"The Sacrifice" and Other Stories

Sarban's three books from the 1950s, "Ringstones and Other Curious Tales", "The Sound of His Horn and The Doll Maker" and "Other Tales of the Uncanny", are highly prized by admirers and collectors of his beautifully-crafted, impossibly hard to find strange stories. The posthumous publication of this fourth book of newly-discovered tales, "The Sacrifice and Other Stories", will therefore be of great interest to devotees of classic twentieth-century horror fiction. Four novella-length stories are included, two of which appear here for the first time. These are "The Sacrifice", in which a young artist encounters an Eastern-inspired tragedy in an idyllic English country garden, and "The Sea-Things", a marine mystery-story with a Red Sea setting. The conte cruel "Number Fourteen", in which the followers of an obscure South American religious cult gain curious influence over a beautiful dancer in post-war London, first appeared in the Tartarus Press edition of Ringstones and Other Curious Tales (2000). "The King of the Lake", where two young English-women are rescued from a Saharan sandstorm by mysterious horsemen and taken to a secret underground Lake, was first published with "The Sound of His Horn" by Tartarus in 1999. All four stories, almost certainly written in the 1950s, display Sarban's usual 'strange combination of daydream and nightmare', first noted by Kingsley Amis, and continue the skilfull exploration of his characteristically opposed themes of wonder and fear, power and enslavement, paradise and purgatory.