BOOK DETAILS
Trade paper ISBN-13: 978-1960241528 List Price: $17.99 U.S. Pages: 164 Published: 2019 |
The Islands of Sorrow
and Other Macabre Tales (1994/1997) Simon Raven Book Description
Simon Raven is best known for his colorful personal life (he once infamously sent a telegram to his starving wife suggesting that she eat their baby) and his ten-volume saga Alms for Oblivion, but he was also a master of the macabre and supernatural, most notably in his classic vampire novel Doctors Wear Scarlet (1960). This new edition of his complete short supernatural fiction comprises the two limited edition volumes originally published as The Islands of Sorrow (1994) and Remember Your Grammar and Other Haunted Stories (1997). The Islands of Sorrow is set in occupied Italy in the summer of 1945, where a British army officer, Adam Ogilvie, begins to grow curious about a series of strange happenings. His investigations lead him to the island of Marciume (whose name means "decay"), where nurses dressed in bizarre garb tend to a community of masked patients, sufferers from a mysterious disease similar to leprosy. Ignoring the warnings of his Italian colleagues, Ogilvie continues his queries, which finally lead him to an ancient catacombs where ten corpses hanging from the walls will lead to a horrible revelation. This volume also features eleven shorter tales, including eerie and elegant classics of the macabre like "Remember Your Grammar," "The Bottle of 1912," and "The Sarcophagus."
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Simon Raven was born in London in 1927 and educated at Charterhouse, from which he was expelled in 1945 for homosexual conduct (though it was not his first sexual encounter: he boasted of having been seduced at age nine by the games master, an experience he said gave “immediate and unalloyed pleasure”). He then performed his national service in the Army until 1948, at which point he enrolled at King’s College, Cambridge, to study Classics. In 1951 he married Susan Kilner after having gotten her pregnant. After the marriage he avoided her and infamously responded to her desperate telegram “Wife and baby starving send money soonest” with the message “Sorry no money, suggest eat baby”. The couple divorced in 1957. After leaving King’s College, Raven secured an army commission, serving in Germany and Kenya before being forced to resign (in lieu of court-martial) over his mounting gambling debts. He then managed to eke out a living in journalism until he met the young publisher Anthony Blond, who believed in Raven’s writing talent and offered to subsidize him while he wrote his first novel, The Feathers of Death (1959), on condition that he leave London and its temptations. His relationship with Blond was a fruitful one: the publisher would go onto publish Raven’s work over the next three decades, including the spy thriller Brother Cain (1959), the classic vampire tale Doctors Wear Scarlet (1960), and the ten-volume Alms for Oblivion sequence (1964-1976), satirical novels focusing on the English upper class after the Second World War. A second sequence of seven novels, The First-Born of Egypt (1984-1992), which involved some of the same characters as the Alms series, was substantially less successful. In later works Raven returned to the interest in horror and the supernatural he had evinced in Doctors Wear Scarlet, with the Gothic novels The Roses of Picardie (1980) and September Castle (1984), the haunting novella The Islands of Sorrow (1994), and a collection of short fiction, Remember Your Grammar and Other Haunted Stories (1997). Raven was also known for his film and television writing, which included The Pallisers, a mini-series adaptation of the novels of Anthony Trollope, of whom Raven was an admirer, as well as dialogue for the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. After a series of strokes, he died in 2001 at age 73, having written his own epitaph: “He shared his bottle—and, when still young and appetising, his bed.”