A Country Still All Mystery

Cover image taken from Tristram Hiller's Shell Oil poster of Jezreel's Temple, Gillingham, Kent

‘The English landscape was made . . . not just for food and shelter and pleasure, but also for the journey of the soul. There is a field of supernatural stories set in this “other” country, the country of the spirit . . .’

In A Country Still All Mystery, Mark Valentine explores how certain writers have used their fiction to convey the idea of numinous terrain, places where we might at any moment stray into the realms of the unearthly and uncanny.

These essays continue similar literary and antiquarian themes to his well-received earlier volume, Haunted By Books (2015). When and where was the last wolf seen in England? Why were certain lonely houses left beyond parish boundaries? Is there a missing book by T.E. Lawrence? What was the secret history of Cope & Fenwick, liturgical publishers? What became of the original Tower of Moab?

A Country Still All Mystery will be read with pleasure by those who enjoy the out-of-the-way, the obscure, the eccentric and the outré. It will appeal to anyone who has ever strayed into remote country which seems to be not quite fully in this world.

Containing:

• Introduction
• ‘A Country Still All Mystery’: Machen, Sarban and Otherworldly Landscapes
• ‘An Atlas of Unknown Worlds’: Mary Butts, John Metcalfe and Stories of Strange Regions
• ‘A Landscape of the End of the World’: The Supernatural Terrain of Francis and Eric Brett Young
• Borderland Mysteries: The Thrillers of R.C. Ashby
• The Islands Beyond: The Books of Robert Atkinson
• Half- Seen Shadows: C.R.J. Carstairs and the Great
• Crying For Elysium: The Pagan Fantasies of Forrest Reid
• Courted by an Orchid: The Mystical Fantasies of Ronald Fraser
• The Singer of Samarkand: James Elroy Flecker
• The Third Alias: A T.E. Lawrence Mystery
• The Roads to Shangri-La: James Hilton and the Mysteries of the East
• The Ceremony at Arnsburg: Playing the Glass Bead Game
• In an Unresting Land: Randolph Stow’s The Girl Green as Elderflower
• Towards Tir-Nan-Og: Lord Dunsany’s The Curse of the Wise Woman
• The Last Wolf in England
• Beyond the Boundaries: Extra-Parochial Districts
• The Wind in Their Faces: The After-Life of Becket’s Assassins
• Inheritance of Shadows: John Meade Falkner’s Other Novels
• Written in Smoke: Oliver Onions’ The Hand of Kornelius Voyt
• Against the Abyss: Carnacki the Ghost-Finder
• Gentleman Renegade: A.J. Raffles, Cricketer and Crook
• Teaching Yourself to Think: Eric Ambler’s Spy Stories
• Holy Treasures: Three Arthur Machen Mysteries
• ‘This Cackling Old Gander’: The New Age and Arthur Machen
• Gentle Mephistopheles: The Fiction of Frank Baker
• Cope & Fenwick: A Reminiscence, and a Checklist
• The Amber Chapel
• The Original Tower of Moab
• ‘Who Could Damn Hardest’: A Muggletonian Influence upon ‘Casting the Runes’?
• The English Catalogue
• Acknowledgements

Limited to 300 copies