The Transfiguration of Mister Punch by D.P. Watt, Charles Schneider & Cate Gardner, Egaeus Press

Egaeus Press's debut releases last year - presenting Stephen Clark's lovingly decadent novel, In Delirium's Circle, followed by George Berguno's vital collection of existential war-torn fables, The Tainted Earth - were likely tough acts to follow. Production-wise, they were also quite beautiful, Egaeus's bi-annual releasing intimating that here was a publisher in Mark Beech who merited a book as much an artistic as a literary artefact, the sparse release schedule thus reflecting production cost.
  The Transfiguration of Mister Punch - Egaeus's latest release - therefore had a lot to live up too. According to Beech, three authors were commissioned "working more or less in isolation from one another" to fantastically re-invent the Punch and Judy mythos in a triptych of macabre tales for a modern adult readership.  Charles Schneider produced 'The Show That Must Never Die,' D.P. Watt, 'Memorabilia - An Evening's Entertainment For Two Players' and Cate Gardner, 'This Foolish & Harmful Delight.'
  Schneider's is a fictitious essay, with anecdotal tales, by a Punch puppeteer whose obsessive adherence to his craft and its history turns encroachingly weird. Black and white photographs punctuate the text, informative at first, but gradually disquieting as if we are being slowly throttled by the collar and forced to consider a perpetrator's defence. Despite its novel presentation in word and picture, it is the most traditional of the three entries in its narrative evocation of a sub-Hammer anthology entry from the 1960s' or 1970s'.
   Watt's tale continues this framing device with the character-narrator addressing the reader directly around four short tales. It is the fourth that is most memorable and genuinely chilling; less in the tale itself as in its depiction. The scene of the carnival-disguised 'freakish mummers' who enter a crumbling inn to confront the cornered, guilt-ridden policeman who finds himself in what appears a purgatorial parallel of his town is especially good.
  Of the three, Gardner's is my favourite. Alongside a giant and especially sadistic Punch and Judy, we begin in Hell itself. They escape to the nearest theatre, taking puppet-maker Stjin, robotic ticket-collector Sir Neville, Rasputin and 'Joan' - a high-strung trapeze doll with a yearn to reclaim her half-forgotten humanity - with them. Clive Barker meets Angela Carter in this nightmarish Grand Guignol of enslavement and human - puppet dismemberment. While the unfolding humanity we hope for is delivered in the character of 'Joan' and her bid to reclaim her past.
  The very tightly edited lines, added to the broad rendering of stark imagery - especially in the second and third tales - make me wonder if one or both of them might have once hankered after graphic realisation. They'd certainly work as well.
  I mentioned the book's appearance.  Clearly, Beech continues as he means to go on. The maroon cover, its gold-embossed title on front and spine, and its wealth of illustrations and photographs evoke a strange, forgotten tome from Edwardian antiquity. Textually, it doesn't quite deliver the high standard, and, by its very nature, single-minded focus set by Egaeus's previous two releases. Yet, as with them, the care and dedication wrought on the production as a whole is equal to them.
 

The Tainted Earth by George Berguno, Egaeus Press

This is, perhaps, the most intriguing collection I've read this past year.
A new writer to me, this, Berguno's third, now makes me pine for the
two I've only recently missed. (The Sons of Ishmael and The Exorcist's
Travelogue; albeit reobtainable as e-books, which, to a reader
of aesthetically designed independent hardbacks, isn't quite the
the same experience).
  Indeed, it feels more like a long anticipated reissue than a new
release - Berguno having only completed the last tale, according to his
afterword, less than four months ago.  I so often find myself most
rating those authors who draw, and build upon, their foreknowledge
of odd pet subjects. For Berguno's research and its utilisation - here, of
Scandinavian folk legends and wartime Europe - resonating to
subsequent eras right up to the present, challenges reader perception
without ever wilfully confusing.  A trick rare for any writer to pull-off.
  Comprising eight tales-within-tales, and ending with a novella, the
title story concerns a father who fails to realise the blood ties he has
with his son are not enough to retrieve him from the existential path
he's taken. 'The Sick Mannes Salve' concerns a will and its elusive
second condition, delivered to a struggling horror writer, by his late
uncle's strange executor and the grotesque, mirrored fate that awaits
him.
  'The Ballad of El Pichon' is another re-told fable on a seafront seller
of fake canaries and the path followed to the dark company he keeps.
'Fugue for Black Thursday' features the first of two World War 2
settings and three seemingly premonitionary sketches by the real-life
Polish author, Bruno Schulz.
  'Mouse and the Falconer' is a satisfying little tale of the consequences
of personal caution challenged by personal courage. 'The Rune Stone at
Odenslunda' - the second Scandinavian fable after 'The Tainted Earth'-
involves the mixed destinies of a fought over love match.
  'The Good Samaritan of Prague' is a Golem tale updated and, truly,
the second 'tainted earth' story here, from the fateful consequence of
the indelible mark left upon the protaganist. 'Three Drops of Death'
is a comic satire concerning the 'hero's desperate bid to save the life of
the girl he loves by two characters who engage in playing him for the
sucker he really is.
  'A Spell of Subtle Hunting' (in three cantos) reveals the second World
War 2 setting, and best outlined by Berguno himself: "...It is a very
intimate tribute to Surrealism.  (It) celebrates the dream, and...
attempts to tell a story where dream and reality coincide.  
Significantly, it celebrates the incomplete, the fragmentary, and 
the useless things in life."  By so doing, it also challenges assumptions
on the things we define as important.
  There are no weak tales here.  The most that can be directed in
terms of any doubt is an occasional over-ripeness of language in
early descriptive passages of this otherwise sublime novella. But all
nine are sublime indeed, indulging and exercising the imagination in
ways reminiscent of Meyrink, Grabinski or Gozzano at their best.
I've no hesitation in naming this collection as a future classic.