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Celestial Chess
This is the 40th anniversary publication of Thomas Bontly’s Celestial Chess, with enchanting cover art by the Viet Hung Gallery, Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam, and a special introduction by Thomas Kent Miller detailing his 40-year crusade to bring this book to a wide audience.
This novel is nothing less than a spot-on homage to M.R. James, the great and influential Edwardian medievalist and bibliographic scholar—and author of some of the best ghost stories of the last 100 years.
Furthermore, Thomas Bontly's 1979 novel Celestial Chess is a riff on James' memorable ghost stories. The 1970s and 80s was an era prone to the updating of classic genre themes. There seemed to have been a bit of a publishing fad back then to ask: "How would [classic genre novel title] be written today knowing what we know today?" Michael Crichton made an excellent career of this. Congo was a reworking of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Eaters of the Dead of Beowulf, and Jurassic Park of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, to name only some. Peter Straub brought Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan up to date as Ghost Story. Wilbur Smith did the same with Haggard's She as The Sunbird, and Nelson DeMille revisited The Quest of the Holy Grail as The Quest (1975 and 2013).
That said, the novel is titled Celestial Chess for good reason. The soul of the story is indeed a game of celestial chess played between a certain tortured 12-century monk (whose story is a vital aspect of this book) and the Devil wherein the stars are in fact the pieces, the board is an iron grate with 64 holes held up to the sky, and the time span of the games is years rather than hours.
This novel is nothing less than a spot-on homage to M.R. James, the great and influential Edwardian medievalist and bibliographic scholar—and author of some of the best ghost stories of the last 100 years.
Furthermore, Thomas Bontly's 1979 novel Celestial Chess is a riff on James' memorable ghost stories. The 1970s and 80s was an era prone to the updating of classic genre themes. There seemed to have been a bit of a publishing fad back then to ask: "How would [classic genre novel title] be written today knowing what we know today?" Michael Crichton made an excellent career of this. Congo was a reworking of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Eaters of the Dead of Beowulf, and Jurassic Park of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, to name only some. Peter Straub brought Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan up to date as Ghost Story. Wilbur Smith did the same with Haggard's She as The Sunbird, and Nelson DeMille revisited The Quest of the Holy Grail as The Quest (1975 and 2013).
That said, the novel is titled Celestial Chess for good reason. The soul of the story is indeed a game of celestial chess played between a certain tortured 12-century monk (whose story is a vital aspect of this book) and the Devil wherein the stars are in fact the pieces, the board is an iron grate with 64 holes held up to the sky, and the time span of the games is years rather than hours.
332 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2019
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