Speculative fiction is by definition in the vanguard of contemporary writing, and particularly suited to the short story form. This fifth volume of Strange Tales from Tartarus includes seventeen new stories by eight British and nine North American authors, some well-known and others up-and-coming in the field. As in previous volumes in this series, a wide range of literary strange fiction is represented here, from the science fiction of Charles Wilkin-son’s ‘The Investigation of Innocence’, to the historical fantasy-horror of Elise Forier Edie’s ‘You Go Back’, to the stream-of-consciousness, psychological weirdness of Andrew Apter’s ‘The Man Who Loved Flies’ to the evocative sleight of hand that is Mark Valentine’s ‘Yes, I Knew the Venusian Commodore’. These are, by any measure, superb short stories, and it is hoped that Strange Tales V will further the cause of contemporary speculative fiction and help introduce it to a wider audience. Cover illustration by Stephen J. Clark.

In Haunted by Books Mark Valentine explores the more curious byways of literature. He presents the author who was always being told he had nearly written a masterpiece, and the genius of the short story who brewed his own cider and lived in a railway carriage. Then there’s the figure of the 1890s, praised by Max Beerbohm, who liked to wander around London wearing horns and chewing railings, and the young man in the 1930s who tried to sell his poetry door to door. There are also new angles on key figures: the strange case of Robert Aickman, sailor and philosopher; the book that Sax Rohmer really wanted to write; the enigma of Walter de la Mare’s ‘Seaton’s Aunt’. And there are literary mysteries; what was the MS in a Red Box? Who wrote Shakespeare’s Gunpowder Plot? What became of Dr Ludovicus? Other essays celebrate neglected writers worth discovering, such as Mary Butts, Claude Houghton, and Vernon Knowles, or offer fresh perspectives, looking at Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s fantasies, Malcolm Lowry’s reading in occult fiction. There are even studies of books that were never written. Haunted by Books will delight all readers and book collectors who like to leave the beaten path and wander in the wild woods, forgotten lanes and lonely houses of literature.