2015 Year-End Roundup and A Look Ahead to 2016

Thank you for making 2015 our best year ever!

It's been an exciting year, as we've released more than 60 great new titles, from lost 18th-century works (Jane West's A Gossip's Story, Jack Voller's The Graveyard School: An Anthology) to neglected Victorian classics (George W.M. Reynolds's penny dreadful The Mysteries of London, R.M. Ballantyne's best-selling boys' adventure The Coral Island) to vintage thrillers and chillers (J.U. Nicolson's Fingers of Fear, Henry Chapman Mercer's November Night Tales) to contemporary horror classics (Bernard Taylor's Sweetheart, Sweetheart, Michael McDowell's Cold Moon Over Babylon) and some really great literary fiction that had inexplicably fallen out of print in the US—or never been published here at all!—(Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave, Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Michael Frayn's first five novels, three by Russell Hoban).

We love all the books we publish, so it'd be impossible for us to pick a favorite or even a top 10. Instead, here's a list of ten books we published this year (in no particular order) that we really love but which some of you may have overlooked.

1. Robert Westall, Antique Dust

Westall is best known as the award-winning author of a number of books for children and young adults; Antique Dust (1989) was his only book marketed for adults. It's a collection of terrific ghost stories in the tradition of M.R. James, centering on an antique dealer who has a knack for running across cursed objects and haunted places. It's sometimes scary, sometimes funny, always entertaining. If you enjoy this one, make sure not to miss Westall's The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral, another Jamesian tale, this time featuring a cathedral tower topped with a rather hideous gargoyle, which may (or may not) be exercising a supernatural power to lure children to their deaths.

2. Christopher Priest, The Separation

Christopher Priest has a large following internationally and has won numerous awards for his books, including the James Tait Black Prize for best novel of the year and the World Fantasy Award for The Prestige (1995), but for some reason has been somewhat overlooked in the States, where most of his classic works were out of print before we started republishing them. The Separation (2002) won both the British Fantasy Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and it's easy to see why. It's an enthralling, mind-bending novel that traces the story of twin brothers who played key roles in World War II through divergent realities. Read it and see why critics have called it one of the best works of alternate history ever written. We also released Priest's The Affirmation (1981) in January 2015, and it's one of my favorite reissues this year.

3. F. L. Green, Odd Man Out

F. L. Green's Odd Man Out is best known as the source of the classic 1947 Carol Reed film adaptation (recently reissued in the Criterion Collection), but if you've seen the movie and haven't read the novel, you're really missing out. Set over the course of one snowy, surreal, nightmarish Belfast night, it starts out as the story of a violent heist gone wrong and turns into something else entirely, as a wounded IRA leader stumbles through the streets, bleeding, menaced by death and betrayal on all sides, and facing the prospect of dying that night with the stain of murder weighing on his soul.

4. Elizabeth Jenkins, Harriet

Elizabeth Jenkins's Harriet (1934) won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse, beating Evelyn Waugh's better-known A Handful of Dust. It's not hard to see why she won, but it's extremely hard to understand why this novel has been so neglected. Based on the real-life case of Harriet Staunton, a mentally disabled woman who was cruelly murdered for her fortune during the Victorian era, it's an unrivaled exploration into the depths of human depravity that still holds the ability to chill readers to the bone.

5. Dennis Parry, Sea of Glass

I've read Dennis Parry's Sea of Glass (1955) three times now and look forward to reading it again. Most of our authors are neglected to one degree or another, but Parry goes beyond neglect into the realm of total oblivion. From his death in 1955 (less than two months after this book, his best, was published) until 2014, not a single one of his books was ever reprinted. Even during his lifetime he was little known, despite having published ten novels; reviewers of Sea of Glass loved the book and expressed astonishment that they'd never heard of Parry or read others of his books. And Parry would have continued in oblivion were it not for the macabre illustrator Edward Gorey, who, in the journal Antaeus in the 1970s, mentioned Sea of Glass as the most unjustly neglected book he knew. No plot description can do justice to Parry's novel. It's exciting, suspenseful, moving, and very, very funny—sometimes laugh-out-loud funny (just wait till you get to the part with the venomous barking spiders). Trust us on this one, give it a shot.

6. Harry Kressing, The Cook

Harry Kressing's The Cook (1965) is one of those books that for decades invariably showed up on lists of books that had undeservedly fallen out of print and needed to be reissued. It's a sort of dark fairy tale, with echoes of Kafka, centering on the mysterious figure of Conrad, a tall, gaunt young man dressed all in black, who arrives in town one day and uses his brilliant culinary skills to win first the stomachs and then the souls of the townspeople. The critic for the Observer said it "begin[s] in a vein of innocent fairy tale and end[s] with satanic revels", while John Fowles praised it, saying, "I have much enjoyed The Cook, for I am very fond of Satan. My congratulations to Mr. Kressing on his achievement." Everyone we've talked to has enjoyed this one, and it has a perfect 5-star rating on Amazon, so we think it's safe to say you're likely to enjoy it too.

7. Michael Blumlein, The Brains of Rats

In this astonishing collection, Michael Blumlein (a medical doctor in addition to a terrific short story writer) blurs the boundaries of horror, science fiction, and fantasy in stories that often feature medical themes. When it first appeared in 1989, it earned rave reviews from mainstream critics at the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, etc., as well as high praise from genre stalwarts Harlan Ellison, Pat Cadigan, Joe R. Lansdale, and Peter Straub. Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love, says it best: “The Brains of Rats is blindingly brilliant. Blumlein is beyond any genre, a genuinely great writer.” Probably the most famous (or infamous) story in the collection is one in which the surgical dissection of Ronald Reagan is described in chilling, clinical detail, but almost every entry in the book is a classic.

8. Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave

Unbelievably, Barry Hines's 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave (filmed in 1969 as Kes, also a recent Criterion DVD reissue) had never been published in the United States despite being recognized as a classic in the UK, where it's probably been read by every kid ever to go through the British school system any time in the past four decades. An outstanding work of realistic working-class fiction, it's the story of a young boy in a northern England mining town who has seemingly no future except a life of toil in the mines, but who finds strength and courage through his experiences in training a kestrel hawk. Our edition features one of our favorite covers of 2015, by Tom Duxbury.

9. Michael Frayn, Towards the End of the Morning

Michael Frayn is legendary in the UK, where his first five novels have long been regarded as classics, his most recent three novels have all been nominated for the Booker Prize, and his play Noises Off (currently being revived on Broadway) was voted the nation's second-favorite play of all time. And yet, despite those impressive credentials, his first five novels had all been out of print for decades in the US until we reissued them with new introductions by the author. All five are excellent, but Towards the End of the Morning (1967) is probably the funniest and most famous. The story involves a group of journalists working for a third-rate London newspaper in the waning days of Fleet Street, stuck in the obscure department responsible for the crossword puzzle and 'Nature Notes'. As always with Frayn, it's a very funny book (the scene where one of the newspapermen, dreaming of escaping to a lucrative career in television, finally gets an appearance on a TV program but gets drunk and makes an ass of himself, is a highlight, as is the catastrophically ill-fated trip to review a new resort in the Persian Gulf). We also published Frayn's newest book, Matchbox Theatre, a collection of thirty short 'entertainments' that the New York Times picked as a must for summer reading.

10. Craig Jones, Blood Secrets

A remarkable first novel, Craig Jones's Blood Secrets (1978) earned rave reviews when first published and in the decades since, numerous critics have hailed it as a masterpiece of 20th century American Gothic fiction. Whether you call it mystery, thriller, or horror, it's a terrific novel, with a slow accumulation of dread and suspense and a couple of genuinely shocking turns you won't see coming. The saying 'don't judge a book by its cover' might have been coined because of this book: the 1979 mass-market paperback, with the title "BLOOD SECRETS" in a large crimson font, must have made the book seem to be just another amongst the thousands of bad horror novels being churned out at the time, which is definitely not the case. Give this one a shot: we think you'll really enjoy it. And whatever you do, don't post any spoilers of the plot anywhere!

A look at 2016

As we count down the waning hours of 2015, how about a look at some of what to expect in 2016? Please note, all these titles are currently considered 'forthcoming' and may be subject to cancellation or delay until 2017. Also, negotiations are ongoing for a number of books, and more titles will be added throughout the year.

Gothic, Victorian, Edwardian
Charlotte Smith, Ethelinde, or, The Recluse of the Lake (1789)
Henry Summersett, The Fate of Sedley (1795) and Aberford (1795)
Regina Maria Roche, The Children of the Abbey (1796)
Carl Grosse, Horrid Mysteries (1796)
Maria Edgeworth, Ennui (1809)
Olivia Shakespear, Beauty's Hour (1894)
Richard Marsh, The Complete Adventures of Judith Lee (1911-16)

Vintage Thrills and Chills
Riccardo Stephens, The Mummy (1912)
Alexander Laing, The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (1934)
Edwin Greenwood, The Deadly Dowager (1935)
Thomas Burke, Night-Pieces (1935)
Gabriel Marlowe, I Am Your Brother (1935)
Gerald Kersh, Night and the City (1938) and Prelude to a Certain Midnight (1946)
John Mair, Never Come Back (1941)
Roger Manvell, The Dreamers (1958)
Frank Baker, Stories of the Strange and Sinister

Horror, Weird Fiction and Science Fiction
Robert Aickman, The Late Breakfasters (1964) and Selected Stories
John Blackburn, Blow the House Down (1970)
John Blackburn, A Book of the Dead (1984)
Stephen Knight, Requiem at Rogano (1978)
Michael McDowell ("Axel Young"), Wicked Stepmother (1982)
Michael McDowell ("Axel Young"), Blood Rubies (1983)
Christopher Priest, The Space Machine (1976)
Christopher Priest, A Dream of Wessex (1977)

Archie Roy, Devil in the Darkness (1978)

Alan Ryan, Cast a Cold Eye (1982)
Robert Westall, The Wheatstone Pond/Yaxley's Cat/Blackham's Wimpey

Rediscovered LGBT Literature
Edward Prime-Stevenson, Left to Themselves (1891)
Charles Jackson, The Fall of Valor (1946)
Robin Maugham, Behind the Mirror (1955)
James Ramsey Ullman, The Day on Fire (1958)
Paul Buckland, A Chorus of Witches (1959)
Geoff Brown, I Want What I Want (1966)
Philip Ridley, Crocodilia (1988)
Philip Ridley, In the Eyes of Mr Fury (1989)
Philip Ridley, Flamingoes in Orbit (1990)

Neglected Literary Classics
H.E. Bates, Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944)
Philip Callow, Common People (1958)
Stephen Gilbert, Bombardier (1944)
Thomas Hinde, Mr. Nicholas (1952)

Thanksgiving / Black Friday Sales

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dreading a long day of political arguments with your family while trying to choke down your sister-in-law's gelatinous cranberry sauce? Wondering how on earth, after all the booze you downed to get through Thanksgiving, you're going to get up at 4 a.m. to get to Best Buy in time to get your hands on a discounted flatscreen TV?

Why not just cozy up with a good book instead? Fortunately, we've got you covered!

BLACK FRIDAY eBOOK SALE!

Today and tomorrow only (Nov. 26-27, 2015), take 50% off ALL e-books on our Gumroad store: www.gumroad.com/valancourtbooks using the code GOBBLEGOBBLE. IMPORTANT: For the code to work properly, first add ALL books that you want to your cart, and input the code at checkout. N.B. Some titles have territorial or copyright restrictions and may not be available in every country. Please feel free to email us or send us a Facebook message or Tweet if you experience any difficulty with the code.

SAVE ON PAPERBACKS & HARDCOVERS!

Take 30% off ANY Valancourt print book (paperback/hardcover) on Amazon.com using the code HOLIDAY30 at checkout (the total maximum discount is $10). Regrettably, this offer is only available on the Amazon US site. UPDATE: We've been informed the code can only be used once per person.

Don't like Amazon? No worries: you can also save at Barnes and Noble using the code 30BFRIDAY at checkout. Can only be applied to one book per order.

Happy Halloween!

This is our favorite time of the year, and probably the favorite of many of you as well. We hope you're enjoying our numerous Halloween-season releases, which include the ultra rare (only one known surviving copy) Gothic novel The Vaults of Lepanto (1814), as well as three titles from the Golden Age of storytelling: Henry Chapman Mercer's M.R. James-style antiquarian weird tales, November Night Tales (1928), E. Temple Thurston's occult mystery Man in a Black Hat (1930), and that legendary work of supernatural horror Fingers of Fear (1937) by J.U. Nicolson. 

For those interested in more modern fare, you won't want to miss our two-volume set of David Case's tales, which total 530 pages and include new introductions by Stephen Jones and new afterwords by Kim Newman. These stories are absolutely fantastic: strikingly original and written in a highly literate style that will have you reaching for your dictionary. If you can't get enough David Case, we'll also be publishing his werewolf potboiler Wolf Tracks (1980) as an e-book later this month. Finally, fans of our gay-interest titles can also get into the Halloween spirit with Foreign Affairs (1973) by Hugh Fleetwood, whom one critic called 'the master of modern horror'. Though I'd characterize it more as a thriller than a horror novel, it certainly does have its nasty, horrific elements and might be classed as a horror novel in the same vein as Stephen King's Misery.

It's been brought to our attention that we haven't been updating this blog much. We don't get much interaction from readers on the blog, and only a couple people have signed up as 'followers', so we've been focusing our efforts in other areas: our once-monthly email newsletter, which is the best way to keep up with what we're publishing, our Goodreads page (add us as a 'friend' and join our group!), and our Facebook, Twitter, Booklikes, and other social media pages. We'll try to blog more in the near future, but in the meantime, we encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter and find us on the above-mentioned social media websites.

And Happy Halloween!

The Prestige e-book and some forthcoming title announcements!

We're celebrating the release of our e-book edition of Christopher Priest's The Prestige (1995), which went live yesterday. The book, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the World Fantasy Award and was adapted for a 2006 Christopher Nolan film, has never been out of print in paperback, but for some reason the United States was the only place on earth where you couldn't get it as an e-book. So we fixed that.

Whether you've seen the film version or not, you really should check out the novel. It's brilliantly constructed—like the stage illusions its plot deals with—and a very compelling read. As fans of Victorian Gothic works by writers like Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Richard Marsh, we also enjoyed the book's structure, with multiple narrators and parts of the story told through diaries, etc.

Read all about it over on its book page: http://www.valancourtbooks.com/the-prestige-1995.html

This is the e-book cover by M.S. Corley:

...and, speaking of Christopher Priest, we're delighted to announce that we'll have the honor of publishing three more of his titles in late 2015 or early 2016: The Space Machine (1976), A Dream of Wessex (1977) (the author's revised edition; the book originally came out in the U.S., for some reason, under the title The Perfect Lover), and The Separation (2002), which won both the Arthur C. Clarke and BSFA Awards. The first two will be available in US & Canada; The Separation will be US only.

And we're pleased to welcome a number of new Valancourt authors!

We're extremely excited about Iain Sinclair's highly acclaimed White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), which weaves two plotlines, one involving shady book dealers in modern-day London and one involving the Jack the Ripper slayings of 1888. Though oft reprinted in the UK (currently by Penguin), Sinclair's novel has curiously never been available in the US. It was the runner-up to that year's Guardian Fiction Prize (his second novel, Downriver, would win both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award). It's a terrific book, written in a unique, highly poetic prose style, and I found it a most enjoyable and rewarding read.

Russell Hoban (1925-2011) is probably best known for his children's books, but his novel Riddley Walker (1980) is regarded in many circles as a masterpiece, and his other novels—which are often unclassifiable, containing elements of humor, science fiction, fantasy, and even horror—have a large and well-deserved cult following. NYRB Classics recently reprinted his novel Turtle Diary (one of two novels he wrote with no supernatural or fantastic themes), but otherwise his works have been long unavailable in the US & Canada. We're very pleased to report that we'll be reissuing three of his very best—The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973), Kleinzeit (1974) and Pilgermann (1983). We'll post more about all these later on, but for now, some vintage covers:

Here at Valancourt, we publish a lot of good books—and even quite a few great ones—but only a handful are so beautifully done, so compelling, so perfect that they're actually impossible to put down. Philip Ridley's In the Eyes of Mr Fury (1989) is one such novel, and we're very excited to have it as forthcoming. It's a bibliographic oddity: it never had a hardcover edition but went straight into paperback from Penguin as part of their short-lived Penguin Originals series. Also odd is the cover, which doesn't have the title or author's name. The book never appeared at all in the US, so we're thrilled to make it available here for the first time, as well as making it available again in the UK and worldwide. We don't want to run the risk of spoiling anything for you, so we won't say more about this one here—just trust us: do not under any circumstances miss it!

From the oldie-but-goodie category is Nightmares and Geezenstacks (1961) by Fredric Brown, who was great at writing everything from crime novels to sci-fi to horror to.... well, just about anything. This collection was first published as a now-scarce paperback original in 1961 and reprinted in the late 1970s. Both editions are hard to find and because of the pulp-quality materials used, most copies are falling to bits. The 1961 paperback contains 47 stories but is only about 130 pages long: most of the stories are only 1-3 pages long, but though very short, they pack a very powerful punch. Few if any writers are better at the "short short story" than Brown was.

And last, but by no means least, the rediscovery of Hugh Fleetwood's fine novels has been begun by the folks at Faber Finds, who publish his John Llewellyn Rhys Prize-winning The Girl Who Passed for Normal (1974) and several others. We're pleased to add his Foreign Affairs to our list: it's a book that showcases perfectly why the Sunday Times called Fleetwood "the master of modern horror" and illustrates what the Scotsman meant when they wrote "He reaches down and stirs up with venomous delight the nameless, faceless things swimming far below the levels of consciousness." Like Ridley's novel, Fleetwood's will appeal both to those who enjoy our literary fiction offerings as well as those of you specifically interested in our gay-interest titles.

Look for more info on all these titles and authors coming soon, and, as always, we have dozens more titles under consideration or in the works, so expect more announcements soon!

Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe!

Today marks Edgar Allan Poe's 206th birthday, so we thought we'd celebrate by sharing some interesting stuff from the Valancourt Archives. Back in 2013, we published Andrew Sinclair's The Facts in the Case of E.A. Poe (1979), a brilliant hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that surely ranks as one of the most interesting books on Poe ever written. In order to write the book, Sinclair followed in Poe's footsteps from Richmond to Charlottesville, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore, and documented his research in two volumes of journals, which he sent to us.  

Poe Cottage, Bronx, NY, where Poe wrote "Annabel Lee"

Poe Park, Bronx, NY

 The Constellation, Baltimore, Maryland. A note in the journals indicates that the bowsprit points to where Poe was found dying.

 The Edgar Allan Poe Society at 512 W. Fayette Street, Baltimore

Poe was originally buried without a headstone; this stone marks the spot of his original grave.

Andrew Sinclair at Poe's tomb.

 Main Street, Richmond, outside the Poe Museum.

 Grave of Poe's mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, at St John's Episcopal Churchyard, Broad Street, Richmond

 The Gold Bug Restaurant & Lounge, Sullivan's Island, SC. Poe's story "The Gold Bug" was set on Sullivan's Island.

 Fort Moultrie, where Poe was stationed from Nov. 1827 to Dec. 1828.

"Visit the house where Poe wrote The Raven": Baltimore. In the late 1970s, when Sinclair visited, this neighborhood was particularly bad. When we visited last year, it hadn't improved much.

Hope you enjoyed these photos -- all of them come into play in Sinclair's book, which we hope you'll check out.  It's available in paperback or as a $2.99 ebook (free for Amazon Prime subscribers).