Borderlands and Otherworlds

Mark Valentine’s Borderlands and Otherworlds explores supernatural fiction of the 1920s, occult thrillers of the ’30s, and the English Fantastic in the ’40s and ’50s.

He discusses notable names in the field, such as Arthur Machen, Dion Fortune and E.F. Benson, and also lesser-known figures such as J.M.A. Mills, Humphrey Gilkes and Charles Whitton. He offers the reader an understanding of these writers in their wider literary context, drawing out links and resonances between them.

Valentine celebrates the byways of book collecting, such as old monographs found in obscure boxes, noticing unusual details and unexpected stories. Other essays celebrate landscape, legend and lore. The author writes engagingly, with a lightly-worn knowledge, a companionable tone, great enthusiasm and an undercurrent of good humour.

Contains:

• Borderlands and Otherworlds: Some Supernatural Fiction of the Early 1920s
• ‘Striking a New Line’: David Lindsay’s Sphinx
• ‘A Study of the Literary Temperament’: The Counterplot by Hope Mirrlees
• At the House of Magic: Mary Butts’ Modernist Novels of the Occult
• Charles Williams and His Circle: Four Vignettes
• Speculative Energies: ‘The Ideas of Lord Torridon’
• The Tarot in England
• A ‘Secret Science’ in Arthur Machen’s The Green Round
• Priestess of the Inner Light: The Magical Novels of Dion Fortune
• Past Lives and Cosmic Forces: The Occult Thrillers of J.M.A. Mills
• Humphrey Gilkes’ The Unclean Spirit
• ‘A Man of Power’: Algernon Blackwood’s Julius Le Vallon
• ‘A Wild Crashing Outburst’: The Purple Trident by Charles Whitton
• ‘The Temporal is the Shadow of the Eternal’: Claude Houghton’s This Was Ivor Trent
• The Last, Lost Novel of Phyllis Paul
• Stalwarts of the Shelves
• Strange Case of John Jasper: Decadence and ‘Drood’
• Trying to Find a Corridor of Mirrors
• Quarles’ Quest: Sun of My Life by Gillian M. Edwards
• A Shilling Book from Praed Street
• The Haunted ’Forties: Wrey Gardiner and Poetry Quarterly
• Three Fantasias of the ’Forties
• Modernity and Tradition: The English Fantastic in the ’Forties and ’Fifties
• In a Remote County
• Bliss on the Waterways
• The Serpent at Ashford Carbonell
• The Black Horse
• The Pleasures of Ephemera
• The Voynich Assistants
• Bygone Booksellers
• Aquarius, Arcania, Arcturus: Exploring New Age Shops
• In the Attic
• Acknowledgements