rats. I should have saved this book for October: The Moons At Your Door, (ed.) David Tibet

97981907222429
Strange Attractor Press, 2016
450 pp
paperback

As I'm sitting here writing this, in the background I'm listening to the eerie music of Current 93's album Faust .  Had I been listening to this  when I read Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock's tale in this book of the same name,  it would have totally heightened the creep factor that the story produced in my head.   The editor of this collection of strange, hallucinatory tales just happens to be David Tibet, the founder of Current 93, and that particular album was inspired by that particular story. 

Tibet's music isn't solely limited to Stenbock as inspiration though;  it reflects at least one way in which the stories and authors in this book (and beyond) have "crept, crept, crept" into his work; in the introduction to this book he lists other music which has been inspired by Ligotti, Machen,  M.R. James and others, whose "names and phrases and worlds and dreams" he has "channeled" into what he's done.  And if Faust is any indication of how he's managed this, I need to listen to more.

Getting to the book now, it's one thing reading an anthology of strange, supernatural tales and it's quite another to read a book that serves as part of a roadmap of stories that have not only made a huge influence on someone's life, but continue to "enthral, and terrify" that person. All of these stories, he says,

"...spell how close is the darkness, how subtly and slyly it may seep into our lives and change them utterly." 

"Enthral, and terrify" they did in my case, and seep into my life is an understatement in the case of some of these stories.  For example,  Stenbock's "Faust" I had to put down in the middle and continue the next day because it was so utterly terrifying;  "The Tower of Moab" by L.A. Lewis and  "The Testament of Magdalen Blair" by Aleister Crowley  took me out the comfort of my reading chair, out of my living room, and into another place entirely.  Those last two are probably imprinted on my brain forever now, and along with the two stories and two poems by Stenbock in this book, have raised the bar for what I'll be expecting from my strange/dark fiction reading from this point on.  Some of these twenty-eight stories I've read before, but I didn't care -- I got a  sense that they belonged here for some reason so I reread them with absolute pleasure.


I'll post the contents here, but I will not be going into any detail about any of them. That should be a pleasure best left to anyone reading this post.

"The Moons at My Door" by David Tibet

*"Faust," "The True Story of a Vampire," "Vol d'Amor," and "Requiem"  by Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock 

"Casting the Runes," "A School Story," and "O, Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad" by MR James

*"He Cometh and He Passeth By" and "Look Up There!" by HR Wakefield

"The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant

"The White People," by Arthur Machen

* "The Testament of Magdalen Blair," by Aleister Crowley

"The Frolic" and "Les Fleurs," by Thomas Ligotti

"The Monkey's Paw," by WW Jacobs

 * "Ravissante," by Robert Aickman

"Smee," by A.M. Burrage

"Sredni Vashtar," by Saki

"Bluebeard," by Charles Perrault

"The Touch of Pan," by Algernon Blackwood

From "The King in Yellow," by R.W. Chambers

 *"Young Tambling," traditional (as sung by Anne Briggs)

* "The Hobyahs," traditional

 *"Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrows," by Thomas de Quincey

 *From "The Thunder: Perfect Mind"

From The Epic of Gilgameš

 *"Couching at the Door," by DK Broster

"The Old Nurse's Tale," by Elizabeth Gaskell

Rounding out the rest of this book are "Biographical and Story Notes," by Mark Valentine and "Lunar Tunes," by David Tibet. 

The asterisks by a few of the story titles mark those I hadn't previously read; I'll just briefly mention a few of those here.  Some time ago I preordered (and am now anxiously awaiting) Strange Attractor's  edition of Of Kings and Things: Strange Tales and Decadent Poems by Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock, also edited by David Tibet. Not to steal Strange Attractor's thunder, but if anyone's interested, Snuggly Books has recently published a collection of Stenbock's work called Studies of Death.   If the Stenbock entries in The Moons at Your Door are any hint of what's to come, I'll be freaked out, utterly terrified, and delighted all at the same time. HR Wakefield's two entries reminded me of MR James, perhaps not with as much depth, but both had eerie twists; Aleister Crowley's "The Testament of Magdalen Blair" chilled me to my bones with its implications.   Aickman's "Ravissante" actually woke me up one morning at 4:30 with an "aha" moment; evidently it was strange and powerful enough to have lingered on in my sleeping subconscious after reading it twice.  "Young Tambling" sent me to youtube to listen to the haunting voice of Anne Briggs;  "Couching at the Door" seems mild and even a bit silly at first but don't let it fool you: it hides a darkness that completely crept under my skin and has stayed there. 

I'm now deep into a second round of Current 93's Faust and thinking how sad I am that this book is over, but fortunately all is not lost.  I have Tibet's newest collection, There is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man (also preordered) to look forward to.  I'm just sorry I didn't save The Moons At Your Door for October reading -- it would have been great to include it in the heading-to-Halloween lineup.

One more thing: yes, you may have many of these stories in various anthologies shelved in your library, but the ones you probably don't are well worth the cost of this book.  The Moons At Your Door should be a mainstay in the home libraries of any serious reader of strange/dark/supernatural fiction.

two beautiful books from John Gale: Saraband of Sable; A Damask of the Dead

"For do not we all wait for something that we know nothing of, something that has not arrived, and possibly never will."  -- from "Vigil," A Damask of the Dead 

A few months ago for reasons I still can't put my finger on, I picked up a copy of his Saraband of Sable from Egaeus Press (the third book in the Egaeus Press Keynote Edition series), never having read anything by John Gale before that time.  Now I would read anything this man writes.

9780993527890

Egaeus Press, 2018

illustrated by Alfredo Guido

185 pp; hardcover

With absolutely no idea what to expect from this author on opening the book,  it didn't take me long at all to realize that I had something exquisite in my hands. By the time I'd finished it, I was telling everyone and anyone who reads dark/strange/weird fiction that they need to buy a copy of this short but sophisticated, highly-satisfying collection of tales, not just because the stories are so good, but also because of the unique quality of the writing.  I'm actually lost for words in trying to describe it, so perhaps I should refer to the description at Egaeus (from the link above) which says that

"Saraband of Sable presents eight of Gale's sumptuous strange tales; dreamlike at times, dense in their imagery yet delicate as dimming perfume."

It also noted there that the author's "previous collections" ... "garnered praise for their sophisticated and decadent prose styling," and I'd only add that I found a sort of ethereal quality to his work, but it really goes much deeper than any description that my non-writer's head can produce.  The most surprising quality of these stories, though, is that while basking in the sheer beauty of the writing, it's like the clouds lift and there at the heart of each story is the darkness that's been peeking through all along, finally emerging with gut-punching force. And while it seems that we're in the middle of long ago and far away, the essentially-human traits that are represented here are tragic, real and timeless. One more thing -- the incorporation of the natural world flows beautifully through each and every story, as in this description of a city's necropolis:

"... a few do venture here, to tarry for a while amidst the cypress and the ebony poplars, basking in the light which falls here like tarnished copper during the diurnal hours; they are the dreamers that revere the lank and elegant grasses that grow between the monuments of obsidian and chrysoberyl, the grasses that turn from jade to gold during autumn; and they love the jackdaws who inhabit the sable green of the elder yews and who often speak in the voices of the dead through eating the fruits of the trees that look like crimson pearls, the trees whose roots bind tight the ivory bones of the long departed."  (from "Lord of the Porphyry Nenuphar"). 

The truth is that even before finishing Saraband of Sable, I was so enchanted that I absolutely had to have more, so I tracked down a copy of the now out-of-print A Damask of the Dead published by Tartarus.

1872621635

Tartarus Press, 2002

100 pp, hardcover (#136)

The dustjacket blurb really tells you all you need to know about this book:

"The perfumes of the East suffuse these tales, of poets, lovers and kings who, despite the luxury and beauty of their surroundings, desire something beyond."

Immediately we find ourselves standing at the gates of  "Death's City", with "palaces with colonnades flooded with darkness, stretching away into infinity," moving later onto "a castle of many turrets that reared up from a cliff of dark rock," complete with "black tourmaline crypts," at some point reaching an "onyx-domed city."  The fourteen stories in this book transport the reader completely out of this world and into others where sorcery is a natural part of life, where poets can really fall in love with the moon, or where the ghost of a king appears one night to give advice to his son and heir, and more.

Fantastical these stories may be, but they are not breezy tales with rewards at the end; as with Saraband of Sable, there is only tragedy, unhappiness, and darkness to be found within.

On the dustjacket blurb of A Damask of the Dead, Mark Valentine has this to say:

"As Machen has observed, literature consists in the art of telling a wonderful story in a wonderful manner. Few writers today acknowledge the need for either element. John Gale is someone who has mastered both."

I couldn't agree more, and that goes for Saraband of Sable as well.  John Gale is a rare find indeed.

So highly recommended that no scale exists for how highly I recommend these books.