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Drolls From Shadowland
HardPress Classic Books Series
166 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1893
3 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 19, 2018
At the time of the Interregnum, a Droll was a short comical sketch, containing physical humour and witty dialogue, with music and dancing, often sourced from works of the Elizabethan theatre. On that basis, these can only be Drolls in a land of shadows. The book is little, and the stories are short; 14 luxuriate within the broad-margined, cream-coloured plains of paper that make up the 166 pages. What stories they are. Tales that provoke dry amusement, not of the comedic kind, but of the moral. The satisfaction of the fitting end. Yes, these are weird tales, of creatures and presences, and of harbingers of fate, but the Shadowland is not some twilit world that marches alongside our own, but the Shadowland within the human heart and the human mind.
When first published, Drolls from Shadowland was well praised, The Guardian calling it “clever and powerful, highly imaginative and weirdly fantastic”, the US press compared Pearce to Daudet (though which one?) and The Illustrated London News thought that it gave him “an assured place” in the canon. His fate was that of the fisherman in “The Unchristened Child”. Within three years it was already considered a neglected book by Katherine Tynan, though she thought of Pearce that
“There is no imagination in young poetry at present which can stand beside his in prose excepting that of his brother Celt, Mr. W. B. Yeats”.
Today, he rates an extraction of the story “The Man Who Coined His Blood Into Gold” in the Hugh Lamb edited anthology “Tales from a Gas-lit Graveyard” and the re-publication of the Tynan review on the excellent Wormwoodiana blog.
But he is there to be found. He is there though ebooks and print on demand, or better still, for those who can find and afford, uncut on cream laid paper within blue-grey boards. These melancholic tales, often with an air as elusive as their author, deserve a new audience.
When first published, Drolls from Shadowland was well praised, The Guardian calling it “clever and powerful, highly imaginative and weirdly fantastic”, the US press compared Pearce to Daudet (though which one?) and The Illustrated London News thought that it gave him “an assured place” in the canon. His fate was that of the fisherman in “The Unchristened Child”. Within three years it was already considered a neglected book by Katherine Tynan, though she thought of Pearce that
“There is no imagination in young poetry at present which can stand beside his in prose excepting that of his brother Celt, Mr. W. B. Yeats”.
Today, he rates an extraction of the story “The Man Who Coined His Blood Into Gold” in the Hugh Lamb edited anthology “Tales from a Gas-lit Graveyard” and the re-publication of the Tynan review on the excellent Wormwoodiana blog.
But he is there to be found. He is there though ebooks and print on demand, or better still, for those who can find and afford, uncut on cream laid paper within blue-grey boards. These melancholic tales, often with an air as elusive as their author, deserve a new audience.
March 6, 2014
I'm like a schoolgirl in the sweetie shop where upon all is free ... e-readers are teh brilliantz.
This is a volume of short stories and as far as I can tell a Droll is the same as a Troll:
Drolls from Shadowland
An Unexpected Journey
The Man who could Talk with the Birds
The Pursuit (meh!)
A Pleasant Entertainment
The Man who Desired to be a Tree
The Man who had Seen
The Unchristened Child
The Man who Met Hate
The Haunted House
Gifts and Awards
Friend or Foe
The Fields of Amaranth
The Comedy of a Soul
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews