{fantasy} – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 856

The November Meteors (1882) by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on Claude Houghton (1889–1961), “an enigmatic figure in the field of fantastic literature and the metaphysical thriller”.

• Free (or name your price) music: Nocturne (Soundtrack For An Invisible Film) by Avi Engel; Surface Tension by Pietro Zollo.

• At Colossal: Bats, Spiders, and Slime Molds Make the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Shortlist.

• At Literary Review: DJ Taylor reviews Super-Beast: The Mysterious Life of Saki by Oliver Soden.

• At Public Domain Review: Soldiers of Misfortune: The Drawings of Urs Graf the Elder.

• At the BFI: Miriam Balansecu chooses 10 great films based on unfinished books.

• New music: Capstone by Ian Boddy, Field Lines Cartographer & Sulk Rooms.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Brunnen.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s A Jonas Mekas Day.

• The Strange World of…Suzanne Ciani.

• XPRMTS: Art prints by Tetra.

• Harmonic Automata

• Late November (1971) by Sandy Denny | November (2002) by Max Richter | November Sequence (2011) by Pye Corner Audio With The Advisory Circle

The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult

I ought to have been writing this in the run-up to Halloween but as I’ve said before, Halloween here is a state of mind, not a mere twenty-four hours. The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult received a mention in the recent post about Charles Williams, two of whose novels were included in the collection. The paperback series was brought to mind again last week when another of the titles, The Prisoner in the Opal by AEW Mason, turned up at Standard Ebooks, the home of high-quality, public-domain texts. This in turn gave me the idea of compiling a list of links to online sources of all the other titles which are now in the public domain. As you’ll see below, that list has sprawled into a guide to the entire series. When I’ve referred to these books in the past I’ve usually pointed to one of the Wheatley fan sites which are generally informative but also lacking in detail, especially when it comes to telling you anything about the individual titles. In this post I’ve satisfied my curiosity about the more mysterious books, listed all the public domain texts and also sought out the information that the Wheatley sites neglect to offer.

The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult was launched by Sphere Books in Britain in 1974. Unlike similar series which promote their titles with a well-known name, Wheatley himself was heavily involved, writing a promotional flyer which was sent to booksellers, and helping to choose the books. The flyer’s text suggests that Wheatley was eager to capitalise on the occult revival of the 1970s, a resurgence of popular interest which had been especially prominent in Britain thanks to our pagan past and the legacy of earlier revivalists like Gerald Gardner, the Golden Dawn and others. Each of the books in the Library series contains a brief introduction by Wheatley which is signed with his facsimile signature, while the four collections of short stories and non-fiction pieces include essays or fictional extracts by Wheatley himself. The introductions for all of the books may be read here and here.

The flyer gives an idea of Wheatley’s ambitions, with a mention of 400 titles being under consideration. One of the books listed as forthcoming—Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by MR James—never appeared, possibly for copyright reasons. The list of prospective authors includes many who appeared in the series and a few more who didn’t, among them Robert Chambers (presumably the author of The King in Yellow), Carl Jung and—surprisingly—HG Wells; the list also manages to misspell Edgar Allan Poe’s middle name. The series as it was published is unusual in its mix of fiction and non-fiction, with magical guides and historical studies scattered among the weird tales; this really is a Library of the Occult, albeit a popular take on the subject, rather than another collection of horror stories. Sphere published 45 of the books in all, an impressive number that might have been greater if Wheatley hadn’t died in 1977. I bought the Library copy of Dracula in the same year, and subsequently managed to accumulate 23 of the titles during visits to secondhand shops. Many of these books were being published for the first time in paperback, and some of them remain obscure today. Even if Wheatley had lived a little longer I doubt the series would have sustained itself much further than 50 titles. The occult revival of the 1970s oscillates between poles of attraction and repulsion; an acknowledgement that this is dark and even dangerous material which is also attractive because of its previously forbidden nature. Wheatley’s fiction had been trading on the same attraction/repulsion since the 1930s, but by the end of the 1970s all the old “forbidden” grimoires were back in print and being joined on the bookshelves by invented ones like the two fake versions of the Necronomicon. The arrival of a new decade demanded a new sensibility. The darkness and witchiness didn’t vanish in the 1980s, when “occult” in its popular manifestations was diluted into “New Age”, it retreated to the shadows to fuel the Goth and metal subcultures while serious occultism began breeding something called Chaos Magic. But that’s another story…

1: Dracula by Bram Stoker

★ ★ ★ Dracula at Standard Ebooks ★ ★ ★

2: The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore

The novel follows Bertrand Caillet, the eponymous werewolf, throughout the tumultuous events of the Franco-Prussian War.

Still in copyright.

3: Moonchild by Aleister Crowley

★ ★ ★ Moonchild at the Internet Archive. ★ ★ ★

Its plot involves a magical war between a group of white magicians, led by Simon Iff, and a group of black magicians, over an unborn child.

Crowley was a better poet than a novelist but this novel has been reprinted many times, with Sphere publishing it again a few years later. Wheatley met Crowley at least once, and in his introduction to this edition describes being in attendance one evening in Paris when Crowley performed a summoning which had tragic consequences. It’s a very Wheatleyan anecdote which doesn’t seem to have ever been confirmed by either Crowley himself or any of his biographers.

4: Studies in Occultism by Helena Blavatsky

★ ★ ★ Studies in Occultism at Project Gutenberg. ★ ★ ★

…a collection of essays written in the early 20th century. This book delves into the foundational concepts and practices of occultism and theosophy, distinguishing between true spiritual knowledge and superficial magical practices.

The first non-fiction title of the series.

5: Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

★ ★ ★ Carnacki the Ghost-Finder at Project Gutenberg. ★ ★ ★

…a collection of short stories published between 1910 and 1913. The work features Thomas Carnacki, an occult detective who investigates unusual hauntings using scientific methods, photography, and his fictional invention, the Electric Pentacle.

Wheatley was an early champion of William Hope Hodgson’s fiction, and in his introduction to this edition announces an intention to reprint all of Hodgson’s novels plus a collection of his sea stories. In the end only The Ghost Pirates was added to the series. One thing Wheatley doesn’t mention here is his borrowing of details from the Carnacki stories for his own occult novels. He swiped a lot more from Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea tales for a non-occult novel, Uncharted Seas.

Continue reading “The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult”

Jim Lamb covers Charles Williams

A boxed set of novels published by Eerdmans in 1981. Not something I own, unfortunately.

A couple of years ago I decided to read in order all seven of Charles Williams’ supernatural thrillers: War in Heaven (1930), Many Dimensions (1930), The Place of the Lion (1931), The Greater Trumps (1932), Shadows of Ecstasy (1933), Descent into Hell (1937) and All Hallows’ Eve (1945). The plan foundered at the end of Shadows of Ecstasy when I felt in need of a break from Williams’ fiction but this week I’m reading Descent into Hell and feeling the opposite, happy to be back in Williams’ world. This in turn gives me an opportunity to draw attention to Jim Lamb’s covers for the books, created in the late 1970s when they were reprinted in the USA by Eerdmans as a set of matching paperback editions.

Charles Williams occupies a curious position today, often referred to as “the third Inkling” along with JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis while being utterly eclipsed by the celebrity which has accrued to his friends and their works. Williams doesn’t write about fantastic lands but about a very particular time and place—Britain in the 1930s, either London or “the home counties“—and a variety of metaphysical intrusions into this world. The Narnia novels by CS Lewis have connections to the same time and place but are generally removed from it. If Lewis had only written his three science fiction novels—which few people seem to read today—he might be joining Williams in posthumous obscurity. Williams’ obscurity is such that his novels have had few reprints, which makes the Jim Lamb covers not only the best to date but also one of the few sets given over to a talented illustrator. You’d think novels which have been praised by (among others) TS Eliot, William Lindsay Gresham, M. John Harrison and Tim Powers might warrant a little more attention, but readers and publishers prefer Narnia and Middle Earth.

The Holy Grail surfaces in an obscure country parish and becomes variously a sacramental object to protect or a vessel of power to exploit.

(All the story descriptions have been lifted from Wikipedia.)

The first one I read after it turned up as one of the paperback reprints that Sphere were publishing in the 1970s as the “Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult”. Wheatley provided an introduction for each book, and this one is close enough to his own supernatural fiction that I wonder whether it was an influence. The novel itself is actually more like a story by Arthur Machen—who also wrote about the Holy Grail—or HG Wells, the latter in its conjunction of miraculous events and very mundane London settings. Where Wheatley has the agents of Satanic Powers living in well-heeled splendour, here they make their plans in the back rooms of a chemist’s shop off the Finchley Road.

An evil antiquarian illegally purchases the fabled Stone of Suleiman from its Islamic guardian and returns to England to discover not only that the Stone can multiply itself infinitely without diminishing the original, but that it also allows its possessor to transcend the barriers of space and time.

The second one I read, and a book I’ve read three times so far. I wouldn’t mind paying another visit, it’s a fantastic novel in every sense, and the closest that Williams gets to science fiction. It’s also a surprise to find Muslim mysticism given a sympathetic presentation after the overtly Christian mysticism of War in Heaven.

Platonic archetypes begin to appear around an English country town, wreaking havoc and drawing to the surface the spiritual strengths and flaws of individual characters.

The original Tarot deck is used to unlock enormous metaphysical powers by allowing the possessors to see across space and time, create matter, and raise powerful natural storms.

Another novel which was part of the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult, The Great Trumps promises much but doesn’t really deliver despite dealing with the richly symbolic world of the Tarot. Tim Powers’ Last Call would seem to owe something to this, and to The Place of the Lion in its staging of a Tarot-related metaphysical conflict which takes place in and around Las Vegas.

A humanistic adept has discovered that by focusing his energies inward he can extend his life almost indefinitely. He undertakes an experiment using African lore to die and resurrect his own body thereby assuring his immortality. His followers begin a revolutionary movement to supplant European civilisation.

Since I’ve read this it comes to mind any time there’s a mention of one of those wealthy men who believes he can live forever by swallowing pills or having regular blood transfusions. Jim Lamb seems to have used Anton Diffring as a model for the man on the left. And is the central figure based on Marlon Brando?

…deals with various forms of selfishness, and how the cycle of sin brings about the necessity for redemptive acts. In it, an academic becomes so far removed from the world that he fetishises a woman to the extent that his perversion takes the form of a succubus. Other characters include a doppelgänger, the ghost of a suicidal Victorian labourer, and a playwright modelled in some ways on the author.

Follows the fortunes of two women after death and their interactions with those they knew before, contrasting the results of action based either on selfishness or an accepting love.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Nightmare Alleys

Weekend links 853

Ghost Rider (detail, 1973) by Bruce Pennington.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Dez Bollardian. My own font of the month is Nosferatu, a design by Sarah Salome Deletain and Jules Durand loosely inspired by the lettering on the German intertitle cards from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens.

• The week in photography: Winners of the Nikon 2026 Microphotography Competition; Winners and finalists of the American Meteorological Society 2026 Photo Contest; The Lion Nebula as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument).

• New music: The Larsen Pipes 01 with Reza Mirjalali by The Larsen Pipes; Bound To Substance by Dodenskald & Wilted Perch.

Their career itself can be seen as a kind of collage, in the way it brought elements from different places and periods together into the present. Their music was too eclectic to be comfortably of the moment. Futuristic jams like 1980’s Western Mantra shared a dynamic with the electronic funk then taking shape in New York and London, but was too fragmentary and generally weird for all but the strangest dancefloors. So the Cabs were sometimes too ahead of the curve for their own good, and while they were acknowledged as electronic music pioneers, they never parlayed that stature into consistent success and remained forever outsiders—where they were probably happiest.

Derek Walmsley talks to Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson about the end of the Cabaret Voltaire project

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Panic: Visions Of The Horned God In The English Country Garden by Sara Hannant.

• At the BFI: Ruby McGuigan on where to begin with Billy Wilder.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Hannah Flowers.

• RIP Tom Skerritt.

• (Ghost) Riders In The Sky (1961) by The Ventures | Ghost Rider (1969) by Musical Doctors | Ghost Rider (1977) by Suicide

Salvator Rosa’s witches

Self-portrait (1650).

Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.

HP Lovecraft, from The Colour Out of Space

My recent reading has included some of ETA Hoffmann’s stories, ostensibly his weird tales although there hasn’t been anything especially weird about the ones I’ve read so far. One of these, Signor Formica, is a novella-length piece with Italian artist Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) as the main character, a story that adds a layer of fiction to the rumours and apocrypha the artist accumulated like so many coats of varnish. Hoffmann has Rosa arriving in Rome where he spends little time painting and much more time operating as a highly proficient agent of vengeance for a younger artist. The real Rosa was proficient enough without anyone having to exaggerate his accomplishments. In his early life he trained as a musician; in the years when he was struggling to sell his paintings he worked as an actor, and had some success as a writer of satirical plays. The theatrical side of Rosa’s career is one that Hoffmann exploits in his story.

The Witches’ Sabbath (c.1635/1654).

Hoffmann says surprisingly little about Rosa’s paintings—a familiarity on the part of his readership seems to be taken for granted—but Signor Formica had me looking them up again, especially the more grotesque examples of which there are many to choose from. Rosa was somewhat ahead of his time in both his subject matter and its handling, providing an artistic link between the late Mannerists and the Romantics of the 1800s who would find much to admire in his dark and violent depictions of witches and the bandits of Southern Italy. The bandit pictures were especially popular in the 1800s but since we’re now in the Season of the Witch it seems fitting to look at Rosa’s witches, or those that are visible in the murk of his shadowy canvases. Rosa’s streghe are a fearsome lot, as are the nameless creatures who attend their ceremonies. The monsters you find in older paintings can often seem more comical than frightening but there’s little that’s comical about these snapping assemblages of slaughterhouse remains.

Scenes of Witchcraft: Morning (c.1645–49).

Scenes of Witchcraft: Day (c.1645–49).

Scenes of Witchcraft: Evening (c.1645–49).

Scenes of Witchcraft: Night (c.1645–49).

Continue reading “Salvator Rosa’s witches”