Charnel Glamour
Hippocampus Press:
New York: 2025
Trade paperback, New,
224 pp.
Cover artwork by: Eli John
Nine dark stories. “Seven of the nine tales are set in the fictional Thool Valley, forming a myth-cycle around the village of Gallows Langley, the nucleus of a vortex of iniquitous cults and sinister distortions of the fabric of reality, with secret passages running in dark and labyrinthine ways between tales. In the Gallows Langley sequence, Samuels takes a turn away from the urban and corporate horror that has occupied much of his previous work, towards the rural and ‘folk horror’, showing us what baleful things the Wolf Moon illuminates and unearthing revenants from the soil of British history in an archaeology of the macabre. The final two tales are the magisterial ‘If Destiny Still Reigns’, chilling as its Siberian setting, and the mist-wreathed, valedictory ‘The End of Death’, a case of missing persons and a dispatch on Last Things. Both, in their different ways, stand worthy as the last fictional testimony of a considerable author.” #74536
Price: $20.00