Valancourt Books

[Sand]

I'm pleased to report that Valancourt Books have now published new editions of Ronald Fraser's Flower Phantoms; Claude Houghton's I Am Jonathan Scrivener and This Was Ivor Trent; and Oliver Onions' The Hand of Kornelius Voyt. These are all overlooked classics of the fantastic or supernatural that fully deserve a fresh readership. The books are reset and have new introductions, and I think are nicely designed.

(I've started a new thread on Valancourt as the original one seems to be in an older format).

[The New Nonsense]

I'm a big fan of Valancourt books. I thoroughly enjoyed their reprint of Ernest G. Henham's Tenebrae. It's an over-the-top decadent and macabre work brimming with dreary settings, murder, obsession, madness, abuse of exotic drugs, and nightmarish hallucinations. It's Stenbock meets E.A. Poe -- a dark delight.

I only wish Valancourt would publish more editions in hardcover.

[Nolon]

Valancourt does indeed seem very interesting. So far I've ordered the two books by Claude Houghton as well as Oliver Onion's The Hand of Kornelius Voyt.

I'm curious to know if anyone has read J.B. Pristley's The Other Place and what they think of it? Another author previously unknown to me is Basil Copper, I wonder if his novel The Great White Space is any good? Recommendations of other books from Valancourt would be much appreciated.

[Druidic]

Basil Copper’s Great White Space reminded me of a cross between Conan Doyle’s ProfessorChallenger stories and a good Lovecraftian romp into the worlds of subterranean horror. I found it quite enjoyable. Copper has written a handful of excellent horror stories and a larger number of acceptable but not terribly exciting ones. This novel is still available, I believe, from Amazon in a cheap paperback edition.
I'm afraid I haven't had the pleasure of discovering Valencourt Books yet.

If you like HPL homage, in a strictly pulp vein, such as Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos novel THE TRAIL OF CTHULHU, you'll probably enjoy Copper's THE GREAT WHITE SPACE.

Mark S.

[Druidic]

This is Jeffery Scott Sims take on The Great White Space. It's interesting, and the following quote is also from it.

GREAT WHITE SPACE

"Mythos novels show a regrettable tendency to flow in the Derlethian vein, with heroic occult researchers lobbing magical amulets and dynamite at conventionally evil monsters. Or they are written more in reaction to Lovecraft, weighed down with repellent characters, political correctness, or other tricks of the post-modernist trendy trade. Sometimes I think there is hardly anybody who even tries to get it right.
Basil Copper tries to get it right. He presents us with this novel, The Great White Space, published in 1974, which incorporates practically every Lovecraft "wannabe's" mistake, and a few derived from the master himself... but he tries, and the result more nearly approaches the apparently impossible goal than that of anyone before or since. Indeed, his stab at a long work of this kind better satisfies than that of his august mentor."


OK, I don't buy it, not that last line, but Copper's book is still a memorable work. It's one of only two novels by Copper that I can read with real pleasure. Mark is, of course, right that it's a pulp homage but I wouldn't have compared it to Trail of Cthulhu, the most dreadful thing Derleth ever wrote. That novel was hastily patched together from several previous stories published in WT and the amount of repetition is mind-numbing. 'Explaining' the Mythos in every one of these stories (now chapters) was defensible when they appeared as stand alone tales but really becomes an exercise in tedium over the course of this 'novel'. Of course Derleth was capable of some fine things, mostly his regional novels and some of his ghost stories which show a British influence and not a hint of Lovecraft. "The Lonesome Place" and "The Place in the Woods" are nice atmospheric horror tales while "Ghost Lake" is an absolute gem.
If you're interested in Copper's short fiction the following may prove useful:

WEIRD SHORT STORIES OF BASIL COPPER

[Sand]

Valancourt have just announced a lot of new titles, including Claude Houghton's first novel Neighbours (1926), and more from Gerald Kersh, Basil Copper and R. Chetwynd Hayes, amongst others.

[njhorror]

ODD MAN OUT was a great movie.