Hippocampus Press:
New York: 2017
Trade paperback, New,
326 pp.
Cover artwork by: Dan Sauer

“The present volume, a masterpiece of folk horror, assembles a wealth of Bolivar’s spectral balladry, prose tales, and vignettes, telling the story of Jack Drake, whose mother gives him a Silver Key that triggers his subsequent journeys and adventures. It becomes evident that many of these adventures echo the work of H. P. Lovecraft, a dominant influence on Bolivar’s poetry, flawlessly conveying terror and strangeness in a manner that evokes both old-time legendry and contemporary cosmic horror. In one of the most powerful of his ballads, ‘The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner,’ he fuses Lovecraft and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in reinterpreting ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ by means of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ Deftly interweaving English and Appalachian traditions, Adam Bolivar’s mastery of the diction and atmosphere of the weird ballad allows him to tap into haunted undercurrents of ancestral memory, producing phantasmal effects seldom found in other forms of weird literature.” This is a print-on-demand title. #60603

Price: $15.00