Date: 1900-1950

Venetian Masque Paperback by Rafael Sabatini

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Scaramouche

Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution by Rafael Sabatini is a historical novel set during the tumultuous period of the French Revolution. The story follows the adventures of André-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer and fencing master. After a personal tragedy, Read more

Venetian Masque
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Published: 2008-01-11
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Monsieur le Vicomte is a remarkable man - not least because, for all concerned, he had been guillotined along with numerous French aristocrats. Yet by some twist of fate he managed to escape and seek refuge in Turin. But by an even more perverse twist of fate, he is apprehended, leaving him once and for all in the hands of the gods.

Rafael Sabatini (29 April 1875 – 13 February 1950) was an Italian-born British writer of romance and adventure novels

The Tavern Knightby Rafael Sabatini

The Tavern Knight
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Rafael Sabatini was an Italian born author best known for romance and adventure novels. Sabatini, who traveled throughout Europe for much of his childhood, was fluent in 5 languages but decided to write in English.

This is a story about a man’s quest for vengeance against two wealthy, snobbish, upper class individuals who’d caused him grief and anguish many years ago.

But, when his “best laid plans” went awry, he found himself in one predicament after another as he tried to rectify the mistakes and mishaps that occurred each time he altered his plans.

 

Rafael Sabatini (29 April 1875 – 13 February 1950) was an Italian-born British writer of romance and adventure novels

The Worm Ouroboros

The Worm Ouroboros
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E.R. Edison’s The Worm Ouroboros inspired the epic-fantasy writers that followed him. This production is of the first edition (1922).

The Lords of Demonland are celebrating Lord Juss’s birthday when an envoy arrives from Witchland. He brings demands from King Gorice XI of Witchland that the Lords of Demonland “kiss his toe, and acknowledge him to be their King and they, his ill-conditioned, disobedient children”. The Lords of Demonland reject this utterly and, to settle the matter, they challenge King Gorice to a wrestling match against their champion, Lord Goldry Bluszco.

But the situation is worsened by the result of that match and ultimately, war is declared. A war that includes dark magic, sorcery, quests, mystical lands, and heroic high-adventure. Ursula K. Le Guin called it “An eccentric masterpiece”, C. S. Lewis said it represented “A new climate of the imagination”, Orville Prescott said it was “A literary event of the first order.”

Critics compared Tolkien’s writing to it when he first published The Lord of the Rings and he freely acknowledged its influence. Eddison writes his narrative in a lyrical, medieval style and in the tradition of Norse mythology, Arthurian myths, and Greek tragedy. In his short dedication he says, “It is neither allegory nor fable but a story to be read for its own sake”, however, the theme of repetition (the cyclical nature of life, history, and war), is undeniable. The “worm (serpent or dragon) Ouroboros” is, after all, “The serpent which eats its own tail”.

Frozen Hell: The Book That Inspired The Thing

Frozen Hell: The Book That Inspired The Thing
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Written in 1938

Fans of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” can rejoice — here is the original, previously-unpublished, 45-pages-longer version of John W. Campbell’s classic story, “Who Goes There?” (filmed as “The Thing” and “The Thing from Another World”). Recently discovered at Harvard by scholar Alec Nevala-Lee, long buried in John W. Campbell’s papers, here is the original version of “Who Goes There?” It adds an astonishing 45 pages of extra material to the classic story.

The Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft

The Shadow Out of Time
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H.P. Lovecraft’s classic novella blending science fiction with elements of horror and psychological thriller. Through the experiences of Nathaniel Peaslee, we learn of the extraterrestrial great race of Yith. For eons, the Yithians explored space and time by projecting their consciousnesses into the bodies of beings throughout the universe, in the future and the past.

Sometimes confused as spiritual possession, the Yithians used this body switching technique to amass great knowledge. Switching bodies en masse to avoid destruction, the Yithians travelled to prehistoric earth. While questioning his sanity following episodes of possession, Peaslee discovers clues of the Yithians and their alien enemies.

At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness
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“On an expedition to Antarctica, Professor William Dyer and his colleagues discover the remains of ancient half-vegetable, half-animal lifeforms. The extremely early date in the geological strata is surprising because of the highly-evolved features found in these previously unknown life-forms.

Through a series of dark revelations, violent episodes, and misunderstandings, the group learns of Earth’s secret history and legacy.” –Amazon.com.

Brave New World

Brave New World
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Now reissued in a gorgeous hardcover edition: “one of the most prophetic dystopian works of the 20th century” (Wall Street Journal) must be read and understood by anyone concerned with preserving the human spirit in the face of our “brave new world.” Huxley’s masterpiece has become a bestseller once again after the American election.

Aldous Huxley’s profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order whose motto is “Community, Identity, Stability.”—all at the cost of our freedom, humanity, and perhaps our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization.

Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning as we head into tomorrow and as a thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a twenty-first-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.

M.R. James: The Complete Ghost Stories Collection

Complete Ghost Stories
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Published: 2017-01-24
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The art of telling a ghost story is a refined one and Montague Rhodes James was a master of it. This volume contains all his timeless masterpieces from the four collections of his eerie tales.

The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Volume One

The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Volume One
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audiobooks available!

“Hercule Poirot meets Fox Mulder . . . raises genuine shivers. “

Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.

Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries—and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)—captivated readers for nearly three decades.

Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero.

The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from “The Horror on the Links” (1925) to “The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by George Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg.

The Best of Jules de Grandin: 20 Classic Occult Detective Stories

The Best of Jules de Grandin: 20 Classic Occult Detective Stories
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Full collection with audiobooks here

“Hercule Poirot meets Fox Mulder . . . raises genuine shivers. “—Kirkus Reviews

A collection of the 20 greatest tales of Jules de Grandin, the supernatural detective made famous in the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales.
Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.

Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries—and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)—captivated readers for nearly three decades.

The Best of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents twenty of the greatest published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order with stories from the 1920s through the 1940s, this collection contains the most incredible of Jules de Grandin’s many awe-inspiring adventures.