New Releases December 2018

edited by Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier - cover by Stephan Martiniere. READ AN EXCERPT - 300 p. - US$ 23.95

Doctor Omega faces his deadliest arch-enemy in a strange museum… Professor Challenger attempts a bold physics experiment… The Nyctalope and Judex unite to fights a fascist regime… Arsene Lupin faces the Devil Doctor… Irma Vep attempts a very risky robbery… Rotwang’s robots invade 14th century Spain… Spiridon the Giant Ant investigates a sinister plot… Edgar Poe is snartched from his time by the Philadelphia Experiment… In this fifteenth volume of Tales of the Shadowmen, the only anthology dedicated to international heroes and villains of pulp literature, writers from England, France, Switzerland and the United States unite to pay homage to those great champions and master criminals who enchanted our adolescence.. 

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edited and adapted by Brian Stableford - cover by Mike Hoffman. READ AN EXCERPT - 368 p. - US$ 25.95

This volume includes three tales by Catherine Bernard (1662-1712), one of the originators of contes de fées, that deliberately subvert not merely their narrative strategy, but also their entire mythology; two enigmatic allegories of French history as seen through the prism of faerie by Jean de Préchac (1647-1720); four stories by François Fénelon (1651-1715), and The Illustrious Fays, a collection of tales by Chevalier de Mailly (1657-1724), which shows how the contes de fées quickly became suited to very different narrative purposes. The variety embraced by these stories is a striking illustration of the versatility of a format that seemed, at first, to be rather narrow. If some of stories seem more stereotyped and less ambitious, the spectrum they display is not lacking in color and variety, and the more flamboyant of them make significant additions to the imagery assembled by the core writers of the original school.

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edited and adapted by Brian Stableford - cover by Mike Hoffman. READ AN EXCERPT - 288 p. - US$ 22.95

The remarkable stories included in this volume, published in the 1730s, show a marked evolution in the contes de fées, each being more substantial, and more imaginatively innovative than its predecessor. Although they clearly attempt to take up where Baronne d’Aulnoy and Comtesse de Murat had been forced to leave off, in terms of their imaginative extravagance, their use of metamorphoses and their quirky employment of allegory exhibit a further development in the direction of the calculatedly absurd and the surreal. These are not the only works of the period to extrapolate its licensed disorder to the chaotic brink of surrealism, but they do so more self-consciously than most. The stories gathered herein provide an intriguing kaleidoscopic pattern, and can justly be reckoned to be more than the sum of their parts.

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