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jayrothermel's review
5.0
I'm not sure what the historical landscape of horror literature for the period 1890-1990 would look like without the efforts of Valancourt Books.
Certainly the record would not be accurate. The finest craftsmen would be footnotes, their paperbacks available only on Ebay for hundreds of the dollars. The invisible hand of the horror fiction market works with greater speed and finality than the dreams of a censor.
One area for which I have a passion, and in which Valancourt has done yeoman service, is in the world of UK horror fiction. John Keir Cross's collection The Other Passenger (originally published in 1944) is an outstanding example of the type.
This is not the UK horror of M.R. James and the Bensons. It is the other UK – the world of strange crime, horrific anecdote, and ghastly punchlines whose masters are John Metcalfe, John Collier, L.P. Hartley, and Gerald Kersh. Keir Cross is an outstanding contributor to this aleatory themed thread (it can hardly be called a "school").
Keir Cross characters are slapped down by mere coincidences, by their own unacknowledged psychological fault lines, as much as they are sometime victims of the supernatural. Often they do not understand they have been something horrible until they piece together their stories in retrospect.
Certainly the record would not be accurate. The finest craftsmen would be footnotes, their paperbacks available only on Ebay for hundreds of the dollars. The invisible hand of the horror fiction market works with greater speed and finality than the dreams of a censor.
One area for which I have a passion, and in which Valancourt has done yeoman service, is in the world of UK horror fiction. John Keir Cross's collection The Other Passenger (originally published in 1944) is an outstanding example of the type.
This is not the UK horror of M.R. James and the Bensons. It is the other UK – the world of strange crime, horrific anecdote, and ghastly punchlines whose masters are John Metcalfe, John Collier, L.P. Hartley, and Gerald Kersh. Keir Cross is an outstanding contributor to this aleatory themed thread (it can hardly be called a "school").
Keir Cross characters are slapped down by mere coincidences, by their own unacknowledged psychological fault lines, as much as they are sometime victims of the supernatural. Often they do not understand they have been something horrible until they piece together their stories in retrospect.
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