Morbid Tales

In these eight immaculately realised strange stories, Quentin S. Crisp delves deep into the decadence of contemporary life. The fresh originality of the tales and their settings: an English country garden in ‘Cousin X’; contemporary Japan in ‘A Lake’: is matched by the elegance of the writing. They are unified, perhaps, by a yearning for the achingly perfect, ecstatic moment. As Mark Samuels points out in his Foreword, Crisp’s fiction is ‘. . . too multi-layered, too individual, to be labelled. One can spot influences here and there, a dash of this and a sprinkling of that, but the end result is much greater than the sum of its parts.’

Contains: Foreword, The Mermaid, Far-Off Things, Cousin X, A Lake, The Two-Timer, The Tattooist, Ageless, Autumn Colours.

Limited Edition of 300 hardcover copies published in 2004