Following on from the news of the Marked to Die anthology last year, we are very pleased to make another Mark Samuels-related announcement. Written in Darkness, the fifth collection of short fiction by Mark Samuels, and the twenty-eighth title from Chômu Press, is officially released today. Originally available as a limited edition hardback from Egaeus Press, it is now generally available as a Chômu paperback, with lush new cover artwork from Christopher Conn Askew and book design by David Rix.

Samuels’s fourth collection, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales, released in paperback by Chômu in 2011, has proven exceptionally popular with our readers, and we are sure that the current collection will be enjoyed just as widely and deeply. With a further refinement of the author’s concise, elegant style and a broadening of his themes and subject matter, the nine apocalyptic tales included in Written in Darkness are testament to Samuels’s secure and growing place in the consciousness of the connoisseur as an authentic practitioner of weird fiction.

From the back cover: “Europe decays, but the Bloody Baron’s spirit will not rest. A lone yachtsman is becalmed at sea, and confronts madness, or something greater than madness. A condemned office building is besieged by the forces of transcendent decay. In the city of exiles, an unguessable secret awaits.” For all this and more, book your one-way ticket to the heart of the labyrinth here. Or, if you would first like a sample of the contents, you can listen to Quentin S. Crisp reading the final story, ‘In Eternity—Two Lines Intersect’, by arrangement with the author, at Soundcloud, here:

For further information, the author talks informally to Quentin S. Crisp about the collection, about weird fiction, psychogeography, Thomas Ligotti and many other things, in the following YouTube vlog interview:

Other stimulating news—of Chômu Press and miscellaneous matters

Although Chômu’s release schedule has slowed down recently, news abounds in relation to our authors and the surrounding small-press world. In January, for the first time, one of our titles was mentioned in the New York Times. In interview, Roxane Gay was asked, “What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?”, and replied: “I Am a Magical Teenage Princess, by Luke Geddes.” Of course, our readers can claim to have been ahead of the pack here; we hope that many more will follow their excellent lead.

On BBC Radio 2, in February, talking to Jonathan Ross about his ‘hidden treasures’, Marc Almond recited a poem by the Chômu-published poet (beloved of Björk and J.G. Ballard), Jeremy Reed. Marc Almond, of course, collaborated with Jeremy Reed for his Against Nature project, putting the seminal decadent novel by J.-K. Huysmans to music; the lyrics for that project, written by Reed, are included in the fantastic miscellany, Nothing But a Star.

The first of a three-part interview, in which artist and musician Rachel Margetts talks to Chômu author Quentin S. Crisp about the relevance of the Dao De Jing to the 21st century, has recently been uploaded to YouTube. The interview was conducted by Skype, and the image and ambient background audio are provided by Rachel Margetts.

The Cutest Girl in Class, by Quentin S. Crisp, Justin Isis and Brendan Connell, now in paperback.

The (as the name suggests) friendly press, Snuggly Books, have been very busy of late. Last month, they released in paperback the three-author collaborative novel The Cutest Girl in Class, by Quentin S. Crisp, Justin Isis and Brendan Connell (reviewed by Publishers Weekly here). Other recent releases include An Ossuary of the North Lagoon, by Frederick Rolfe a.k.a. Baron Corvo, and a collection of seasonal tanka, October, by Quentin S. Crisp.

To keep up to date with all Chômu and related news, and if you are not already signed up, please do subscribe here to our e-mail list.

On July 3, 2008, one month before killing himself, Thomas M. Disch wrote a poem in which he referenced 19th century French author Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly. Disch introduces him as “the Walter Scott of Normandy” and mentions how “in his old age, he drew about him in his poor Paris lodgings the best of the young generation which has since made his fame secure.” Disch’s mention is intended as ironic; Barbey d’Aurevilly is all but unknown in the Anglosphere today.

Who was Barbey d’Aurevilly? Geoffrey Wall’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale states:

“Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, the mischievous high-Catholic dandy, declared that the whole thing was disagreeably ‘dry’ and overdone. Flaubert, so he argued, ‘stays on the surface, knows no feeling, no passion, no enthusiasm, no ideal, no insight, no reflections, no depth.’ Maliciously perceptive, Barbey d’Aurevilly mocked Flaubert’s cult of perfectionism, inviting his readers to imagine a crowd that ‘goes down on its knees – like the three kings at the crib of the Infant Jesus – before the box that contains Flaubert’s manuscript.’”

Wikipedia:

“Beloved of fin-de-siècle decadents, Barbey d’Aurevilly is a classic example of what lengths the Romantics were capable of; his writings make it plain why the genre fell into discredit among later Victorians. He held extreme Catholic views, yet wrote on the most risqué subjects (a contradiction the English apparently found more disturbing than the French; Voltairianism would have been something else); he gave himself aristocratic airs and hinted at a mysterious past, though his parentage was entirely respectable and his youth humdrum and innocent.”

Barbey d’Aurevilly also reviewed À rebours, “the breviary of the decadence,” upon its release. J.-K. Huysmans states that “in the midst of all this hurly-burly, a single writer alone saw clear, Barbey d’Aurevilly, who, be it said, had no personal acquaintance with me.” Huysmans is referring to the ultimatum Barbey d’Aurevilly offered him in the review: “After such a book, it only remains for the author to choose between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the cross.” Huysmans, like Barbey d’Aurevilly, would eventually choose the latter.

At present, few books seem available in English. One is a manual on Dandyism with a preface by Quentin Crisp (not [Chomu co-founder] Quentin S. Crisp); another is Les Diaboliques, a collection of stories dealing with the common theme of murderesses, which is available for free, online, in French. I used online translation for the preface, and from it the following phrases were generated:

“Real stories of this civilized time and if divine that, when one warns to write them, it seems that it is the Devil which dictated… The Devil is like God. Manicheism which is the stock of all the great heresies of The Middle Ages, the Manicheism is not so stupid! Malebranche said that God recognized himself with the use OF the MEANS MORE. Devil too.”

“One wanted to make a small Museum of these Ladies, while waiting for the Museum, even smaller is made, ladies which make them during and contrasts in the company, because all things are double. Art has two lobes, like the brain. Nature resembles these women who have a blue eye and an eye black.”

My own interest in Barbey d’Aurevilly stems from his embodying two seemingly contradictory ideas: religious conservatism and avant-garde fashion. This tendency, symptomatic of a certain stratum of 19th century French literature, can be seen also in Huysmans’s movement from Naturalism to religious themes. This combination is difficult to imagine in English literature; although a kind of spirituality exists in the work of Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, it remains at the level of a vague ideal. Few Victorian writers seem capable of summoning the satanic ecstasies of Huysmans’s La-Bas; even Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray comes off as derivative when held up to the standard of À rebours.

Where does this tendency come from? It might help to examine the seminal works of Flaubert, a writer typically credited with creating the modern form of literary Realism. As of 2008, Flaubert’s style in Madame Bovary and L’Éducation sentimentale is still used as a primer for Realist techniques – see critic James Wood’s recent How Fiction Works for an excellent analysis. But a closer inspection reveals that Flaubert, who claimed to detest Realism, more often wrote in a fantastic mode. His earliest work, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, is a near-Surrealist drama. His shorter works collected in Trois Contes have the atmosphere of fairy tales and medieval legends, and their concomitant violence – consider the flatly mystical ending of “Saint Julien l’hospitalier,” in which a horribly rotting leper is transfigured into Christ, or the grotesque death of John the Baptist in “Herodias,” a story which evokes its Oriental setting with all the vividness of a Gustave Moreau painting. Then there’s the historical novel Salammbô, with its flesh-eating idol, Moloch. And this dialogue from the early story “The Dance of Death,” which seems to prefigure H.P. Lovecraft rather than Henry James:

“When God’s work of creation has ceased; when the heavens have disappeared and the stars are quenched; when spirits rise from their retreats and wander in the depths with sighs and groans; then, what unpicturable delight for thee! Then shalt thou sit on the eternal thrones of heaven and of hell–shalt overthrow the planets, stars, and worlds–shalt loose thy steed in fields of emeralds and diamonds–shalt make his litter of the wings torn from the angels,–shalt cover him with the robe of righteousness! Thy saddle shall be broidered with the stars of the empyrean,–and then thou wilt destroy it! After thou hast annihilated everything, –when naught remains but empty space,–thy coffin shattered and thine arrows broken, then make thyself a crown of stone from heaven’s highest mount, and cast thyself into the abyss of oblivion. Thy fall may last a million aeons, but thou shalt die at last. Because the world must end; all, all must die,–except Satan! Immortal more than God! I live to bring chaos into other worlds!”

Examined in this light, Flaubert’s Realist works can be seen as exceptions rather than the rule, and so it seems strange that he’s still known primarily to English readers for a novel of provincial adultery. But the fact that the casual reader is familiar only with Madame Bovary is perhaps not surprising, given the Anglosphere’s Realist bias (to be fair, the other side of the coin is the long tradition of the English ghost story). And if most of Flaubert’s work goes unread, what hope does Barbey d’Aurevilly have? Disch’s poem and its mention of his “secure fame” seem painful to me. Oscar Wilde’s attempt to import Symbolist decadence into English had some influence on Modernism, but for the most part has had little mainstream effect: in the Anglosphere, at least, the fantastic/mystical tradition seems not just dead but forgotten. Instead we’re flooded with, on the one hand, tedious “magic realism” and empty formalism, and on the other, derivative “Realism” of the kind Flaubert would have disdained – Flaubert, who famously chose the theme of Madame Bovary not because of any especial interest, but because it was deliberately banal.

Why doesn’t the English-speaking world get the joke?

The year 2013 draws moodily and mistily to its close, but if there is one bright spot in the nighted firmament, it is the advent of our 25th book. That’s right, with Nothing But a Star, by Jeremy Reed (cover photo by Gregory Hesse-Wagner), we have reached the quarter century in the number of volumes we have published. Jeremy Reed’s stellar novel, Here Comes the Nice, received a starred review at Publishers Weekly when we released it in November 2011. This time we are releasing an eclectic collection of his poetry, essays, lyrics and more besides. We may be shivering at the foggy fag-end of the year and of civilisation, but let us warm our hearts by the starlight of poetry.

Glamorous, autumnal, visionary, distilling the future from the present moment, glittering with pop spontaneity and smooth with velvet melancholy, capturing the dread and tingle of the moods of London, and spinning out from the light-polluted urban night across the universe, Nothing But a Star is the perfect book to bring a decadent, empurpled twinkle to the long, cold nights of December. Part intimate scrapbook, part jeweller’s tray, Nothing But a Star contains, as well as poetry, an essay on the suicides of Hart Crane and Harry Crosby, a playscript for a version of The Picture of Dorian Gray set in the 21st century, a pop libretto written for Marc Almond and based on J-K Huysmans’ À rebours, and other specimens of dopamine in literary form. Catch a falling star by picking up a copy here. There now follows the testimony of other stargazers:

Jeremy Reed’s talent is almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance. He is Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautréamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised.

- J.G. Ballard

The most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world.

- Björk

The man is light worlds apart from his contemporaries in poetry.

- Andrew Loog Oldham

Jeremy Reed may be heard reciting one of his poems as part of the act The Ginger Light in the inset clip below:

As usual, there is a prize draw, details of which may be found at the bottom of the announcement. Please also remember, if you require books for Christmas, and they appear to be temporarily out of stock at Amazon, that The Book Depository delivers worldwide at no extra cost. And for those anticipating the coming year, please look out for Brendan Connell’s The Galaxy Club, which continues our astronomical theme. And finally, in other news, the collaborative novel by Chômu authors Brendan Connell, Justin Isis and Quentin S. Crisp, The Cutest Girl in Class, a less-than-simple tale of “boy meets inanimate object” (Joe Simpson Walker) was released last month from Snuggly Books.

Prize Draw for an inscribed copy of Nothing But a Star

The results of the Member prize draw are as follows: Caleb Wilson, of Illinois, was the winner of a specially inscribed copy of Michael Cisco’s Member, which should be on its way to him, or has perhaps already arrived.

This month’s prize draw, of course, is for a specially inscribed copy of Jeremy Reed’s Nothing But a Star. For anyone unfamiliar with them, please allow me to repeat the unchanging rules: To be entered for this draw, please sign up here to our mailing list (or using the ‘Free updates’ widget on our home page) and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘But some of us are looking at the stars’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, of course there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘But some of us are looking at the stars’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 3rd of January, 2014.

Those on our mailing list can also expect exclusive interviews from Chômu authors. The next interview is still to be with P.F. Jeffery.