Skulls in the Stars

I just received in the mail the other day my copy of Valancourt Books’ edition of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle: A Mystery.  The Valancourt edition is the definitive edition for the collector, with an introduction by Richard Marsh scholar Minna Vuohelainen and detailed notes putting the novel in its proper historical and literary context.  As with other Valancourt Marsh books, it also reproduces the original cover art:

It’s quite a lovely volume!  To celebrate the release, I’ll be posting over the next week about other works of Richard Marsh that I’ve been reading.

Over the past few months, I’ve been throwing in a ‘shout-out’ to some smaller press publishers who specialize in classic and hard-to-find weird fiction; some original posts on the topic can be found here and here.  A few weeks ago the finance/marketing director of Wordsworth Editions Ltd, Derek Wright, dropped a nice comment in my original ‘shout-out’; since it appeared in an old post, I thought I’d reprint the comment in its entirety here:

Thanks for the mention of our Mystery & Supernatural series, which I stumbled across purely because I was reading your other notes while I was researching for possible new titles. As a small company (there are only three of us), we welcome suggestions from readers, so if anyone would care to have a look at our list, and comes up with something that we really should be doing, drop us a line on the website. The only specific requirement is that they need to be out of copyright (70+ years after the author’s death – we can’t squeeze royalties into a £2.99 R.R.P.) Mmmm, Flaxman Low, now there’s an idea…

Wordsworth Editions is one of the two small press publishers (along with Valancourt Books) which I am particularly fond of.  They’ve been reprinting a number of classic tales which would otherwise be quite inaccessible.  I highly encourage people to check them out; you won’t be disappointed!

I read much of Robert R. McCammon’s work when I was younger, but somehow I managed to read only his ‘lesser’ works, such as Stinger (1988), Wolf’s Hour (1989), and The Night Boat (1980), and completely missed the books widely considered to be his masterpieces, namely Swan Song (1987) and Boy’s Life (1991). It’s possible, in the case of Boy’s Life, that it was published after I had ended my initial interest in horror fiction, but I suspect that I simply wasn’t mature enough to bother with a story about a boy growing up in a small Alabama town in 1960.

I recently decided to take another look at McCammon, and started with Boy’s Life. I have to say: wow. Boy’s Life is good, and not just ‘horror novel good’ — it’s ‘literary novel good’.

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