THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK - Ex Occidente Press

There are three new titles listed for publication; two in May and one in June.
A new Joel Lane and a (short though) new Mark Samuels! And a Louis Marvick with whom I am not familiar.

Ex Occidente Press - The Terrible Changes

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THE TERRIBLE CHANGES
by Joel Lane
Cover art: Franciszek Starowieyski
Publication Date: May 2009
ISBN: 978-973-7764-19-5
Sewn hardcover, limited to 300 copies, 219 pp with end papers and a full-color frontispiece.

In midwinter, an aspiring politician finds himself suddenly deprived of human contact. A group of newcomers to a town are strangely reminiscent of people lost in a recent flood. In a world where grief is forbidden, a young man builds a mound to commemorate his lover. An obsessive reader of Poe enters the world of his idol's stories. Demonstrators on a peace march see the faces of sleeping children in the snow. A failed musician meets his own ancestors getting off a midnight train.

Joel Lane's short stories combine the supernatural with themes of human loss, passion, solitude and despair. The complexity of the urban landscape provides a background to stories in which nothing can be relied upon. Ghosts and visions are an inevitable part of a reality where facts are uncertain, loyalties are divided, and the unknown is always close at hand. In Lane's fiction, the weird is a symbolic language that expresses the chilling beauty, sadness and mystery of real life.

From "The Brand" (written in 1983) to "Alouette" (written in 2008), these stories are selected from a quarter-century of writing. Twelve previously uncollected stories are reprinted from magazines and anthologies, bridging various strands of the weird fiction genre: urban horror tales, elegiac ghost stories, erotic reveries and psychological fugues. Two brief new tales offer different perspectives on the theme of mortality. Influences on these stories include Robert Aickman, John Metcalfe, Ramsey Campbell, M. John Harrison, Jean Genet, Sylvia Plath and Robert Smith.

The Terrible Changes is a journey through a shadow-realm between reality and dream, between clarity and madness, between the living and the dead. Enjoy.

Contents
Introduction
After the Flood
Power Cut
Empty Mouths
The Last Cry
Every Form of Refuge
The Hard Copy
Face Down
Tell the Difference
Blue Train
The City of Love
All Beauty Sleeps
The Brand
Alouette
The Sleepers

The Terribles Changes is a sewn hardcover book of 219 pages with endpapers and a full-colour frontispiece. Edition limited to 300 copies. $40 inc. p&p to Europe and USA, $45 to the rest of the world.

Ex Occidente Press - The "Star" Ushak

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THE "STAR" USHAK
by Louis Marvick
Cover art: Franz von Bayros
Publication Date: May 2009
ISBN: 978-920-5989-18-4
Sewn hardcover, limited to 300 copies, 244 pp with end papers

Was Ellis Carstairs imagining things, or had the exsanguinated body of Professor Cuthbert somehow nourished the blood-red field of the carpet on which it was found? Fragments of manuscript and an obscure bill of sale suggested that the "Star" Ushak might be woven with strands from an ancient carpet on which Timúr the Lame had dispatched whole hecatombs—unless Anthony Styles, Carstairs’ ingenious associate, was right, and the whole thing was just a blind. It was Styles, after all, whose opinion the Yard chiefly valued; and when he discovered the presence of an hallucinogenic dye in the carpet’s wool, he seemed to have struck on the cause of the madness that had possessed its former owners and that was beginning to creep on Carstairs himself.

But The "Star" Ushak is Carstairs’ story, not Styles’, and the tenuousness of his grasp of reality in no way lessens the liveliness of his impressions. Deepest of these is the one he takes from Ilona Golmassian, the daughter of an Armenian rug broker implicated in Cuthbert’s death. Is she also Mado Pampanini, the elusive singer who immerses herself so completely in the spirit of the bolero that she is reported to have shed black tears at a performance of Lágrimas negras? Like Margot Lavender, the actress, and Hilda Dachstein, the daughter of a wealthy dilettante, Miss Golmassian has an unexplained connection with Emmerich Waldteufel, the sinister figure who seems to be working toward a dominion that even Timúr—even Tamburlaine the Great, as he is better known—could not achieve.

While the murder investigation is going forward with a pace and atmosphere familiar to amateurs of the fin-de-siècle thriller, a disturbing doubt presses more and more insistently on Carstairs’ mind. What he took at first for intrusions of the supernatural into the world around him begin to look instead like weaknesses or errors in the making of that world. His alarm for his sanity becomes most acute at moments when he notices small inconsistencies in his experience, for these seem to point to a thinness in the fabric, an inattention or capriciousness on the part of its creator. In the same way that Carstairs sees in the "Star" Ushak both a textile and a portal to another world, so the reader finds her willing suspension of disbelief troubled by reminders that The "Star" Ushak is, after all, a text meant to deceive. Can a plot of such Gordian complexity be unraveled, or must it be summarily cut by an act that would wreck the fabric of illusion?

An incredible, singulary and lustrous debut in the great tradition of Théophile Gautier, Gustav Meyrink, Arthur Machen, Sax Rohmer and Aleister Crowley.

Louis Marvick received the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1983. His scholarly work includes Mallarmé and the Sublime, 1986, and Waking the Face that No one Is: A Study in the Musical Context of Symbolist Poetics, 2004, as well as articles on La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Diderot, Proust, Max Beerbohm, and decadent aesthetics. A ghost story, "Pockets of Emptiness", is scheduled to appear in number 16 of Supernatural Tales. He is Professor of French at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The "Star" Ushak is a sewn hardcover book of 244 pages with endpapers and a full-colour frontispiece. Edition limited to 300 copies. $40 inc. p&p to Europe and USA, $45 to the rest of the world.

Apparently, the frontispiece for this will be An Abandoned Town by Ferdnand Khnopff, recently discussed somewhere else on this forum.
Ex Occidente Press - The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Tales

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THE MAN WHO COLLECTED MACHEN AND OTHER TALES
by Mark Samuels
Cover art: Not yet finalised
Publication Date: June 2009
ISBN: 978-850-1590-19-46
Special oversized format, sewn hardcover, limited to 300 copies, 110 pp with end papers

Mark Samuels is one of the few modern masters of the weird tale. He has enjoyed effusive praise from the likes of Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell and T.E.D. Klein. In his latest collection of tales he demonstrates the sense of mystical awe mingled with horror coupled with an elegant prose style that has made his name a byword for fantastic fiction of the highest quality. Where nightmares become reality, where shadows are bright, where the future is already decayed and dying, here, within the pages of this volume, you will find a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Contents
Losenef Express
The Man Who Collected Machen
The Black Mould
A Slave of Melancholy
Thyxxolqu
Xapalpa
A Question of Obeying Orders
Glickman the Bibliophile

The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Tales is a special oversized format, hardcover book of 244 pages with endpapers and a full-colour frontispiece. Edition limited to 300 copies. The first 30 copies are signed by the author. $35 inc. p&p to Europe and USA, $38 to the rest of the world.