Inscrit le: 14 Fév 2007
Messages: 1252
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I'm particularly excited about our two November releases, because I think they're both major works in the pulp/mystery/horror genre, woefully left untranslated until now.
By far the better know, at least in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, is HARRY DICKSON, who started life as an unlicensed Sherlock Holmes pastiche in Germany, then mutated into an odd mix of Holmes and Nick Carter with a horror slant before WWI, and then mutated again after WWI through Holland and Belgium, becoming at last HARRY DICKSON. The character would likely have remained relatively forgotten if it hadn't been for ghostwriter Jean Ray (the author of MALPERTUIS) who threw away most of the lame German stories (but kept the lovely covers!) and wrote fast-paced horror thrillers who have since remained in print. We have selected three of the best and most representative Dickson tales from the mid-1930s, THE HEIR OF DRACULA, a Germanic Vampire tale, THE RETURN OF THE GORGON, a new take of an old myth, and THE IRON TEMPLE, a mind-blowing sci-fi/horror tale, plus a shorter yarn that's a drossover between Dickson and Ray's armchair detective, Mortimer Triggs. The book also includes a Harry Dickson timeline and an article about the origins and the literary phenomenon, its spin-offs, etc.
SAR DUBNOTAL, on the other hand, suffered the fate that might have happened to HARRY DICKSON, had Jean Ray not taken over the writing. Like THE NYCTALOPE, it is another ground-breaking French hero, somewhat unjustly consifned to literary oblivion because, let's face it, the execution wasn't nearly as good as the concept, and its potential was left, for the most part, unexploited. In the case of SAR DUBNOTAL, with apologies to Bulwer-Lytton, what we have here is, if not the very first, but one of the first mystic heroes of popular literature, the "ancestor" of Mandrake, Zatara, Dr. Strange, etc. Yes, the stories are a bit hokey, relying on coincidences and dei ex machina, but as revealed in some of our TALES OF THE SHADOWMEN stories, the potential was there. It just is a shame it wasn't better exploited then, and perhaps was even too fanciful and outlandish to grab enough of a public in 1909. We'll never know. We have selected a self-contained saga within the series in which the mystic Sar fights an evil sorcerer, hypnotist and criminal mastermind who on top of everything is also Jack the Ripper. Brian Stableford has penned a scholarly introduction about mystic heroes and pseudo-mysticism of the late 19th century.
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