warden at the holiday hamlet of Beech Point observes the exodus of renters at the end of the summer season. En route home for dinner, Clark spies a small, illicit encampment and stops off to investigate. Within the sole tent he sees what appears to be a swaddled corpse. Bursting its wrapping elicits the 'fume' of the title that also burns his skin and causes a personal change – inside and out - that may be more than mere hallucination. In 'Weaned On Blood' an abbot, newly-arrived at a rural monastry, is initiated into a sacrificial ritual as a means to sustain a much darker tradition. The abbot decides, for the good of the brotherhood, to act unilaterally to reveal the recipient.­

  In 'Mare's Nest', the husband of a couple still very much in love must face the imminent death of his wife. He, a sculptor, she, a poet, they agree upon a pact to both physically manifest and entrap forever the spirit of her favourite self-composed poem of the title. If that sounds trite, the tale's real strength is in the authentic depiction of the husband's uxorious emotions, which are genuinely heartrending.

 This is the fifth collection by a writer who, being usually distant from 'horror,' I've previously overlooked. I see in the case of Richard Gavin at least, this has been my loss. The territory and subject matter may otherwise both be familiar to its seasoned readers. For myself, glimpses of frightening beauty in Gavin's exotic prose style transcends that in much of the genre.

According to one of the three afterwords that inhabit this collection of long short tales, Ron Weighell implies that his contribution to this Blackwood tribute represents the fifth to feature his continuing character, Dr. Andrew Northwoode, "respected Fellow of Belden College, Oxford, and eminent scholar of antiquities various." The Edwardian influence of the prose style and its derring-do usage makes 'The Letter Killeth' easily the most traditional of these three. A strange bequest delivered to the College library, its mystical contents, and the malevolent force it threatens to unleash is well done and informed and affectionate rather than merely derivative.

  It reads more like Machen-informed Wheatley, than Blackwood inspired, but, as other recent author-dedicated anthologies have shown, such inspiration doesn't necessarily mean bland homage. I don't know of Weighell's previous work, but he's clearly a man of some deprecating wit. He ends his short, intermediary afterword (the first of three by each author) disappointed that he had to rely less upon imagination than usual, since he's reached his ongoing character's age-group.

  'In The Clearing' takes its cue from Pan's Garden's 'The Man Whom The Trees Loved.' A city man who, from the opening line, "had never made much time for anyone," suddenly finds a haven for some peace and quiet, where time is all he has. Suspended from his post, (for a reason left intriguingly unexplained), he suddenly faces what has long been harboured, perhaps even repressed, within himself, as previously unexplored feelings uncannily mingle with perceptions he can no longer recognise or trust. Is what he sees merely from his own point of view? Or is he being externally, objectively affected? The tale has a brave ambiguity, that stays with you long after its end. Yet, whether it is entirely successful – in its own terms - is hard to guage in that I wasn't entirely certain what Howard wanted to achieve. Rather than lead you, however, its snail pace demands your attention and gradual recall.

  In its assured feel for the Edwardian uncanny, 'The Fig Garden' is classic Valentine. A childhood ritual among friends, involving a procession and the near-holy imbibing from a figtree, resonates across time and the life of one man, semi-conscious of vague connections he can sense but not clearly define. He comes to suspect he might have a role in something far greater than himself. It vaguely reminded me of David Lindsay's rare mid-Twenties novel, The Violet Apple, in its philosophical theme.

  The dustjacket evokes that of Blackwood's one-hundred year-old novel, Julius LeVallon, by its cool colour pallette and of a sole figure standing awestruck and exultant amongst a mountainous landscape.

The Silver Voices by John Howard, Swan River Press / Lost Cartographies: Tales of Another Europe by Cyril Simsa, Invocations Press

What has become known as ‘the other Europe’ in independent literary circles, has also garnered an ‘other currency’ in recent years’.
  Intentionally or otherwise – by the authors’ concerned - the credibility deficit exposed in the euro, that of Maastricht, shifting allegiances, geographic and metaphysical, and the rise of UKIP, have each lent relevance to this topic as a literary theme. To Howard’s credit, his Transylvania – while highlighted as the setting in the cover blurb – never comes close to the increasingly stale whiff of the Undead.
  His theme is ‘nostalgia for the future.’ In each tale we see the architectural and political changes wrought upon the ‘unknown eighth’ Rumanian town, formerly Sternbergstadt,( latterly renamed Steaua de Munte), and its often darkly circuitous consequences to one figure who appeals, in various guises, to each protagonist-narrator; often in search of some form of atonement.
  A lawyer, desperate to hold on to what his beloved town had once been, conscripts a drifting artist to his own personal cause.
  From a bar in Prague, a former political agent re-encounters his former gaoler when a prisoner-of-war and the old colleague who’s reunited them.  This is a cold war-style tale of intrigue where ‘boundaries…may be negotiated and crossed over.’
    A small, fascistic coterie of Futurists try establishing the Sternbergstadt Spaceflight Society in a poorly-supported bid – by its ageing founder - to launch Romania’s first manned rocket, past credibility but not of heart. This is a clever depiction of another possible future; a cul-de-sac of cornered utopianism.
  ‘The Reluctant Visionary’ is the first of this collection’s three true gems.  A newly-qualified architect with a penchant for the Art Deco, born of what he saw reflected in the buildings of Bucharest, steers him back to Steaua de Munte – his old home town. Here, he oversees the restoration of his boyhood cinema. Further research draws him to a newly-opened bookshop, the film of ‘Shape of Things to Come,’ an old photo album, and a local couple’s story, which harbours disturbed visions of an alternate future.
  ‘In Strange Earth’ follows a chance encounter between a loyal, Zelig-like Party member, rising up the ranks through a series of serendipitous triggers, and the local town mayor. When he witnesses the people turn against his leader, he soon realises that, for the first time in his life, his own hide is now vulnerable.  Mine is a simplistic sketch, since, as with the best uncanny tales, the telling is slightly ambiguous, the sense of isolation, beautifully wrought.
  In fact, Howard is so often less of an uncanny voice than that of Mark Valentine, his occasional writing partner. Yet, where he is, he excels, heightening rather than undermining a narrative’s authenticity.
  ‘The Silver Voice’ (effectively, the title tale) is a frame tale-within-a-tale.  A short story, found printed in an old, fascist periodical, hides a central truth – a badge of family shame - relayed by the framing narrator’s grandfather-writer.  An accompanying, anonymously sent, query compels the grandson to embark on a journey to uncover the source of this shame; to, in effect, re-enact the trajectory of the original short tale. An entry as emotionally authentic as it is structurally sound.
    The seven-tale collection closes with ‘To Hope for a Caesar.’ The setting shifts to Berlin. A museum tour guide is held back by a strange older man who, having observed the younger, impresses to him the need for him to contact a third party whom he seeks.  This third man is also a stranger to the tour guide, but he cautiously takes the older man’s card. What transpires leads to a show of manifest wealth bought by familial and political treachery; a selling-out that must somehow be reconciled to today’s more liberal mores.
  I’m pleased both this collection (first published in 2010) and ‘Secret Europe’ (2012 – and now with Tartarus) have so soon found a home for an additional western audience to Bucharest’s more esoteric Ex-Occidente, who published both first editions.
  Howard – a British writer - has carved out an almost unique niche for himself, detailing the geo-political ebb and flow of Eastern European history from the minutiae of its human costs and intrigue.

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Cyril Simsa takes both a more literal, and wittier, view of his ‘other Europe,’ spawned, as it is, from the Czech community of his North London roots. It is his Prague and the surrounding country that features most broadly. Broadly, Simsa’s deprecating wit reveals much future promise in unexpected punchlines;

  “The air was warm under the slanted glass panes of the conservatory roof, even as the moon and stars swooped overhead through the long, elliptical thread of their courses.  It was not for nothing my father had learned to copy the ancient Romans’ underfloor heating system.”
(‘Journey’s End’).

And here;

  “I don’t think he quite knew of what to make of my reaction either, but to give him his due, he did not give away any more than I did.  And I suppose that, after several centuries of being shunned, it must come as something of a surprise to have a dinner guest.  You can’t do a lot of entertaining if your neighbours swoon with horror whenever they see you. It must be so terribly dull to be frightening.”
(‘Imbibing History’).

   In this, his debut collection, the writer is, perhaps inevitably, still in the process of finding his literary voice.  Some metaphors are not entirely comparable; not always perfectly evoking what is described.  Take, “their loose white smocks flapped like owls in the warm riverside breeze.” This, after the wearers are described as ‘tall and sun-browned.’ (‘Imbibing History’). Or, “their bodies black and furry as smoke in the turbid sky.” (Ibid.)  A reference to a cloud of bats, where the smoke being ‘furry’ seems a misnomer.
  This first tale is a contemporaneous riposte to ‘Dracula,’ set in its published year.  It covers overly familiar ground, yet with the sly wink of a convincing female academic archetype. (If an archetype can ever convince…). A cossetted, wide-eyed innocent whose textbook intelligence inadvertently equips her with the ability to fascinate her dark ‘suitor.’
  There are two fantastical bursts that indelibly imprint upon the memory. Long after putting the book down you’ll easily summon the last descent into a water nymph’s netherworld in ‘Under the Waves,’ along with the earth-erupting ascent of a pagan figure of folklore in ‘On the Feast of Stephen.’
  ‘Under the Waves’ is this collection’s highlight.  With its timely setting - the summer before the 1914-18 War - it has the sepia-tinged wonder of a Lake Lady fairy tale by that old outsider-prophet, George Macdonald. A reflective epilogue on a life’s changing pace and perception succeeds as a balanced portrayal of what appears to be Simsa’s twin interests; fantastical interventions to self-realisation.
  In ‘Poorly Formulated Questions,’ a conservative, despotic President – beneficiary of a genetic programme of life extension – is finally tracked down. Or is he? His trailer soon discovers the secret of his elusive, extended life.
  The collection’s timely sub-theme of treachery culminates in ‘Queen of Sumava.’ Two Red Army Colonels are independently posted for rival manoeuvres at the post-War Bavarian border; one with orders to close the border; the other to ‘test’ the present troops. Also here, amidst the unknown-knowns of what the surrounding mountains may harbour, is the source of local superstition, made manifest as its mists come down - the ‘Queen’ of the title.
  Another pleasing contrast with Howard’s collection is the number of female protagonists that Simsa delineates with apparent, simple ease. (In four of the six tales, including one of the two Colonels’ in the last). To achieve this, I wonder if he empathised most with the women in his own family. Certainly, from his Introduction, he states how he grew-up seeing himself something of a stateless outsider who only realised how English he really was when he moved to Prague in the 90s’.
  This is a debut of promise.  Simsa dispenses building atmosphere through over-dominant back-story or character.  Instead, he utilises a lighter touch, an informed wit enlivening both the history and the myth.

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Finally, speaking of wit, I’d like to thank the anagrammatical Paulo Brito for the dedication of one of his infamous, oulipo poems to myself:

My "Beau Présent" of the day
(20th August) goes to
Mark Andresen

A seaman and sand!
A sandman and sea!
Are Mark’s dreams.
Same dreams. Same dramas!
A dark, dense edema?
Sad! Sad!
Mark sees a reader,
a sneaks
and read… read.
Mark dreams a dream.
A masked Eden's remake?
An arena,
a damask snake,
a naked drake,
and…
Mark earned a ranked arena!
Mark’s a dear
as
Mark’s a masked dream maker.
End!

© Paulo Brito (2014)

Written By Daylight by John Howard, Swan River Press

"I think these ideas are irresistible and ideal material for stories. We are surrounded by tokens of people and events outside ourselves—everything and everybody that isn’t me—they come from somewhere, and if we let them go again, they pass to somewhere else, neither of which can be known with certainty."
(John Howard, from an interview with Mark Valentine, May 2013)
  It is worth reflecting upon this quote when reading this delicate, quite elusive, new collection.
  In "Where Once I Did My Love Beguile," the fate of a boy and a broken pocket watch become inextricably linked, in a near covert tale of time reversal that reads as having been written with the child reader in mind. 'Silver On Green,' reflecting Howard's long interest in foreign coin collecting, sees a European radical with a Blakean sensibility exiled among London's cosmopolitan Bohemia until a warning visitor from his homeland darkly confirms his earlier belief that silver may 'wax and wane like phases of the moon, but the form endures and deep within...remains constant.' A strange tale in another sense, from a twist that, like others here, requires re-reading to even begin to uncover its portent.
  'Winter's Traces' is a real gem that could so easily have failed. A journalist relates his scouring for source material to write a profile-obituary on the late, 'prolific composer of light orchestral music,' William Winter. There is little uncanny about this tale other than  ambiguous gaps in Winter's chronology and a possible reason the late composer cited as to why he withdrew from public life and ceased composing.  Tales about music so often feel overly contrived; but Howard seems to know enough about the critics' point-of-view to seemlessly pull it off.  In 'Out to Sea,' being careful what you wish for becomes an unforeseen initiation as an ominous band of rowers ferry unsuspecting hopefuls between a Mediterranean mainland and six idyllic islands in a seemingly blind gamble.
  'Time and the City' evokes a science fantasy of a fading era where an explorer delineates an impenetrable map of unknown origin through an uncharted region of the distant past from the prone position of an induced coma. 'Into an Empire' is, perhaps, the most beautifully written entry, about a collector of "coins, banknotes, and postage stamps," the transience of objects and the traces they leave behind - evoking the opening quote. It isn't so much a tale as a rumination upon one with a precise o.c.d. routine for buying and receiving who belatedly, unwittingly, discovers what he'd been searching for in the wider, instinctive world around him.
  The dust jacket is worth a mention; a lovely collaboration between the artist Eoin Llewellyn and designer Meggan Kehrli of a sleeping man in Forties-style suit amid a dream landscape of autumnal browns, greens and blues.
  The remaining five in this collection,'Westernstrand,' 'The Way of the Sun,' 'The High Places,' 'Wandering Paths' and 'A Gift for the Emperor' each originally featured in Secret Europe (with Mark Valentine, Exposition Internationale, 2012) so already reviewed in these pages.
  Most of these tales are so subtle as to defy any category of the strange at all, but reward re-reading and are all the greater for it.

A Brief Q & A with Mark Valentine and John Howard

This week, as a companion piece to my last entry, a brief Q & A with partnered authors of the uncanny, Mark Valentine and John Howard:

Mark Valentine’s first publication was The Garden of Ruin, god of the rain (1980) and his most recent, with John Howard, is the short story collection Secret Europe (Ex Occidente Press, 2012). He has written a biography of the Welsh author and mystic Arthur Machen (Seren, 1990) and Time, a Falconer (Tartarus Press, 2011), a study of the diplomat and fantasist ‘Sarban’. His tales of an aesthetical occult detective were recently brought together in The Collected Connoisseur (with John Howard, Tartarus Press, 2010) and he has published four other short story collections. He edits Wormwood, a journal of the literature of the fantastic, supernatural and decadent.

John Howard was born in London in 1961. He is the author of a collection of short stories, The Silver Voices, and a novella, The Defeat of Grief. His stories also have appeared in the anthologies Beneath the Ground, Cinnabar’s Gnosis, and Never Again. His collaborations with Mark Valentine have appeared in the collections Masques & Citadels, The Rite of Trebizond and Other Tales, and The Collected Connoisseur. He has published many articles on various aspects of the science fiction and horror fields, especially on the work of classic authors such as Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, August Derleth, M.R. James, and writers of the pulp era. 　

Why did you originally approach a Romanian publisher for this and previous projects?

MV: Originally, Ex Occidente Press approached us. Dan Ghetu, who runs the press, had enjoyed some of our earlier stories and asked us to produce a book for his new imprint.

JH: Dan was willing to publish more by us (separately and in collaboration) – which he did – and so it was natural for us to ‘pitch’ the ‘Secret Europe’ idea to him. Dan went along with the way the project developed, as well as requesting and/or making his own changes (such as not including any story notes).

What feedback, if any, have you so far received from British mainstream publishers from your work with Ex-Occidente?

MV: None. However, I’ve never tried to interest them in it.

JH: None – but I’ve never asked for any.
　
How and why did you both settle on the theme of dissent for many of the tales in this book?

MV: We didn’t discuss this as a theme. Our stories were drawn to it independently.

JH: I didn’t consciously settle on this theme. As many of my stories in SECRET EUROPE are set during times of upheaval (or worse) or impending change, the theme of ‘dissent’ clearly turned out to be relevant and so found its way into the stories through the various characters in their different – or not so very different after all – situations. It often takes an outsider looking in to discern themes.

Another example is in Des Lewis’ real-time reviews, where he (correctly) points out the times I’ve used ‘high places’ – balconies, terraces, towers, hills, etc – in my work. I never realised how often I did it until he mentioned it.

Did either of you ever consider it an issue placing the 'uncanny' tales next to the more political ones?

MV: No. I didn’t think about it. I just wrote the stories that the place or characters seemed to suggest.

JH: I never gave any thought to the arrangement of the individual stories in the book, or of attempting to co-ordinate the order of my stories with Mark’s. We were happy to leave this to the skill and judgement of the publisher. And I think this has worked out well!

As a writing partnership, how do you avoid conflicts? Do you both instinctively write to your own strengths or is it always something that has to be long planned and negotiated?

MV: We have known each other for almost 30 years so probably have a good idea of each other’s interests. For this collection, all we did was to divide Europe up between us, so we didn’t write about the same places. So, yes, the writing is mostly instinctive.

JH: When we’ve collaborated, we’ve avoided conflicts because Mark always has the last word! I’ve been happy with this because the impetus and main ideas have nearly always come from him. This was certainly the case for our six collaborations involving The Connoisseur. He was Mark’s character and Mark knows more about him than I do (although in my time with him I think he’s picked up a few things from me).

I think Mark and I always write to our strengths – many of which we share, and others of which are complementary. I think we largely write instinctively – and more often than not we’ve turned out to have shared those instincts, or they’ve led us in the same direction.

Which stories from SECRET EUROPE do you both consider the most successful at achieving what you'd planned for the book as a whole?

MV: I hope they all work together as a set. While we didn’t have a definite plan for the book, we knew that most of the stories would be set in interwar Europe and in places and situations that might not be all that well known. The interest for me was in trying to imagine the atmosphere of each setting and the preoccupations of the characters.

JH: I’m not sure we really planned anything for SECRET EUROPE as a whole, except to cover as much of Europe geographically as seemed feasible.  I don’t think I started writing my stories to a plan, except that once I’d decided to use a setting (or create a fictional one) I wanted to make it as alive as possible, and hopefully to leave the reader with a sense of having been somewhere in ‘secret Europe’ – even if only for a very brief time, and perhaps with the relief of having got away.

As well as wanting to use places I’d had the chance to visit, I also wanted to write about times and events in recent history that have interested me for years, but which might not be well-known today: for example the brief but bloody civil war in Austria in 1934.

Mark and I divided Europe between us, rather in the manner of Molotov and Ribbentrop; so we never trespassed on each other’s territory, even when we ended up setting stories in the same areas, because of shared interests in them – for example, the Baltic countries.

I don’t think I can answer the question by choosing a story: that’s up to the reader!
　
My thanks to Mark Valentine and John Howard for giving of their time. I very much look forward to their next releases - both together and apart.