Return Of the Ancients
Return Of the Ancients
edited by Katy Soar
British Library Publishing (2025)
One of the many reasons to read this collection of tales chosen from the shelves of the British Library by Katy Soar is what it offers in the way of an appreciation of varieties in style and voice within a relatively narrow sub-genre: the spooky tale of ancient gods and spirits. Many of the writers here exploit the tense dynamic of ancient beings in modern contexts; Old Ones exposing the superficiality of the hypermodern or stomping about anachronistically. More impressive however, is how each writer variously sets about fabricating worlds sufficiently stable to be recognisable while porous enough to let the strange things in.
In ‘The Veil of Tanit’ (a gem of a story), Eugene de Rezske adds one more yarn to the ‘Arabian Nights’. His twisty storytelling is a convoluted set up for set-piece moments of remarkable power. Along the way the story seems to duck into a satire on colonial entitlement about an reticent and undistinguished “professor of ancient history” who has hordes falling at his feet when he undoes an ancient box – keen to experience something, whatever it may be – and takes for his own the “veil” of a goddess. Given a belief that anyone who touches the “veil” will die, once the professor has it no one is rushing to take it from him. But he is plagued by the idea that one day he will forget to wear it and that Tanit will return to take it (and much else) from him. The professor, ever ready for a risk, decides to test the threat and the last two pages of the tale are chilling.
Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) in ‘Dionea’ constructs a far more sophisticated web, interweaving the disparate worlds of an impoverished Italian village and ecclesiastical power politics to bring into everyday lives and romances the mother of Aphrodite. The gathering power of the goddess and the increasingly inextricable tangle of divinity and humanity ends with a scene of such triumphant excess – as told by a sailor boy – that it repays staying with the slow burn of Lee’s epistolary narrative.
Place is crucial to these tales. Often because an ancient force or personality is displaced or is returning after suppression. In ‘The Wind In The Portico’ the author (perhaps surprisingly it is John Buchan) draws us into a renovated manorial hall with a heating issue. But it’s not the boilers that are causing the trouble; it is “a British god of the hills” with solar connections. The denouement is stated so blankly by Buchan that it draws all the exotic build up together, with winds sweeping about the rebuilt temple, into a stark horror.
Even more restrained, yet far more magical, are the Lovecraftian trips we go on to sleeping underwater cities with “crystal towers, carved from the crests of waves” in Edmond Hamilton’s ‘Serpent Princess’ with its exploration of obsession and infatuation (does jouissance get any better than “a cry of horror that mingled weirdly with a joyous silver shout”), and in ‘Above Ker-Is’.
In the latter tale by Evangeline Walton (it is wonderful that this collection by Katy Soar recovers so many lesser known – at least to me – authors) there is a wonderful shiftiness of matters, with Alise-Guenn who hates ugliness more than “what you call sin”, becoming in the arms of the narrator like the divine “Ahes rising from the waters; from those waves that are said to form a bed for her and the man who dies beneath her kiss”. This continues a theme that runs through many of these tales, equating women to a deadly otherness. At once granting women power and at the same time demonising them; authors projecting their male characters’ confusions, guilts and violences onto the objects of their desire. So, in ‘Serpent Princess’ (the title says a lot) the character Roos races into the waves after the goddess Tiamat, and then “white arms like supple serpents coil around Roos’ neck… the Dutchman’s wild shout of joy as he sank beneath the billows”.
There are moments of heart-stopping economy in these stories: “the sleepers no longer slept”, “a naked body, already charred”, “in his hands were two impossible things”, “there were no cows in the field that night”, and “the collection of extraordinarily knobbly bones that someone had recently put in the dustbin”. But what these stories all best demonstrate is a threefold virtue: they allow for a phenomenological connection with weird materiality that exceeds most visionary mysticisms; they mess with perception as when in Carl Jacobi’s ‘The Face In the Wind’ something comes through after a mirror is set beside a painting; and they celebrate the slipperiness of identity: “the man I might have been died long ago; these many years I have been his ghost. But who killed him…. that is what I must find out tonight”.
Katy Soar has assembled a fabulous collection here, for while each tale contains something in itself, the real pleasure is reading the connections across the stories, assembling from their strangeness a pantheon of weird beings, and savouring the melting of stable identities.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews
edited by Katy Soar
British Library Publishing (2025)
One of the many reasons to read this collection of tales chosen from the shelves of the British Library by Katy Soar is what it offers in the way of an appreciation of varieties in style and voice within a relatively narrow sub-genre: the spooky tale of ancient gods and spirits. Many of the writers here exploit the tense dynamic of ancient beings in modern contexts; Old Ones exposing the superficiality of the hypermodern or stomping about anachronistically. More impressive however, is how each writer variously sets about fabricating worlds sufficiently stable to be recognisable while porous enough to let the strange things in.
In ‘The Veil of Tanit’ (a gem of a story), Eugene de Rezske adds one more yarn to the ‘Arabian Nights’. His twisty storytelling is a convoluted set up for set-piece moments of remarkable power. Along the way the story seems to duck into a satire on colonial entitlement about an reticent and undistinguished “professor of ancient history” who has hordes falling at his feet when he undoes an ancient box – keen to experience something, whatever it may be – and takes for his own the “veil” of a goddess. Given a belief that anyone who touches the “veil” will die, once the professor has it no one is rushing to take it from him. But he is plagued by the idea that one day he will forget to wear it and that Tanit will return to take it (and much else) from him. The professor, ever ready for a risk, decides to test the threat and the last two pages of the tale are chilling.
Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) in ‘Dionea’ constructs a far more sophisticated web, interweaving the disparate worlds of an impoverished Italian village and ecclesiastical power politics to bring into everyday lives and romances the mother of Aphrodite. The gathering power of the goddess and the increasingly inextricable tangle of divinity and humanity ends with a scene of such triumphant excess – as told by a sailor boy – that it repays staying with the slow burn of Lee’s epistolary narrative.
Place is crucial to these tales. Often because an ancient force or personality is displaced or is returning after suppression. In ‘The Wind In The Portico’ the author (perhaps surprisingly it is John Buchan) draws us into a renovated manorial hall with a heating issue. But it’s not the boilers that are causing the trouble; it is “a British god of the hills” with solar connections. The denouement is stated so blankly by Buchan that it draws all the exotic build up together, with winds sweeping about the rebuilt temple, into a stark horror.
Even more restrained, yet far more magical, are the Lovecraftian trips we go on to sleeping underwater cities with “crystal towers, carved from the crests of waves” in Edmond Hamilton’s ‘Serpent Princess’ with its exploration of obsession and infatuation (does jouissance get any better than “a cry of horror that mingled weirdly with a joyous silver shout”), and in ‘Above Ker-Is’.
In the latter tale by Evangeline Walton (it is wonderful that this collection by Katy Soar recovers so many lesser known – at least to me – authors) there is a wonderful shiftiness of matters, with Alise-Guenn who hates ugliness more than “what you call sin”, becoming in the arms of the narrator like the divine “Ahes rising from the waters; from those waves that are said to form a bed for her and the man who dies beneath her kiss”. This continues a theme that runs through many of these tales, equating women to a deadly otherness. At once granting women power and at the same time demonising them; authors projecting their male characters’ confusions, guilts and violences onto the objects of their desire. So, in ‘Serpent Princess’ (the title says a lot) the character Roos races into the waves after the goddess Tiamat, and then “white arms like supple serpents coil around Roos’ neck… the Dutchman’s wild shout of joy as he sank beneath the billows”.
There are moments of heart-stopping economy in these stories: “the sleepers no longer slept”, “a naked body, already charred”, “in his hands were two impossible things”, “there were no cows in the field that night”, and “the collection of extraordinarily knobbly bones that someone had recently put in the dustbin”. But what these stories all best demonstrate is a threefold virtue: they allow for a phenomenological connection with weird materiality that exceeds most visionary mysticisms; they mess with perception as when in Carl Jacobi’s ‘The Face In the Wind’ something comes through after a mirror is set beside a painting; and they celebrate the slipperiness of identity: “the man I might have been died long ago; these many years I have been his ghost. But who killed him…. that is what I must find out tonight”.
Katy Soar has assembled a fabulous collection here, for while each tale contains something in itself, the real pleasure is reading the connections across the stories, assembling from their strangeness a pantheon of weird beings, and savouring the melting of stable identities.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews