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Haunted By Books
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.
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.
296 pages, Paperback
First published December 3, 2015
13 people are currently reading
172 people want to read
About the author
Mark Valentine
269 books138 followersMark Valentine is an English author, biographer and editor.
Valentine’s short stories have been published by a number of small presses and in anthologies since the 1980s, and the exploits of his series character, "The Connoisseur", an occult detective, were published as The Collected Connoisseur in 2010.
As a biographer, Valentine has published a life of Arthur Machen in 1985 (Seren Press), and a study of Sarban, Time, A Falconer (Tartarus Press), is published in 2010. He has also written numerous articles for the Book and Magazine Collector magazine, and introductions for various books, including editions of work by Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Saki, J. Meade Falkner and others.
Valentine also edits Wormwood (Tartarus Press), a journal dedicated to fantastic, supernatural and decadent literature, and has also edited anthologies, including The Werewolf Pack (Wordsworth, 2008) and The Black Veil (Wordsworth, 2008).
Valentine’s short stories have been published by a number of small presses and in anthologies since the 1980s, and the exploits of his series character, "The Connoisseur", an occult detective, were published as The Collected Connoisseur in 2010.
As a biographer, Valentine has published a life of Arthur Machen in 1985 (Seren Press), and a study of Sarban, Time, A Falconer (Tartarus Press), is published in 2010. He has also written numerous articles for the Book and Magazine Collector magazine, and introductions for various books, including editions of work by Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Saki, J. Meade Falkner and others.
Valentine also edits Wormwood (Tartarus Press), a journal dedicated to fantastic, supernatural and decadent literature, and has also edited anthologies, including The Werewolf Pack (Wordsworth, 2008) and The Black Veil (Wordsworth, 2008).
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 23, 2018
How could a true bibliophile resist such a title as Haunted by Books? Add the fact that it was written by Mark Valentine and the siren's lure was irresistible. Having recently read Valentine's stellar collection The Nightfarers, I was altogether hypnotized by the prospect. One might say "possessed".
But, like all unrealistic expectations, some aspect of anticipated pleasures are bound to disappoint. Thankfully, the disappointments here are few.
For example, the chapter on Aickman I found to be a bit of a stretch. The exposition on a couple of lines of Aickman's writing, lauding the complexity hidden beneath so few words, just wasn't very convincing to me. Aickman's a great writer, but looking at the same text as Valentine, I think he's stretching the evidence to the breaking point.
And if Valentine was hoping to encourage me to read Vernon Knowles' work, his attempt was a spectacular failure. If he was warning me away from it, mission accomplished! Still, a poignant story.
I also had a hard time seeing the influence of hermeticism in Vansittart's work, judging purely from Valentine's essay. I'm sure he is a fine writer, but how can you title an essay "Secret Names: The Hermetic Fiction of Peter Vansittart" and not have a hint of hermeticism in the essay? I felt a little cheated by the title, though it did spawn in me a number of thoughts which I shall be taking down in my writing notebook. So it's not all a loss.
These disappointments did not last long, however. I found much to like in this volume. Heart-rending stories about writers who nearly rose to prominence, then faded to obscurity, abounded. As it a bevy of accounts regarding anonymous writers or well-known writers whose works have been lost to time. And not a few books were added to my "must read someday" list: Mary Butts' Armed with Madness, Morris' Bretherton, The London Mercury (which I should like to see resurrected), and the lost volume A Book of Whimsies - lost to me, anyway, as I can't find any reference to it outside of Valentine's essay. I am haunted by the absence of these books.
Valentine is at his best when he is digging through the layers of creation, showing how a writer does what they do. Valentine's analysis of Walter de la Mare's Seaton's Aunt is the sort of essay that makes me want to be a better writer and reader and gives me the tools to do so. It is a careful unpacking of a subtly horrific story that gives a peek behind the panels at the gears that make the story move. Fantastic stuff.
Valentine uses Sax Rohmer's The Orchard of Tears as a digging tool to uncover the shadowed trends and hidden interstices of occult movement happening at, or just before, the writing of the novel. I am fond of these socio-intellectual archaeologies. They are so rare and so rarely done well. I could stand to read a book filled with such insightful essays.
Digging among the dead stirs up ghosts. And there are ghosts of all different kinds here.
The essay on Charles Welsh Mason was everything I hoped for: a thoroughgoing assessment of an extremely interesting writer whose career faded into the mists of time under most mysterious circumstances. This sort of essay was what I thought of when I first saw the title Haunted by Books. Fascinating and eerie.
As a young man growing up in the time of James Leslie Mitchell, I might have loved his fiction, particularly his shorter works. Alas, I was born to late and am probably too jaded to fully appreciate his work. But maybe not. There is a certain wistful longing for simpler times in me. I am a haunter out of time, it seems.
Valentine's premise of the inverse relationship between the amount of esoteric/occult content in a book and the book's popularity (at least among mid-twentieth-century readers) is interesting. Readers want a glimpse of the occult, but they don't want to read a text that might imply that they have actually learned something of esoteric teachings. Interesting fiction/non-fiction dynamic there. These readers are haunted by longing, but unable to receive revelation, in a sort of limbo of faith. A literary purgatory.
I should give a copy of The Fifth of November to my daughter and see if she can figure out it isn't Shakespeare. I constantly tease her about Shakespeare being Francis Bacon or Robert Marlowe. She has acted in several Shakespeare productions and actually been paid professionally to do so on a couple of occasions, and I'm a Dad, so I can't help teasing her about Shakespeare's reality or lack thereof. I suppose I am, in some strange way, haunting her with my own notions of literature. Poor woman!
"Or Opaline Algol" is a sweet, sweet mystery - an anonymous poet of significant talent remains, somehow, completely anonymous. The texts drop hints of the author, but never enough to reveal them. This is what I anticipated when I first read the title Haunted by Books: The identity of the poet is just around the corner, but when you spin around it to look down the hall, you only catch faint, ectoplasmic wisps dissolving up into the ceiling.
The story of the Johnsonians is poignant and possibly the most well-written essay in this entire book, so far. Valentine's personal anecdotes of his childhood are creepy and insightful into his mode of thinking. Haunted by books, indeed!
"What Became of Dr. Ludovicus" is a fascinating archaeology of creativity and the vain quest to seek publication, only to later become lost to the sands of time - except for the correspondence between the two authors who were working on it. It's like an epistolary novel that might or might not have ever existed. A little eerie by reason of omission. What is not seen is usually much more terrifying than what is perceived directly.
"Wraiths," the long-lost poetry of some fin-de-siecle would-be-writers which have been utterly lost to the sands of time, are the perfect haunters for this book. Beautiful words like a vapor, or so it is rumored.
"The Piccadilly Goat" was the most entertaining, whimsical essay of the book. It reads like a turn-of-the-(20th)-Century Harpers article and hits all the right notes. Absolute perfection.
The final essay sends the reader off into the atmosphere of what might have been. A wonderful way to end this eclectic, but intellectually-upward-spiraling work. The reader finishes the book with a sense of awe, as of watching spirits rise from a graveyard through the illuminated fog on a moonlit moor.
footnote: Special thanks to Acep Hale for his generous loan of the book to me.
But, like all unrealistic expectations, some aspect of anticipated pleasures are bound to disappoint. Thankfully, the disappointments here are few.
For example, the chapter on Aickman I found to be a bit of a stretch. The exposition on a couple of lines of Aickman's writing, lauding the complexity hidden beneath so few words, just wasn't very convincing to me. Aickman's a great writer, but looking at the same text as Valentine, I think he's stretching the evidence to the breaking point.
And if Valentine was hoping to encourage me to read Vernon Knowles' work, his attempt was a spectacular failure. If he was warning me away from it, mission accomplished! Still, a poignant story.
I also had a hard time seeing the influence of hermeticism in Vansittart's work, judging purely from Valentine's essay. I'm sure he is a fine writer, but how can you title an essay "Secret Names: The Hermetic Fiction of Peter Vansittart" and not have a hint of hermeticism in the essay? I felt a little cheated by the title, though it did spawn in me a number of thoughts which I shall be taking down in my writing notebook. So it's not all a loss.
These disappointments did not last long, however. I found much to like in this volume. Heart-rending stories about writers who nearly rose to prominence, then faded to obscurity, abounded. As it a bevy of accounts regarding anonymous writers or well-known writers whose works have been lost to time. And not a few books were added to my "must read someday" list: Mary Butts' Armed with Madness, Morris' Bretherton, The London Mercury (which I should like to see resurrected), and the lost volume A Book of Whimsies - lost to me, anyway, as I can't find any reference to it outside of Valentine's essay. I am haunted by the absence of these books.
Valentine is at his best when he is digging through the layers of creation, showing how a writer does what they do. Valentine's analysis of Walter de la Mare's Seaton's Aunt is the sort of essay that makes me want to be a better writer and reader and gives me the tools to do so. It is a careful unpacking of a subtly horrific story that gives a peek behind the panels at the gears that make the story move. Fantastic stuff.
Valentine uses Sax Rohmer's The Orchard of Tears as a digging tool to uncover the shadowed trends and hidden interstices of occult movement happening at, or just before, the writing of the novel. I am fond of these socio-intellectual archaeologies. They are so rare and so rarely done well. I could stand to read a book filled with such insightful essays.
Digging among the dead stirs up ghosts. And there are ghosts of all different kinds here.
The essay on Charles Welsh Mason was everything I hoped for: a thoroughgoing assessment of an extremely interesting writer whose career faded into the mists of time under most mysterious circumstances. This sort of essay was what I thought of when I first saw the title Haunted by Books. Fascinating and eerie.
As a young man growing up in the time of James Leslie Mitchell, I might have loved his fiction, particularly his shorter works. Alas, I was born to late and am probably too jaded to fully appreciate his work. But maybe not. There is a certain wistful longing for simpler times in me. I am a haunter out of time, it seems.
Valentine's premise of the inverse relationship between the amount of esoteric/occult content in a book and the book's popularity (at least among mid-twentieth-century readers) is interesting. Readers want a glimpse of the occult, but they don't want to read a text that might imply that they have actually learned something of esoteric teachings. Interesting fiction/non-fiction dynamic there. These readers are haunted by longing, but unable to receive revelation, in a sort of limbo of faith. A literary purgatory.
I should give a copy of The Fifth of November to my daughter and see if she can figure out it isn't Shakespeare. I constantly tease her about Shakespeare being Francis Bacon or Robert Marlowe. She has acted in several Shakespeare productions and actually been paid professionally to do so on a couple of occasions, and I'm a Dad, so I can't help teasing her about Shakespeare's reality or lack thereof. I suppose I am, in some strange way, haunting her with my own notions of literature. Poor woman!
"Or Opaline Algol" is a sweet, sweet mystery - an anonymous poet of significant talent remains, somehow, completely anonymous. The texts drop hints of the author, but never enough to reveal them. This is what I anticipated when I first read the title Haunted by Books: The identity of the poet is just around the corner, but when you spin around it to look down the hall, you only catch faint, ectoplasmic wisps dissolving up into the ceiling.
The story of the Johnsonians is poignant and possibly the most well-written essay in this entire book, so far. Valentine's personal anecdotes of his childhood are creepy and insightful into his mode of thinking. Haunted by books, indeed!
"What Became of Dr. Ludovicus" is a fascinating archaeology of creativity and the vain quest to seek publication, only to later become lost to the sands of time - except for the correspondence between the two authors who were working on it. It's like an epistolary novel that might or might not have ever existed. A little eerie by reason of omission. What is not seen is usually much more terrifying than what is perceived directly.
"Wraiths," the long-lost poetry of some fin-de-siecle would-be-writers which have been utterly lost to the sands of time, are the perfect haunters for this book. Beautiful words like a vapor, or so it is rumored.
"The Piccadilly Goat" was the most entertaining, whimsical essay of the book. It reads like a turn-of-the-(20th)-Century Harpers article and hits all the right notes. Absolute perfection.
The final essay sends the reader off into the atmosphere of what might have been. A wonderful way to end this eclectic, but intellectually-upward-spiraling work. The reader finishes the book with a sense of awe, as of watching spirits rise from a graveyard through the illuminated fog on a moonlit moor.
footnote: Special thanks to Acep Hale for his generous loan of the book to me.
November 23, 2019
Haunted by Books is a wonderful treat to read, filled with Valentine’s usual wit and erudite style on a subject he knows more about than anyone else. Most of the authors and works in here were unknown to me when I started reading, but Mark Valentine’s passion makes every chapter interesting. His enthusiasm for the subjects, their books, and their lives are infectious in the best possible manner, and I’ve written down more than one name from this collection that I’ll keep my eyes open for when I’m hunting for new books.
Several of the authors discussed in the book led lives that seemed almost more interesting than their work, such as Mary Butts, H.A. Manhood and Charles Welsh Mason, and some like Butts and Rohmer seemed to have outlined their most ardent belief systems into some of their novels. Mark Valentine has also included some strange occurrences in the world of publishing, such as the MS in the Red Box, and one of my favorite chapters; Offerings to Mercury, where Valentine meditates on which titles he’d like to read from the 1935 issue of the literary catalog The London Mercury.
For bibliophiles and the connoisseurs, who love the aesthetics of books, the hidden passions of their authors and the long-lost titles of forgotten poets, this collection of essays is a must. Valentine has even written two more volumes of essays that I can’t wait to delve into.
Several of the authors discussed in the book led lives that seemed almost more interesting than their work, such as Mary Butts, H.A. Manhood and Charles Welsh Mason, and some like Butts and Rohmer seemed to have outlined their most ardent belief systems into some of their novels. Mark Valentine has also included some strange occurrences in the world of publishing, such as the MS in the Red Box, and one of my favorite chapters; Offerings to Mercury, where Valentine meditates on which titles he’d like to read from the 1935 issue of the literary catalog The London Mercury.
For bibliophiles and the connoisseurs, who love the aesthetics of books, the hidden passions of their authors and the long-lost titles of forgotten poets, this collection of essays is a must. Valentine has even written two more volumes of essays that I can’t wait to delve into.
Want to read
December 16, 2015This copy is signed by Mark Valentine.
January 9, 2019
What a great non-fiction book about (mostly) fiction. It set me on the trail of so many other authors and books from days gone by. Mark Valentine is a walking encyclopedia of authors and books, especially from the first half of the 20th century, and his stories of obscure villages, religious sects and other tasty tidbits of forgotten lore is to be savored.
January 24, 2021
Overall, simply a book to treasure.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
January 25, 2025
If only more authors would do this.. an essay collection on neglected and forgotten literature that has influenced their lives and their writing.
It’s inevitable that the reader will pick up recommendations, especially if they are a fan of Valentine’s fiction. Now it’s a question of trying to track them down, as many are out of print.
It’s inevitable that the reader will pick up recommendations, especially if they are a fan of Valentine’s fiction. Now it’s a question of trying to track them down, as many are out of print.
September 18, 2017
My review: Haunted by Books by Mark Valentine
http://jayrothermel.blogspot.com/2017...
http://jayrothermel.blogspot.com/2017...
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July 16, 2024I read some moderately recondite books, but compared to Mark Valentine I might as well be buying exclusively from supermarkets, with maybe an occasional trip to a station WH Smith when I was feeling particularly fancy. He starts off accessible, luring us in with the likes of Robert Aickman, Mary Butts and Walter de la Mare - not exactly canonical figures, but known names. After that, though, the rollercoaster gets properly underway, and soon we're being introduced to the likes of Charles Welsh Mason, who "wrote six books under at least three names" and "tried to make himself King of China. As a first step to seizing the throne of Britain." Or how about J.M. Barrie's cricket team-mate J.C.Snaith, who kept on being told he had very nearly written a masterpiece, except that nobody seemed able to agree on which book, or quite how to leap that final gap? Even if we do bump into a recognisable name, it will usually be in an unfamiliar context; I know Ernest Dowson's decadent poetry, but here Valentine is more interested in piecing together a lost novel on which he collaborated. Sax Rohmer's Yellow Peril potboilers are remembered, albeit not fondly; Haunted By Books would rather tell us about The Orchard Of Tears, a distinctly wonky-sounding alloy of grand philosophical-historical instruction and authorial wish-fulfillment which recalls nothing so much as Corvo's Hadrian The VII minus the faux-humility. Mostly, I don't know that I even particularly want to read these books (though the fantasies of Vernon Knowles, essentially suggested as Dunsany for people who find Dunsany too mainstream, and the historical novels of Peter Vansittart, have a certain appeal). But I'm glad to know that someone is out there, keeping their work alive in at least one reader's mind, disseminating capsule appreciations of them to a few more of us. By the end, Valentine seems almost to be challenging himself to get more quixotic, then still more: an anonymous volume of astronomically obsessed verse which even the British Library seems not to have; assorted scapegrace poets of whom only a single line and a few memories in the diaries of others, themselves already obscure, survive. A few times during the book I thought of Max Beerbohm's spoof literary portraits, wondered whether Valentine might in places likewise be having us on; by this point, though, we're firmly in the territory of figures who would envy Enoch Soames his towering reputation. Recapitulating them is a self-evidently absurd project - and as noble as any human endeavour. To see us out, a charming account of the Piccadilly goat, and then, by way of encore, reviews of a number of books which take the only logical next step from those last spectres, and not only don't but couldn't exist, at least not here. And some imply better worlds by far - but would also rule out the existence of other books we do have; a strange consolation there, in being reminded that at least in details we could be somewhere else's tantalising counterfactual.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews