Fans of literate, subtle horror will clamor for more.-Publishers Weekly Starred Review

The quality of the stories selected is so uniformly high it's difficult to single out the best...-Rue Morgue

For the past two decades, British author Mark Samuels has written some of the most vibrant and challenging weird fiction of any contemporary writer. But his work-collected in such volumes as The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (2003), The Man Who Collected Machen (2010), and Written in Darkness (2014)-has by and large appeared in limited editions not widely distributed in the United States.

This volume features seventeen of Samuels's best weird stories. Several display his fascination with technology, advertising, and urban horror, as in Apartment 205 and the title story. Other tales speak of the writing of weird fiction itself as a potentially hazardous and supernatural enterprise, as in The White Hands and Vrolyck.

In several of his lengthier narratives-notably The Gentleman from Mexico and The Crimson Fog-Samuels draws upon H. P. Lovecraft's pseudomythology to venture into realms of cosmic horror. The Black Mould and My World Has No Memories are distinctively existential tales of undeniable potency.

Mark Samuels is one of the pioneering weird writers of today, and this selection makes plain why he has few rivals in the portrayal of the horrors that are unique to our troubled age.

Since the appearance of The White Hands and Other Weird Tales in 2003, Mark Samuels has forged a distinctive and uncompromising body of work in the realm of weird and horror fiction. Earning praise from such voices as T.E.D. Klein and Michael Dirda, Samuels has combined a Borgesian play of ideas with a sensibility steeped in the twin traditions of cinematic and literary horror. The ten extraordinary tales in Charnel Glamour form in this edition the first publication of the last writings left to the world by one of the most notable weird authors of our time.

Seven of the ten tales are set in the fictional Thool Valley, forming a myth-cycle around the village of Gallows Langley, the nucleus of a vortex of iniquitous cults and sinister distortions of the fabric of reality, with secret passages running in dark and labyrinthine ways between tales. Two other tales are the magisterial If Destiny Still Reigns, chilling as its Siberian setting, and the mist-wreathed, valedictory The End of Death, a case of missing persons and a dispatch on Last Things. This volume includes an additional story, a substantial revision of the early story Dedicated to the Weird, which may well be the last creative work from Samuels's pen before his untimely passing.

In the collection as a whole we find the familiar, dread-filled cosmology of the undead that has become a Samuels hallmark, here given some new twists and laced with a subtle, layered reflection upon the sources in our history of what might sustain us against the inhuman depredations to come. Lurid entertainment here sits side by side with an existentialism of the human species, and the philosophical peers from behind the gruesome. Charnel Glamour is the black swan-song of an author whose reputation will now only grow.

When, in 1940, Saul Prior receives a letter from Lady Caroline Degabaston to catalogue the library of Thool Abbey in Hertfordshire, he jumps at the chance. But he soon finds himself in a realm that seems cut off from the real world. In the cryptic fastnesses of the abbey, Prior is beset by bizarre dreams and seems incapable of leaving the place. Lady Caroline proves to be a baleful and mysterious presence, and Prior is mired in a landscape that mingles Gothic terror and surrealism.

The actual books that Prior is tasked with cataloguing are themselves a farrago of occultism, psychological aberration, and cosmic horror. And when other presences manifest themselves in and around the castle, Prior knows that he has stumbled into an adventure that is unlikely to end short of death or madness.

Mark Samuels has knitted together many of the themes that appear in his previous work into a grand synthesis of dread and awe. Impeccably written, with careful attention to historical detail and the portrayal of the strange characters he puts on stage, Witch-Cult Abbey is a triumph of supernatural terror.