An Attempted Bibliography
of the Works of Barbara Livesey
by Stephen George Wallis
The Eden Book Society is a "literary hoax" perpetrated by publisher Dead Ink: a metafictional conceit that provides the backdrop to a series of horror novellas by contemporary writers.
For newcomers to the
project, this is the fictional frame story for the novella collection. The
"Eden Book Society", presided over by the Eden family, published
horror novellas for a private and exclusive list of subscribers from its
inception in 1919 until 2006. The history of the Eden Book Society is
intertwined with that of the Eden family itself, shrouded in mystery and occult
intrigue, with many dark rumours emanating from the Edens’ ancestral home of
Irkwell Manor. Eden Society books were elusive artefacts: written under
pseudonyms, available only to a select few, and occasionally turning up in
jumble sales or unexpected locations. Dead Ink, the publishing house behind
this literary experiment, purportedly acquired the Society's back catalogue and
will reprint the novellas sequentially. In actual fact, the books are penned by
a group of specially commissioned writers.
The project got off to an impressive start some years back with the publication of six novellas purportedly dating from 1972, written under pseudonyms (supported by fictional author biographies) by Andrew Michael Hurley, Alison Moore, Aliya Whiteley, Jenn Ashworth/Richard V. Hirst, Sam Mills and Gary Budden. The chosen wrters faced the challenging task of evoking the style of 1970s horror while transporting contemporary readers back to the atmosphere of that decade. The result was an excellent crop of works. Notably, it included Starve Acre, by one "Jonathan Buckley", which was later reworked and republished as Hurley's acclaimed novel.
Dead Ink has now revived the concept with a new "1993 Collection", again commissioning contemporary writers to publish anonymously under invented pseudonyms. The real authors behind the 1993 Collection are another roll call of critically acclaimed writers of horror, weird and speculative fiction: Chikodili Emelumadu, Grady Hendrix, Alison Rumfitt, Alex Pheby, Nina Allan, John Darnielle, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and Kylie Whitehead.
Having been one of the supporters of the project on Kickstarter, I received, some days ago, the ebook versions of all eight novellas in this series. I chose to start with An Attempted Bibliography of the Works of Barbara Livesey by Stephen George Wallis. It was a random choice, but turned out to be a serendipitous one. This novella takes the literary conceit of the Eden Book Society series to another level, being itself a metafictional work about an invented author linked to the Society. Its format follows a structure often employed by contemporary writers of speculative fiction, eschewing traditional narrative in favour of playful formal experimentation through reports, lists, inventories and similar documentary forms (just as an example, several of the stories in Ray Newman’s Municipal Gothic followed this format).
In this case, the novella takes the form of a "bibliography" prepared by a certain Stephen George Wallis of Cambridge, who worked for many years cataloguing books in the Cambridge library tower. Wallis seeks to provide as comprehensive a list as possible of the published and unpublished works of the elusive Norwich author Barbara Livesey, who, over several years in the 50s, corresponded with the Eden family, even though for unexplained reasons, none of her works were ever published by the Society.
The "bibliography" includes summaries of the Livesy works traced by Wallis, extracts from them, as well as Wallis’s sometimes inconsequential observations.
This starts off as a quirky, almost humorous reading experience. However, as certain recurring themes linking Livesey's writings begin to emerge, we start to realise that Livesey's supposedly fictional works, together with her pamphlets documenting local Norwich news, might have been signalling the existence of an obscure and dangerous cult. By the end of it, the novella, which I finished reading late at night, became genuinely unsettling.
What a great start to
the 1993 series. Look out for reviews of the other books on this blog in the
coming weeks!
No comments:
Post a Comment