Ex Occidente Press

	The Master in Café Morphine: A Homage to Mikhail Bulgakov "The séance is over! Maestro! Hack out a march!" Because where there is Art, there is no Devil. This is a homage to Mikhail Bulgakov, last Prince and Master of the White Twilight lineage. Dissident extraordinaire, wayward Dandy, fabulous anti-hero of the Great Soviets, Doctor, Mystic and tamer of the Deamons from the Highest Courts of Hell, genial novelist and loyal soldier of the White Army, Morphia addict, Reactionary and Visionary, Mikhail Bulgakov remains to this day a singular man and a remarkable figure in the entire history of Promethean Literature. More than a marvelous writer, as the cynics and the cloaca of the literary critics want us to believe, Mikhail Bulgakov was one of the few Eschatological forerunners of the much ill-fated XXth century. Sathanas Triumpathur! The Master in Café Morphine: A Homage to Mikhail Bulgakov is an over-sized sewn hardcover book of 500 pages with endpapers, a full-colour frontispiece and a dust-jacket. Deluxe cloth boards with folio. Edition limited to 250 copies. $60 inc. p&p to Europe and USA, $70 to the rest of the world. More...
	Cinnabar's Gnosis: A Homage to Gustav Meyrink - October 2009 Only a few copies remaining. "It is called the Cinnabar Book because that red is the colour of the garments of those who have reached the highest stage of perfection and stayed behind on earth for the salvation of mankind. Just as we cannot comprehend the meaning of a book if we just hold it in our hand or turn the pages without reading, so we will not profit from the course of our destiny if we do not grasp its meaning. Events follow each other like the pages of a book that are turned by Death; all we know is that they appear and disappear, and that with the last one the book ends. We do not even know that it keeps being opened, again and again, until we finally learn to read. And as long as we cannot read, life is for us a worthless game in which joy and sorrow mingle." - Gustav Meyrink Cinnabar's Gnosis is the first Ex Occidente Press anthology in a series of homages dedicated to European lost masters and exquisite fantasts. Some of the upcoming anthologies will be dedicated to Dino Buzzati, M.P. Shiel, Bruno Schulz, Ernst Jünger, Baron Corvo, Leo Perutz, Emil Cioran. All the stories and novelettes in Cinnabar's Gnosis are exclusive works, written especially for this anthology. More...
	The Light of the World and Other Tales - June 2009 Peter Bell A deserted Hebridean beach in winter. A baronial estate in Norway. A seedy fairground on the Isle of Man. An old church in the Italian Apennines. A small town in Germany. The mystical island of Iona. Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland. A Cumberland village in the merry month of May. A sinister Cambridgeshire manor. The Carpathian Mountains in Romania. These are some of the settings for Peter Bell's collection of strange tales, which draw strongly on the genius loci of scenes he knows and curious things witnessed and imagined in them. Within these pages you will meet a variety of familiar horrors: vampire, werewolf, phantom, demon, devil-doll, scarecrow, monster; woven into new, convincing tapestries of terror. More...
	The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Stories - June 2009 Mark Samuels Mark Samuels is one of the few modern masters of the weird tale. He has enjoyed effusive praise from the likes of Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell and T.E.D. Klein. In his latest collection of tales he demonstrates the sense of mystical awe mingled with horror coupled with an elegant prose style that has made his name a byword for fantastic fiction of the highest quality. Where nightmares become reality, where shadows are bright, where the future is already decayed and dying, here, within the pages of this volume, you will find a consummation devoutly to be wished. More...
	All God's Angels, Beware! - October 2009 Quentin S. Crisp The house of literary Romanticism has fallen into sad disrepair. Through its dusty passages are to be heard only the muffled, shivering voices of its ghosts, like the last lingering echoes of some forgotten passion in a lunatic asylum. It has been said that, in the grounds of this ruin, was a hothouse where Romanticism showed its last, grotesque bloom in the form of H. P. Lovecraft, since when the grey desolation of realism has swept over all in a fungoid blight. And yet, there remains a kind of life here, perhaps stranger still than previous blooms, in a weedy and overgrown flowerbed, under the name of Quentin S. Crisp. All God’s Angels, Beware!, the fourth collection of fiction from the contemporary British master of dementia, gathers together for the first time eleven examples of Crisp’s own unique species of decayed Romanticism. Crisp draws equally from East and West to create a vision of the macabre like nothing else in literature. Discover here fleurs du mal of hybrid decadence, whimsy, exoticism, gothickry, horror and beauty. More...
	The Nightfarers - July 2009 Mark Valentine Only a few copies remaining. To find the “light of lights”, you must first know the darkness of night, said the 17th century German mystic Angelus Silesius. It is a truth found by all the characters in Mark Valentine’s new full collection of stories since Masques & Citadels. Carden, the quester after lost languages, finds there are some things that cannot be named. The narrator in "The Seer of Trieste" finds the old city harbours an image that has pervaded the most advanced literature of our time, while the strange and tragic secrets of another liminal city are explored in "The Seven Treasures of Bucharest". The voyages of "The White Sea Company" seem to sail beyond any mortal shore, while the smouldering sunrise in "The Dawn at Tzern" brings different illuminations to a priest, a postmaster, a prophet and a soldier. The author of The Connoisseur stories and editor of Wormwood offers a book of wonder, where neither light nor shadow are ever all they seem. Two years in the making, The Nightfarers is not only the most eclectic and exquisite Mark Valentine collection to date but also his finest. We here at Ex Occidente Press trust this is one of the very few contemporary masterpieces of the weird and the fantastic. More...
	The Terrible Changes - June 2009 Joel Lane Joel Lane's short stories combine the supernatural with themes of human loss, passion, solitude and despair. The complexity of the urban landscape provides a background to stories in which nothing can be relied upon. Ghosts and visions are an inevitable part of a reality where facts are uncertain, loyalties are divided, and the unknown is always close at hand. In Lane's fiction, the weird is a symbolic language that expresses the chilling beauty, sadness and mystery of real life. From "The Brand" (written in 1983) to "Alouette" (written in 2008), these stories are selected from a quarter-century of writing. Twelve previously uncollected stories are reprinted from magazines and anthologies, bridging various strands of the weird fiction genre: urban horror tales, elegiac ghost stories, erotic reveries and psychological fugues. Two brief new tales offer different perspectives on the theme of mortality. More...
	Bloody Baudelaire - June 2009 R.B. Russell When young Lucian Miller visits the house of a friend it is everything he had long fantasized about; decay and grandeur, lofty rooms, dark red shadows and dust. The evening, however, is a disaster, and Lucian finds himself apparently alone with the sophisticated but troubled Miranda Honeyman. They shut all of the doors in an attempt to keep their problems out, but it soon becomes apparent that someone else may have access to the house. On the threshold of adulthood, in a heightening atmosphere of sexual uncertainty and violence, Lucian tries to make sense of what is happening around him. Bloody Baudelaire handles its themes deftly, with a rare insight into human character in extremis. An absolutely stunning new novella from an upcoming master of the fantastic! More...
	The Horrifying Presence and Other Tales - March 2009 Jean Ray Only a few copies remaining. Jean Ray was a prolific Belgian author whose pen left us a varied oeuvre, ranging from journalism to adventure stories for youngsters and including a large number of gems of the fantastic, not least the well-known novel Malpertuis, which was adapted to the cinema in 1971 by Harry Kümel. Despite De Kremer's well deserved prestige among French and Belgian audiences – although part of his texts were originally written in Flemish, the "Jean Ray" fantastic and supernatural were in French and have appeared largely during the Second World War: Le Grand Nocturne (1942), La Cité de l'Indicible Peur, Malpertuis, Les Cercles de L'Epouvante (all 1943), Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury (1944) and Le Livre des Fantômes (1947) – the work of Jean Ray is still far from well known by Anglo-Saxon audiences. A couple of published anthologies rapidly went out of stock, preventing new generations of readers from getting acquainted with it. More...
	Madder Mysteries - February 2009 Reggie Oliver Sold Out. This is Reggie Oliver’s fourth work in the field of “strange stories”. In his first three The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini (Haunted River 2003), The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (Haunted River 2005) and Masques of Satan (Ash Tree Press 2007) he explored the uncanny interactions between the physical and metaphysical worlds with a blend of deep seriousness, sharp wit and sardonic humour unique to this writer’s work. As a result they have been among the most acclaimed collections of supernatural stories of the 21st century, garnering numerous awards and nominations. In Madder Mysteries, Oliver travels even deeper into his own bizarre territory, hence the title. The book is illustrated throughout with Oliver’s fine, but very bizarre illustrations, making it a connoisseur's collector’s item as well as a splendidly provoking read. Truly a thing of strangeness and a joy forever. More...
	Putting the Pieces in Place - January 2009 R.B. Russell Sold Out. The five stories that make up R.B. Russell’s debut collection, Putting the Pieces in Place, demonstrate a subtle mastery of the macabre. Enigmatic and enticing, they combine a pleasing respect for the great tradition of supernatural fiction with a chilling contemporary European resonance. In the title story, an obsessive collector goes to great lengths to recreate a moment in time. An author who many years ago sent one of his characters out into the world, finds that she returns to him in "Eleanor". In "There is Nothing That I Wouldn’t Do", a young woman finds that a boyfriend’s feelings for her are more heartfelt than hers for him. In "Waiting", the woman at the centre of a scandal from the past is not the only one hoping for an explanation of what happened, while a young woman in distress attracts the attentions of a sinister landlord in "Dispossessed". With original and compelling narratives, Putting the Pieces in Place offers the reader insights into the more hidden, often puzzling, impulses of human nature, with all its uncertainty and intrigue. There are few conventional shocks or horrors on display, but you are likely to come away with the feeling that there has been a subtle and unsettling shift in your understanding of the way things are. This book is a disquieting journey through twilight regions of love, loss, memory and ghosts. More...
	The Rite of Trebizond and Other Tales - October 2008 Mark Valentine & John Howard Sold Out. Almost five years have passed since we last heard anything from that monarch of dim visions and recondite Mysteries, The Connoisseur. There were whispers of a long planed retreat in the sun stricken Mithraic caves of Cappadocia. Or was it to a mysterious and unnamed Coptic monastery in Alexandria? Others sustained The Connoisseur was captured by a group of Armenian ether drinkers, somewhere in an unknown village in Prussia. Something about a terrible “black ikon” was mentioned. A year ago, the author himself claimed that The Connoisseur was dying. Confronted with such contradictory, ambiguous and indeed - uneasy information, we decided to find out the truth on our own. We are pleased to say we have good news. The Connoisseur is alive and sends his august regards. For proof, we have three new long tales to infirm all rumors. Mark Valentine & John Howard offer here three new excellent episodes from the casebook of the aesthetical occult detective, The Connoisseur, whose adventures have been described as “curious and wonderful” and “shot through with authentically fin-de-siècle gleams of decadence”. Four further stories complete the collection. More...