Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti
Please email us to check prices & availability!
We are proud to carry Tartarus books: beautifully produced in very limited editions, they are a pleasure to read and own, and represent some of the finest rediscovered weird fiction available today. These hardback books are printed lithographically on high quality paper, in sewn sections, and are hand-bound. Each title has original dust jacket artwork and decorated, embossed boards.
Below is a small sampling of the offerings from this and other literary British publishers (all extracts ©publisher of origin except where noted): please do check with us regarding availability, as the limited size of the print-runs means we cannot guarantee all titles represented will stay in stock or available in first-edition format!
Teatro Grottesco
by Thomas Ligotti. Limited Edition Hardcover. ~$125 (Price variable if in stock, pls email first)'Teatro Grottesco' collects virtually all of Ligotti's writings previously available only in various limited editions in one volume. Each story has been newly revised for this edition. The Durtro edition also includes poems by Ligotti which will not be included in the future trade edition (from Mythos).
Quality hardback, bound in black cloth with blocked metallic calligraphic titles by Geoffrey Cox-Dorée, page-signatures sewn to the spine, head- and tail-bands, black foil page edges, black end-papers and ribbon-bookmark. Designed by David Tibet and Kat Cormie, layout design by Kat Cormie and Internal Omegas by Cox-Dorée, 344pp.
The book sold out at the publisher in advance.
Contents: Derangements (Purity, The Town Manager, Sideshow and Other Stories, The Clown Puppet, The Red Tower); Deformations (My Case for Retributive Action, Our Temporary Supervisor, In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land); The Damaged and the Diseased (Teatro Grottesco, Gas Station Carnivals, The Bungalow House, Severini, The Shadow, the Darkness); Dead Dreams (Things They Will Never Tell You, This Degenerate Little Town, Envoi)
The Wandering Soul: Essays and Letters
by William Hope Hodgson, Introduction by Mike Ashley. $74.95, hb trade edition.
Tragically killed in action at the end of World War One, Hodgson (1877-1918) has acquired a formidable reputation for his classic weird writings, which include the monumental novel The Night Land and atmospheric tales of maritime terror fuelled by his early adventures as an apprentice in the Merchant Navy. In The Wandering Soul, Jane Frank has compiled much previously unpublished and uncollected material, gleaned from editor and science-fiction historian Sam Moskowitz's 'Hodgson Archive'. Presented here are 'Coasts of Adventure', a collection of stories never before published in book form; Hodgson's 'Ship's Log' from one of his early sea voyages; photographs of Hodgson and his family; newly discovered poetry; Hodgson's wonderful and historically important sea-going photographs; articles from contemporary newspapers and journals; and an unpublished slide lecture, all augmented by Frank's carefully researched Introduction and a critical appreciation of the fiction and poetry.
The wide-ranging elements of the book are melded together by William Hope Hodgson's uniquely potent imagination and vigorous approach to life, and their publication can only enhance our understanding and appreciation of his life and work.
PS Publishing, UK. Co-production with Tartarus Press. The Deluxe edition (out of print) contained a separate volume of Hodgson's poetry. June 2005.
The Lost Poetry
by William Hope Hodgson, with an Introduction by Jane Frank. $74.95, hb limited edition.The Lost Poetry presents three previously unpublished collections of William Hope Hodgson’s verse, as he arranged them: Mors Deorum and Other Poems, Through Enchantments and Other Poems on Death, and Spume, which together include forty-three poems never seen before.
Hodgson is best known for his novels and stories of horror and the supernatural, but, despite the lack of previous critical research into his poetry, the sheer quantity of output proves Jane Frank’s assertion that '...poetry was a significant creative outlet for Hodgson throughout his adult life'.
The poems range widely in form—from ballads, epic verse, and dirges to sea shanties—and, perhaps not surprisingly, given Hodgson’s early apprenticeship in the Merchant Navy, it is the sea which 'provides the most dramatic and compelling motif...and which informs and illustrates [Hodgson’s] most frequently explored themes: death, immortality, love, religious faith, patriotism, loss, the meaning of life.'
'Nightmarish lights, breathless gloom, silent streams where "dim, ghostly trout shine in the spectral shallows"; these and many other original concepts are revealed in Hodgson’s poetry, providing pleasure for enthusiasts and the more general reader alike. The total effect...is to reveal William Hope Hodgson as at core a writer vividly alive, vigorous and pulsing with energy.' —Jane Frank
Beresford Egan
by Adrian Woodhouse. $95, hb.Hailed as one of the few truly original British exponents of art déco, Beresford Egan was an essential element of bohemian London for over fifty years. He enjoyed a brief but dazzling career as draughtsman of decadence in the late 1920s-early 1930s, bursting upon artistic London, aged twenty-three, with his brilliantly illustrated lampoon on the banning of Radclyffe Hall's notorious novel The Well Of Loneliness (1928). Over the next six years he produced illustrations and book covers of unparalleled beauty and ferocity for works by Aleister Crowley, Pierre Louÿs and Charles Baudelaire. He also illustrated his own novels and the monographs of his first wife, the beautiful Catherine Bower Alcock.
This book celebrates the centenary of Egan's birth, presenting seventy-nine black-and-white and twenty-five colour illustrations—the best of his published art work from 1928 to 1934—along with many striking drawings, paintings and designs never seen before. These are augmented by Adrian Woodhouse's exhilarating and revealing account of the man and his chief talent, his varied later careers as music-hall performer, film star, dramatist, theatre critic, legendary 'Chelsea artist' and lover of beautiful women. The text is adorned with further images from Egan's long and eventful life, including his earliest work as a cartoonist, photographs of him in British films of the 1940s and his last published drawings before his death in London in 1984.
Oversize sewn hardback. Limited to 750 copies, July 2005.
H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
by S.T. Joshi. $30, pb.Back in print! With a new afterword by the author.
"Even for a reader relatively familar with Lovecraft's work and with the gothic legend of his life, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life will contain illuminating surprises." —Joyce Carol Oates
"S. T. Joshi's admirable biographical study of Lovecraft provides the inevitable foundation for all future study of that enigmatic author." —Harold Bloom
"A magnificent book which supersedes every other study of Lovecraft’s life—the definitive biography of Lovecraft... It deserves to be classed with the major literary biographies." —Ramsey Campbell
The Suicide Club and Other Dark Adventures
by Robert Louis Stevenson, introduction by Mark Valentine. $74.95, hb.Stevenson's Dark Adventures take us deep into the realms of the "gloriously bizarre and elaborately sinister." So writes Mark Valentine in his Introduction to this definitive collection of Robert Louis Stevenson's fantastic and macabre stories.
While 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' has passed into the collective consciousness, many of Stevenson's weird tales, although of seminal importance to the genre, have long been forgotten. This book seeks to redress the balance, bringing back into print the more obscure stories and collecting together the better-known into one volume.
Stevenson's range and inventiveness is breathtaking; from the sheer recklessness and swagger of 'The Suicide Club' stories to the more subtle terrors of 'Olalla'; from the macabre horror of 'The Body Snatcher' to the exuberance and exoticism of 'The Isle of Voices'. Over a century after they were written, Stevenson's stories brim with sophistication and power. Who can resist Stevenson's "overt relish for the storyteller's art", his mastery of style and content and his "swagger in the face of the mundane and the sordidly material. ...The excitement, the fierce joy, the delight in strangeness, the pleasure in deep and dark adventures"; all these burn as brightly today as they have ever done.Sewn hardback of 507+xiv pages. Limited to 400 copies, December 2004.
Black Spirits and White
by Ralph Adams Cram, introduction by Stefan Dziemianowicz; introduction to the uncollected stories by Douglas Anderson. $64.95, hb.Black Spirits and White, a collection of six stories originally published in 1895, is regarded as a landmark of the nineteenth-century weird tale. H.P. Lovecraft singled out the story 'The Dead Valley' as one of the small percentage of American works deserving of high praise in his seminal essay 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'. In the decades since Cram's death in 1942, the book's reputation has only improved. The stories, researched during Cram's travels through Europe as a young man, are sublime renderings of the Gothic tradition.
By 1900 Cram's career as one of America's leading architects had taken off, and he gave up writing fiction. What is less well known is that, amongst poetry and drama, he had also written and published two further stories: 'The Decadent; or, the Gospel of Inaction' (1893), about an æsthete's retreat from the world into art, ripe with the influence of Oscar Wilde... and 'How Jamie Rode for the King' (1897), an historical adventure set in the Scotland of the Jacobite rebellion. These two tales have never before been collected; 'How Jamie Rode for the King' is reprinted here for the first time since its original magazine publication.
In his new Introduction, Stefan Dziemianowicz provides a comprehensive summary of Cram's life and architectural career, and a critical appreciation of the stories of Black Spirits and White. Douglas A. Anderson explores the uncollected stories within the context of Cram's other literary work.
Sewn hardback of 145+xxi pages. Limited to 300 copies, November 2004.
Miss Hargreaves
by Frank Baker, introduction by Glen Cavaliero. $64.95, hb."A novel whose immediate, refined humor is overshadowed by an impressively chilling atmosphere of anticipation and subtle shock." —William Simmons, Hellnotes
As Dr Glen Cavaliero stresses in his introduction, Miss Hargreaves is a brilliantly funny and moving fantasy with an admirable lightness of touch and wonderful characterisation, but for all that it has a dark and frightening undercurrent. A burlesque parable of 'the ways of God with man', the book explores how the creator must live with the consequences of their creation, no matter how uncomfortable. And if they renounce their responsibilities, then there is always the possibility that their power may be turned against them.
Miss Hargreaves, first published in 1940 to great acclaim, is a classic novel of the supernatural. Glen Cavaliero is a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and author of The Supernatural and English Fiction (O.U.P., 1995).
Sewn hardback of 266+ix pages. Limited to 300 copies, June 2004.
The House of the Hidden Light
by Arthur Machen and A.E. Waite, introduction by R.A. Gilbert, hb [SOLD OUT & out of print: no plans to reprint.]Prince Zaleski
by M.P. Shiel, $54.95, hbArguably the most decadent of all fictional sleuths, Prince Zaleski relies upon the methods of ratiocination so beloved of Sherlock Holmes. But unlike his deer-stalkered colleague, Zaleski rarely needs even to leave his divan to solve the perplexing mysteries brought before him by Shiel. Rather than give crude chase to the perpetrators of these sophisticated crimes, Zaleski reclines elegantly in his semi-ruined abbey, 'a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom,' smoking hashish and fashioning solutions from his encyclopedic knowledge of the esoteric. Although he is in this respect akin to Edgar Allan Poe's detective, Auguste Dupin, Zaleski is primarily an up-to-the-minute 1890s aesthete, prompting one critic to suggest that he is based on that tragically extravagant poet of death, Count Eric Stenbock.
Prince Zaleski contains the three tales originally collected in John Lane's Keynotes edition, (1893) along with three further stories, one unfinished, which represent later 'collaborations' with the poet, writer and literary researcher John Gawsworth. Brian Stableford provides an illuminating Introduction to the twilight world of Prince Zaleski, and R.B. Russell's Note explains the genesis of the three stories written with John Gawsworth.
Sewn hardback book of 187+ xxviii pages. Limited to 400 copies, November, 2002.
Three Miles Up, and other Strange Stories
by Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduction by Glen Cavaliero. $49.95, hb"Singularly pure examples of their kind." So writes Glen Cavaliero of these strange stories by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Born in 1923, the author is best known for her skilfully-crafted novels of upper middle-class English life. Three of the four stories collected together here for the first time—'Three Miles Up', 'Perfect Love', and 'Left Luggage'—initially appeared alongside three stories by Robert Aickman in that touchstone of twentieth-century uncanny fiction, We Are for the Dark (1951). The fourth and most recently written story, 'Mr Wrong', a chilling and thoroughly contemporary tour-de-force, was the title story in a collection of Howard's short fiction published in 1975. All four stories, which represent the sum of Elizabeth Jane Howard's strange short fiction, have the power to shock, thrill and puzzle in equal measure, and display the design, coherence [and] deliberate artistry, for which she is justly celebrated.
Sewn hardback book of 216+xii pages with silk ribbon marker, head and tailbands and dustjacket. World Fantasy Award Winner, 2002.
Masques and Citadels: More Tales of The Connoisseur
by Mark Valentine. $54.95, hbWhen beast-headed figures lurk in dark woods, strange utterances are exchanged in a Georgian drawing-room, and bizarre machines are readied in a wharfside warehouse, only The Connoisseur can disentangle the conspiracy that is afoot. And this is just the first of ten episodes in the further career of the sleuth of the singular gathered in this second volume of his adventures. His exploits lead him from his firelit study to a disused lighthouse where lost sea-kingdoms are invoked; to a Scottish island whose Prince may not be named; to a Victorian folly and its weird instruments; and to a secret account of the first crossing of an Arctic land.
With enough extravagance of incident to please any enthusiast of mystery and fantasy, these original and unusual tales also offer moments of reflection upon the delicate shading between this world and other realms. So, whether sword-sticks or subtle visions are your preference, The Connoisseur's case-book is sure to oblige.
"This is a very curious and wonderful book: curious because a contemporary author dares to write in a style and mode fashionable a century ago; wonderful because he does so with such apparent ease, perfectly matching sometimes purple but always precise prose with outre subject matter. [A] slim, elegantly produced volume...." Peter Cannon, All Hallows
"Oh this is luscious! It's a hardback [...] special limited edition with an old-fashioned feel to it, but forget that, let's jump into this wonderful creation... guaranteed to enchant." —Prism
Sewn hardback book of 212 pages with silk ribbon marker, head and tailbands and dust-jacket. Limited edition of 300 copies. One autographed copy also available, $75.
Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker
by Jean Lorrain, translated by Brian Stableford, hb [SOLD OUT & out of print.]Tarnhelm: The Best Supernatural Stories of Hugh Walpole
Introduction by George Gorniak, 70.00 hb"If subtlety, originality and ambiguity are hallmarks of the best supernatural tales, then Walpole's stand with the very best."—So writes George Gorniak in his Introduction to this definitive collection of the most admired of Hugh Walpole's supernatural and macabre shorter works, along with two previously uncollected early masterpieces, 'The Clocks' and 'The Twisted Inn'.
Perhaps best known for The Herries Chronicle (1930-34), a series of four historical Lakeland novels which remains in print to this day, Walpole was widely recognised in his own lifetime as a consummate literary craftsman with a fine narrative style and an admirable ability to portray character, humour and dialogue. In classic tales such as 'The Silver Mask', 'Tarnhelm' and 'The Snow', he also demonstrates beyond question that he understood the experience of sheer, stark terror.
Walpole had a deep and abiding interest in the supernatural and consistently incorporated macabre, mystical and supernatural elements in his work throughout his writing career. He also exhibits a markedly modern understanding of the psychological, and it is this combination which allows his more traditional ghost stories, such as 'The Little Ghost' and 'Mrs Lunt', to retain their power today.
This collection of twenty-five stories should help renew the recognition enjoyed by Walpole in his own lifetime. As he said himself "...the creator who relies more upon the inference behind the fact than upon the fact itself, more upon the dream than the actual business, more upon the intangible world of poetry than upon the actual world of concrete evidence, this kind of creator will come into his kingdom again."
Sewn hardback book of 363+xiv pages. Limited to 500 copies. Publication March, 2003.
The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman
with an Essay by Robert Aickman, an Appreciation by David Tibet, a Reminiscence by Ramsey Campbell and cover artwork by Stephen Stapleton, 2-vol. set only, hb [SOLD OUT & out of print.]Robert Aickman is considered by many to be one of the finest modern writers of ghost stories. But Aickman himself referred to his tales as "strange stories", for they are often open to more complex interpretations. The writing is subtle and poetic, presenting us with both psychological and more material terrors.
"Tartarus have done a superb job of making these books available to the reader at a price which demands commitment, but represents value." —Phil Baker, Times Literary Supplement.
"Straightforward genre horror, you would think, but it's all crossed with acute social observation and the kind of resistance to closure associated with more literary work." —The Guardian.
The Collected Strange Stories are published as two sewn hardback books of 398+xi and 470 pages. The two volumes are published in association with Durtro Press.
The Collected Macabre Stories
by L.P. Hartley, Introduction by Mark Valentine, $79.95, hb, 2nd ptg.Perhaps best known for his 'perfectly realized' novel of Edwardian childhood, The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley was also a much admired adept of the macabre short story. Hartley was no dilletante in the genre: he was well-versed in its long and distinguished tradition, and his carefully crafted macabre stories represent some of the most successful attempts to carry the ghost story into the twentieth century. As Mark Valentine points out in his perceptive new Introduction to this collection, "Hartley said the ghost story was 'in revolt against a materialistic conception of the universe' but also that it must have 'a natural as well as a supernatural interest'; 'humanity must pervade' both the haunter and the haunted; ghost stories should not be 'merely literary exercises in making one's flesh creep'. These observations demonstrate that he saw the form as important and worthwhile: indeed he called it 'If not the highest... certainly the most exacting form of literary art'."
The Collected Macabre Stories includes thirty-seven of Hartley's best tales, ranging from the well-known, traditional ghost stories 'The Cotillon' and 'Feet Foremost', through the dark humour of 'The Travelling Grave' and 'The Killing Bottle' to the Aickmanesque 'The Pylon'. These encompass a wide range of settings from English Country Houses to Venetian Palaces. Two accomplished fantasies, 'Conrad and the Dragon' and 'The Crossways' are also included. Taken together these represent one of the most impressive acheivements of twentieth-century macabre fiction.
"One of the undisputed books of the year, for which demand will surely outstrip the initial printing; if you haven't ordered it already, do so without delay. Well done, Tartarus—yet again." —Steve Duffy, All Hallows, October 2002.
Sewn hardback book, with dj, of 393 + xiv pages.
Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
by Arthur Machen, $74.95, hb, 3rd ptg.Essentially the best of Arthur Machen's short stories and novellas, this collection contains: The Novel of the Black Seal, The Novel of the White Powder, The Great God Pan, The White People, The Inmost Light, The Shining Pyramid, The Bowmen, The Great Return, The Happy Children, Out of the Earth, N, The Children of the Pool, The Terror. With a new Introduction by Roger Dobson.
"Of creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few can hope to equal Arthur Machen." —H.P. Lovecraft.
Sewn hardback book of 392 pages.
The Green Round
by Arthur Machen, hb [SOLD OUT & out of print.]Arthur Machen includes within the pages of The Green Round all of the many interests and preoccupations of his writing career. His hero, Hillyer, takes a holiday in West Wales and visits the "Green Round", a mysterious natural hollow. He soon finds that he has acquired an unwanted shadow, and the novel becomes a study in disclocated parallel realities. With a perceptive new introduction by Machen's most recent biographer, Mark Valentine.
"Machen expertly conveys mystery and a sense of the supernatural whilst maintaining a believable environment and story line." —Matt Leyshon, Enigma.
Sewn hardback book of 129+xii pages. Limited to 400 numbered copies.
The Secret Glory
by Arthur Machen, hb [SOLD OUT & out of print.]For the first time, all six chapters of The Secret Glory were published together, with a new introduction by Godfrey Brangham. Like The Hill of Dreams, The Secret Glory is a novel about a young man who experiences great wonders which change his attitude towards the outside world.
Set against the background of a hateful public school system, and then bohemian London, Ambrose Meyrick cherishes his childhood vision of the cup of Teilo Sant. Unlike Lucian Taylor in The Hill of Dreams, however, Ambrose learns to be confident in his dealings with everyday life, and his adventures with Nellie Foran in London display a fine delight in the good things the world can offer. However, Ambrose Meyrick considers himself to have sinned, and chapter Five of The Secret Glory, formerly available only in a limited edition from Tartarus Press, takes the novel into new realms. Ambrose returns to his native Wales, and in writing of great beauty and power Machen describes how Ambrose and Sylvia perform the marriage of the cup.
The Secret Glory is a book of great beauty, containing some of the most ecstatic and powerful of Machen's writing. ...Includes a new Introduction by Godfrey Brangham.
"This definitive edition of The Secret Glory is essential reading for lovers of Arthur Machen and anyone else who values exquisite prose." —Peter Cannon, All Hallows.
Sewn hardback book of 253 pages. Limited to 500 copies.
The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny
by Sarban, $54.95, hbDescribed by no less an authority than E.F. Bleiler as "excellent", 'The Doll Maker' is the story of Clare Lydgate, a young woman studying at boarding school for her Oxford scholarship examinations. In the evenings, she escapes the school grounds by climbing over the wall of Brackenbine Hall. It is here that she encounters the charismatic and mysterious Niall Sterne, the 'Doll Maker' of the title. This is a subtle, intelligent and compelling tale of horror. The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural describes Sarban's stories as "nicely written, with solid characterizations, convincingly detailed backgrounds... and a fine sense of pacing and atmosphere." It notes that 'The Doll Maker' is Sarban's most intriguing work, and that Niall Sterne "offers no ordinary seduction, and there is a delicate horror in his beautiful, sterile doll-world, the antithesis of life itself." First published in 1953, 'The Doll Maker' appears with 'The Trespassers', and 'A House of Call'.
Sewn hardback book of 272 pages. Second printing.
Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions
by Oliver Onions, introduction by Rosalie Parker, [SOLD OUT & out of print: no plans to reprint.]Containing: 'Credo', 'The Beckoning Fair One', 'Phantas', 'Rooum', 'Benlian', 'The Ascending Dream', 'The Honey in the Wall', 'The Rosewood Door', 'The Accident', 'IO (The Lost Thrysus)', 'The Painted Face', 'The Out-Sister', 'John Gladwyn Says...', 'Hic Jacet', 'The Rocker', 'Dear Dryad', 'The Real People', 'The Cigarette Case', 'The Rope in the Rafters', 'Resurrection in Bronze', 'The Woman in the Way', 'The Smile of Karen', 'Tragic Casements'.
Oliver Onions has long been acknowledged by aficionados of supernatural writing as an elegant and accomplished practitioner; the eerie and beautifully-crafted 'The Beckoning Fair One' is perhaps the best known and certainly the most anthologised of his stories. But Onions' wider work has, until now, generally eluded republication. One of Onions' great strengths, but perhaps also one of the reasons why the majority of his ghost stories have been overlooked, is that they are not easy to categorise; their settings vary greatly, they have a broad frame of reference and the traditionally 'supernatural' content is sometimes minimal. Nor do similarities with other writers spring readily to mind, although it can be argued that there is a correspondence with those other twentieth-century masters of the psychological ghost story, Robert Aickman and Walter de la Mare.
Sewn hardback book of 459+vii pages. This printing contains an extra tale, 'Tragic Casements'.