(preorder—to be published in January/February)
Dust jacket and interior illustrations by Eli John.
Chiroptera Press proudly presents Reassuring Tales by T.E.D. Klein. Our deluxe edition includes new illustrations by artist Eli John, and includes expanded material as seen in the Pickman’s Press edition.
Synopsis:
Collecting a dozen stories, along with verse, an essay on Arthur Machen, story notes, and an interview gathered from sources ranging from hardcover anthologies to Lovecraftian fanzines to a children’s magazine, Reassuring Tales presents a striking overview of Klein’s career over six decades.
It opens with one of his most remarkable creations, inspired by the framed journal structure in Machen’s “The White People,” in which an English instructor offers trenchant commentary on the gothic tradition from Shakespeare to Faulkner while increasingly uncanny and threatening “Events at Poroth Farm” take shape around him. Later expanded into the British Fantasy Award-winning novel The Ceremonies, the original has lost none of its power to compel and chill in the 52 years since publication.
Accompanying it are a clutch of briefer stories in a variety of modes, leavened with the irony implicit in the collection’s title, manifested not only through wit, but also in the tension between the stable, comfortable reality we wish existed and the destabilizing forces lying at its fringes. Thus the seemingly innocuous campfire tales in “One Size Eats All,” the flattering enticements of the “Well-Connected,” the fear of exposure that makes a person “Camera Shy,” the strange pattern that leads a man to the “Ladder,” the shifts in reality that mean “Curtains for Nat Crumley,” the anxiety a new homeowner might feel as he senses “Growing Things,” the border between shadow and self in “Imagining Things,” and more are handled with a deft mordant magic worthy of Ambrose Bierce or L.P. Hartley, while “They Don’t Write ‘Em Like This Anymore” acts as a bittersweet epilogue.
Deluxe Edition Specs:
- Edition of 400x copies
- 6”x 9”
- 240 pages
- Smyth-sewn binding with head and tail bands and ribbon marker
- Tipped in signature page signed by the author
- Dust jacket and interior art by Eli John
- Cloth bound with dust jacket
- Offset printed on acid-free archival paper
Slipcased Edition Specs:
- Edition of 80x copies
- 6"x 9"
- 240 pages
- Smyth-sewn binding with head and tail bands and ribbon marker
- Tipped in signature page signed by the author
- Dust jacket and interior art by Eli John
- Cloth bound with dust jacket
- Offset printed on acid-free archival paper
- Marbled endpapers
- Varying cloth color than standard edition
- Custom slipcase
- authors_list:
- T. E. D. Klein
- artists_list:
- Eli John
- badge:
- preorder
