Best new supernatural releases in the 'weird' genre

Having no belief whatsoever in the supernatural, I nonetheless love stories of the weird and inexplicable. Give me a plot involving magic, deals with the devil, three wishes, an impossible-seeming murder, time travel, alchemy, the Tarot, accursed books, revenants, demons or Elder Gods, and I’m a happy reader. In what follows, I race — with necessary but unseemly speed — through 10 recent volumes of the "weird," nearly all from small independent presses. Let me, therefore, urge you to visit these publishers’ websites, where you can linger, daydream and learn more about their current titles and backlists.

To begin, Valancourt Books has just reissued Karl Edward Wagner's classic, "In a Lonely Place" (1983). In Wagner's famous "Sticks," an artist fishing in an isolated stream notices a cairn topped by an unsettling latticework of branches, of different sizes, lashed together at cross angles. He glimpses more and more of these bizarre sculptures as he penetrates deeper and deeper into the woods, until they lead him to the ruins of an old house. Never apparently having seen a horror movie, he then descends into the darkness of its basement. This is just the beginning of an award-winning story that pays deft homage to H.P. Lovecraft, the fantasy artist Lee Brown Coye and probably half the conventions of pulp horror fiction.

Tartarus Press may be best known for reissuing Arthur Machen, Robert Aickman and other past masters of the "ghost story," but it also actively supports the work of contemporary writers. Dare Segun Falowo, for instance, is a self-described practitioner of "Nigerian Weird," a rubric broad enough to take in both the word-intoxicated Amos Tutuola ("The Palm-Wine Drinkard") and Booker Prize winner Ben Okri ("The Famished Road"). "Akara Oyinbo," the first story in Falowo's collection "Caged Ocean Dub," begins this way:

"On the sixth day of February, in the year that they declared the Nigerian houses be painted white and grass-green, Mrs. Lola Joy, who lived in the largest house on Ada Goodness Street, choked on wedding cake and died."

More reviews by Michael Dirda

The structure of that sentence hints that Falowo knows his Gabriel García Márquez, as does the magic-realist "Busola Orange Juice," in which an abused woman returns from the dead to sell an eerily refreshing beverage. In "Ngozi Ugege Nwa," a promiscuous would-be supermodel impulsively buys a heavy framed mirror from a crone straight out of fairy tales. Hung on a bedroom wall, it reflects a Ngozi who appears even more beautiful than usual. Like so many mirrors in horror fiction, this one proves to be a portal into a nightmarish otherworld.

In the emotionally complex title story of Rosalie Parker's "Dream Fox and Other Strange Stories" (Tartarus), a young girl's empathy for the foxes hunted by her farmer father culminates in a shocking finale and an even more shocking metamorphosis. Besides Parker's own excellent short fiction, this volume also incorporates "Mary Belgrove's Book of Unusual Experiences." In one of those experiences, a weekend at a snowbound country house mixes flirtation, possible adultery, an eerie portrait and an atmosphere of growing unease. What more could you want?

In whatever he writes, Mark Valentine draws on his extensive reading in forgotten authors and books. Consider the 17 stories and 35 prose poems in "The Peacock Escritoire," packaged in this volume with "At Dusk" (Tartarus). In "Sime in Samarkand," for instance, the celebrated fantasy artist Sidney Sime reluctantly agrees to illustrate James Elroy Flecker's "The Golden Journey to Samarkand." It turns out that Sime, like the protagonist of Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model," doesn't imagine unearthly beings; he copies them from life.

This spring, Hippocampus Press has issued "The Devil Snar’d," a second selection from the voluminous oeuvre of Marjorie Bowen, one of the genre's greatest writers. While last year's "The Grey Chamber," like this volume edited by John C. Tibbetts, focused on short stories, "The Devil Snar’d" reprints extracts from book-length works of fiction as well as the title novel in its entirety.

"The Devil Snar’d" is an intense psychodrama. Grace and her writer husband, Philip, retreat to a rented house in the Lake District, where they hope to repair their marriage after Philip's love affair with a young actress. Soon the house, said to be haunted, inspires him — compels him — to re-create on paper the ancient tragedy in which Hugh Vavasour apparently murdered his despised wife, Susanna, so as to be free to marry a local yeoman's daughter. The similarities between the modern and the ancient love triangles strike Grace immediately and obsessively. More and more she feels that the long-dead Susanna is reaching out to her — but why? Could the dead woman be trying to warn Grace? Or is something else going on?

"Mad Man," edited by the late John Pelan, is the seventh volume, with more to come, in Centipede Press's highly desirable collected short fiction of R.A. Lafferty. That's a lot of short fiction, but Lafferty's sui generis blend of the surreal and the deadpan funny can be addictive. The perfect introductory sampler remains "The Best of R.A. Lafferty" (Tor, 2021), edited by Jonathan Strahan, but once you’ve experienced the hilarious "Narrow Valley," the mind-boggling "Slow Tuesday Night" or the truly bizarre "Nor Limestone Islands" — this last among the stories reprinted in this latest Centipede volume — you’ll understand why Lafferty's ardent devotees include Neil Gaiman, Samuel R. Delany, Connie Willis and the late Gene Wolfe.

Iain Sinclair's "Agents of Oblivion," beautifully produced by Swan River Press, showcases one of the supreme prose stylists of our time. Set in bohemian London's demimonde, four perambulating narratives blend autobiography, fiction and essay as they circle around the works and afterlives of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, J.G. Ballard and Lovecraft. Comics legend Alan Moore also puts in an appearance.

Nobody can do more with a sentence's cadence, diction and imagery than Sinclair. "Seated figures in the steaming cafe, intent as Cézanne's card players, contemplate cheese sandwiches, their dogs restless on the floor." "Questing book collectors can never, despite the best of bad intentions, go hunting together, when it comes to the kill." "There was something cruel about the siting of the hospital at the crest of the hill. The halt and the lame were scattered across the nursery slopes, clutching at gateposts, clawing at hedges, crawling toward shelters where buses did not pause."

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How best to describe James Morrow's "Behold the Ape" (WordFire Press)? Satirical romp? Affectionate tribute to 1930s monster movies? Savage indictment of religious fundamentalism? Though imaginary, Morrow's great actress Sonya Orlova — the woman of a thousand faces — certainly deserves cinematic immortality, if only for her signature roles as the vampiric Countess Nocturnia, Golemoiselle and Korgora the Ape Woman. In these pages, however, Morrow relates the story of the ape into whose body Sonya's unlicensed neurosurgeon brother secretly transplants the long-frozen brain of Charles Darwin. Adopting the stage name of Ungagi the Great, the simian "Mr. Darwin" eventually joins Sonya as her co-star in a half-dozen trashy classics of "Australopithecinema." As one character approvingly remarks, "Florid is fine, but lurid is better."

What becomes a legend most? For the author of the beloved fantasy classic "The Last Unicorn," it would be "The Essential Peter S. Beagle," in two volumes (Tachyon). While the set leaves out Beagle's novels, all his stories — I count 32 — are here, including "Lila the Werewolf," "Come Lady Death," "Oakland Dragon Blues" and "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros." In this last, a Swiss teacher of philosophy, while visiting the zoo with his 7-year-old niece, encounters a rhinoceros that unexpectedly addresses him in "good Zurich German with a very slight, unplaceable accent." Dirty and ravenous, but exceptionally courteous, the huge creature maintains that it is, in fact, a unicorn. The story — funny, winsome and touching — only gets better from there.

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