I received a review copy of this book.
And a rather lovely book it is, too. As expected with Swan River, the cover is a true work of art. But what of the contents? Well, according to the blurb, Treatises on Dust is not supernatural fiction in the conventional sense. However, as one might expect from a Machen enthusiast, there is plenty to entertain lovers of weird fiction. Several of the shorter pieces can be found on YouTube if you want to sample the book's' feel', and hear the author himself. I particularly like 'Let It Be a Blood Ape on the Prowl'. We've all had days like that.
The book is hard to sum up as the stories range from the overtly fantastical to urban realism tinged with the strange. In the latter category is 'With Scourges, With Flowering Sprigs', which links a weird incident in the Spanish Civil War with the ordeals of a Bulgarian migrant worker in modern England. Kalina, the protagonist, meets an old lady in a pub and hears about the last days of the Percy Bysshe Shelley regiment. A mysterious matchbox containing folk magic transforms Kalina's life - but at a price.
Altogether wilder in imagination is 'Three Relics', in which Jarvis explores the post-mortem adventures of three significant people. One is W.B. Yeats, whose bones were all jumbled up in a French ossuary because he wanted a quick funeral. Later the remains were returned to Ireland. Or were they? Well, the French did their best and a skeleton was reconstructed... All three tales here are playful and, at times, moving accounts of how the living and the dead intermingle in surprising ways.
Gritty realism returns with 'The Yellow Book', as a stag do goes horribly wrong thanks to a transgression straight out of Seventies folk horror. 'And Yet Speaketh' is not exactly a Jamesian ghost story but has some of the same ingredients - the academic interest in obscure texts and folklore, the quest for knowledge, talkative locals making oblique references. It's one of several stories that I felt would make a good short film.
Overall, this collection is a nice example of a kind of metafiction in which the author tells the reader about the inspiration for the story within the tale (more or less). I enjoyed it, not least because of the author's enthusiasm for the mysterious and bizarre, and his elegant but unshowy prose.
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