Treatises on Dust

by Timothy J. Jarvis

“From the small bones of the middle ear can be fashioned a key.”

“For a while now,” Timothy J. Jarvis tells us in the first tale here, “I’ve been collecting texts that hint at strange tales.” He goes on to explain that these “Treatises on Dust” are not ghost stories in the traditional sense. Indeed none of the pieces in the collection could be said to be in the vein of traditional supernatural fiction. They are haunted, not by ghosts, but by an obscure volume of French decadent poetry, a seventeenth-century murder ballad, a bone antenna, and by places where “the membrane is thin”.

They cleave closer to what the literary hermit of Arthur Machen’s Hieroglyphics called “ecstasy”. Though perhaps an ecstasy found less in the “withdrawal from the common life and the common consciousness”, than one grubbed up from the murk of that very consciousness.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror

239 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2023

About the author

Timothy J. Jarvis is a writer with an interest in the antic and strange. His novel, The Wanderer, was first released in summer 2014 by Perfect Edge Books and republished by Zagava in 2022. Short fiction has appeared in various venues and in 2023 a collection, Treatises on Dust, was published by Swan River Press. He is also interested in drone and ambient music and has collaborated with sound artists on sleeve notes and performance.

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

So far this year, two writers with whom I've been Facebook friends since encounters at other people's book launches have published books with dust-related titles. Coincidence - or something more sinister? To be honest, they'd probably both plump for sinister, though where in Jay Owens' Dust that something would be the extractive, isolated mindset of a humanity high on its own delusions of controlling the world, here it's the things lurking beyond another boundary that isn't nearly as solid as we'd like, the one between waking world and nightmare. Jarvis' method is within the established territory of the weird tale, strange texts serving as keys to doors that should have stayed shut, but in place of the usual suspects (the Necronomicon, The King In Yellow, you know the drill*), he supplements actually existing oddities with his own cursed library of experimental poetry, broadsheet ballads, and unsettling graffiti, not to mention a few dubious artefacts of other kinds. The locations, too, are shifted - there's a fleeting encounter with Machen's London, a few European excursions, but for the most part the tendrils of the outer dark creep into the likes of Luton and Hatfield, apparently bathetic settings, except isn't their very soullessness exactly what makes them suitably thin and ripe for intrusion? Put it this way: I've got into a habit of reading old ghost stories at bedtime, and even stuff operating in the slightly later Lovecraft mode can sometimes end up strangely soothing, but this book was always out of the bedroom by nightfall.

*OK, there is one mention of Ludwig Prinn, which I confess I found a little disappointing, falling back as it did on an easy out elsewhere scrupulously avoided, not to mention unnecessary when the new weird tomes here are so wonderfully ominous.

[Chris Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This colleciton had much in the way of the literary form, with a perfect blend of strangeness, along with some descritive laguage that was pure icing. I enjoyed how the author carried the reader along with a subtle, lyrical style of writing, often to be deposited into a scene of unsettling trepidation. As a bonus, these works were packaged in a beautiful volume worthy of any collector's bookshelf.