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Mark Valentine's name and fiction is often associated with authors such as Reggie Oliver, Quentin S. Crisp, John Howard, Stephen J. Clark, and Mark Samuels, largely because of these authors' associations with a handful of publishers known for producing extremely high-quality books, in limited editions, that focus on the borderline between the classic ghost story and the modern strange tale (e.g., Tartarus Press, Ex Occidente, Egaeus, Zagava, etc). These contemporary authors can be seen as the in...
full post here: https://www.oddlyweirdfiction.com/202...In the story "The Axeholm Toll," I marked a particular sentence which perfectly describes my experience with reading the stories in this book:"We enter them, and a sense steals over us of being in a different domain."The best writers, in my humble reader opinion, somehow manage to deliver stories that shut out the sensory realm altogether and deliver me fully into the world(s) that they've created. That's certainly how it is in the case of
“The letters gleamed as if their darkness was coated with a curious light.” LAWKS! I’ve quoted from the text again! I thought that there’s no teaching an old dog new tricks. But this book has proved me wrong. I highly recommend the whole book for its separate ‘ready-mades’ (first the letters and then the words), for its quests within quests (the stories that can either be enjoyed like ‘islands’ or as a ‘white sea company’) and, finally, for its gestalt within the larger gestalt that is you. The...
not one of my faves but a good book.
It is rare to encounter such a wonderful book as 'The Nightfarers'. To read it is a genuinely magical, transportive experience. This is a book that carries you to alternative territories - to another Europe which hovers between fairy tale, reality and nightmare. Like the equally excellent Colin Insole, Valentine utilises mood, tone, atmosphere and symbol rather than plot to create the narrative power in his stories. Pretty much everything in here was excellent, but "The Dawn at Tzern", "The Whit...
From the description I thought this book might be a collection of M R James style ghost stories. But the stories were much stranger than that. The settings were unusual, the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1916, Constantinople, and the Isle of Axholme! (I'm from Lincolnshire).I love books about books so this was a treat.
Its a rare thing when a book can leave you feeling transported to a whole other time and place. Sure... its one thing to escape into a story and the lives of the characters in that story, but its a whole other thing to imagine being in the fantastic world created by Mark Valentine.A rich decadent aesthetic just flows through the pages of this collection, fully drawing out the unique settings created by the author and the stories themselves were thoroughly entertaining. Of the 13 stories (not cou...
The Nightfarers - a collection of fourteen short stories by Mark Valentine composed with the British author's signature elegance, charm and suavity. To add to my reading pleasure, I have the good fortune to own one of the 300 high quality hardback copies published by Tartarus Press. What a delight holding this book in my hands and turning the pages. As a way of sharing the distinctive flavor and flair of these finely wrought tales, I'll turn to a trio of my personal favorites. Perhaps not surpri...
