Three Macabre Stories

Hardcover. 8vo. xxxii + 64pp. Black cloth with gilt titling to spine. Frontispiece & black and white illustrations. Edition limited to 666 numbered copies. Rosaleen Norton is now largely remembered as "the Witch of Kings Cross:" the Australian artist and occultist who gained notoriety during the 1950s and 1960s on account of her occult beliefs, unconventional lifestyle, and bizarre and often sensual artwork. A little-known sidelight to Norton's career was the publication by the popular magazine, Smith's Weekly, of three horror stories that she wrote while still in her teens. The magazine's editor, Frank Marien, was so impressed with these tales that he not only published them, but also offered Norton a cadetship. The short stories first appeared in Smith's Weekly in 1934, and were later collected and published under the title "Three Macabre Stories" in an extremely limited letterpress edition in 1996. This new edition of "Three Macabre Stories" contains those original three short stories, along with two previously unknown stories by Norton's husband Beresford Conroy: works to which she almost certainly contributed. It also includes reproductions of a group of grotesque drawings executed by Norton not long after her involvement with Smith's Weekly, the first-ever reprinting of three comic illustrations she drew for that magazine, and a revised Introduction and new Foreword by Keith Richmond.