"[S]tories like this are about more than just delivering a few literary fictional pleasures. They carry the ring or scent of truth. They feel like revelations, like forbidden transmissions, like windows or doorways to something that is real, but that we are otherwise not allowed to acknowledge or talk about. In short, they feel a lot like the supernaturally potent books-as-carriers that show up in many of the stories themselves."
—from Matt Cardin's introduction
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.
