Morbid Tales

In these eight immaculately realised strange stories, Quentin S. Crisp delves deep into the decadence of contemporary life. The fresh originality of the tales and their settings: an English country garden in ‘Cousin X’; contemporary Japan in ‘A Lake’: is matched by the elegance of the writing. They are unified, perhaps, by a yearning for the achingly perfect, ecstatic moment. As Mark Samuels points out in his Foreword, Crisp’s fiction is ‘. . . too multi-layered, too individual, to be labelled. One can spot influences here and there, a dash of this and a sprinkling of that, but the end result is much greater than the sum of its parts.’Crisp will surprise and delight you with his marvellous writing skill and the ability to convey a profound sense of universal horror, cosmic menace and spiritual desolation. - Mario Guslandi, The Alien Online Attempting to find a frozen moment, description, or phenomena with which to express a breath of cosmic fear and awe, Crisp achieves with this collection a remarkable scrapbook of terror. - William Simmons, Cemetery Dance The power of the best stories here is in the way in which Crisp has been able to use his influences to reflect deep within himself and draw out something that is strikingly new. - Douglas Campbell, All Hallows