​Exciting new books from the House of Pomegranates Press!
 
The Hill Of Dreams
 
Arthur Machen (3 March 1863 - 15 December 1947) was a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language." He is also well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.
 
From the The Friends of Arthur Machen website:
 
For many readers today this is Machen’s most important and moving work … Machen drew copiously on his own early years in Wales and London, and the book as a whole is an exploration through imagination of a potential fate which he personally avoided. One of the first explorations in fiction of the figure of the doomed artist, who is biographically so much a part of the decadent 1890s.
 
The Hill of Dreams was little noticed on its publication in 1907 save in a glowing review by Alfred Douglas. "Machen's prose has the rhythmic beat of some dreadful Oriental instrument, insistent, monotonous, haunting; and still the soft tone of one careful flute sounds on, and keeps the nerves alive to the slow and growing pain of the rhythmic beat... It is like some dreadful liturgy of self-inflicted pain, set to measured music…”
 
Machen was a member of the New Bohemians drinking society that used to meet at the Prince's Head in Buckinghamshire Street, London. Members included Alfred Douglas, Arthur Ransome, Hilaire Belloc, Richard Barham Middleton, Edgar Jepson, Edwin Pugh and Cecil Chesterton.
 
The Collected Blue-Beard, As chosen by Prof. M. Flowers, BMus, MA, PhD
 
Real-life monster, myth, or fable. Collected here are essays, histories and fairy tales of the monster named Blue-Beard, as chosen by folklore historian M. Flowers. Included here:
The Original Blue-Beard - The History of Gilles De Retz
Thomas Wilson
The Book of Were- wolves –The Maréchal de Retz
Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould
English Fairy Tales – Mr. Fox
Joseph Jacobs
Four And Twenty Fairy Tales – Blue-Beard
J R Planché
The Blue Fairy Book – Blue-Beard
Andrew Lang
 
The Book of Werewolves
Fantasy, myth, and religious scholars probably know of the eccentric Sabine Baring-Gould’s work. He was prolific in his day, (more than 1,240 publications and 15 children) specifically in writing hymns. The Book of Were-Wolves, written in 1865, is a fascinating read on many levels. First, it shows the transition of literary styles from the late 1800s to today. Second, it is a real attempt at unbiased scholarship by someone whose biases show up in everything else.
Histories of shapeshifting from a wide variety of cultures (Baring-Gould cites everything from North American to South American to Asia to Africa and back up to Europe for examples), and attempts to explain shapeshifting as any number of things; is it psychosis? Is it real? Is it magic? Is it biologic? Is it culture-based (this section alone is worth the read).
He spends some time reviewing cases of ghoulism - eating the dead - as were-activity, also worth the read.

The Victorians were obsessive people. Obsessive for knowledge as well as empire. In the late 1800’s their cities were overrun with all sorts of creatures, mostly human but some myths and legends. To mask their xenophobia, they saw vampires and werewolves running loose in the streets challenging their starch-shirted and oftentimes contradictory values. Dracula, that fanged foreigner was here for our children. Werewolves, also from foreign lands, roamed the forests plucking up school children and dairy maids.
 
These two books, guides in a way, came out of that obsession, that time.
 
Vampires and Vampirism
 
Dudley Wright was an English writer, historian, occultist, Mason, and scholar of Islam. At one point the editor of England’s most influential Masonic newspaper, The Freemason, Wright dedicated his career to the study of religious, theosophical, and esoteric traditions, and was the author of dozens of books and hundreds of articles on such wide-ranging topics as Buddhism, Judaism, poltergeists, and the life of Jesus.
Vampires and Vampirism (1914) is a work from another era, a time when belief and wonder led some to travel down pathways of knowledge in search of truth and terror, not knowing what they would find.

Written in response to an “awakened interest in supernormal phenomena” in the early twentieth century, Dudley Wright’s Vampires and Vampirism traces the history of vampirism around the world, from ancient Babylonia, Assyria, and Greece, to Great Britain, Germany, and Eastern Europe. At times despicable, and always controversial, Dudley Wright was a tireless searcher whose life included conversions to Islam and Catholicism, and a deep, spiritual involvement with organizations dedicated to matters both visible and invisible, true and beyond belief.
 
The Book of Werewolves
 
Sabine Baring-Gould
 
Fantasy, myth, and religious scholars probably know of the eccentric Sabine Baring-Gould’s work. He was prolific in his day, (more than 1,240 publications and 15 children) specifically in writing hymns. The Book of Were-Wolves, written in 1865, is a fascinating read on many levels. First, it shows the transition of literary styles from the late 1800s to today. Second, it is a real attempt at unbiased scholarship by someone whose biases show up in everything else.
Histories of shapeshifting from a wide variety of cultures (Baring-Gould cites everything from North American to South American to Asia to Africa and back up to Europe for examples), and attempts to explain shapeshifting as any number of things; is it psychosis? Is it real? Is it magic? Is it biologic? Is it culture-based (this section alone is worth the read).

He spends some time reviewing cases of ghoulism - eating the dead - as were-activity, also worth the read.

Adventures with GHOSTS! Two fascinating new books from The House of Pomegranates full of adventure, seances and ghosts! Link in Bio.

The Road to En-Dor
The incredible true story of two WWI POWs who used amateur magic to convince their captors that they were in touch with the spirit world. Captured during World War I, Lieutenant E. H. Jones, a Welsh officer in the Indian Army, and Lieutenant C. W. Hill, an Australian serving in the R.A.F., were prisoners of war at the Yozgad prison camp in Turkey. Duty-bound as officers to attempt to escape, Jones sensed that what had previously been the harmless fun of fooling around with a homemade Ouija board could be turned into something much more productive. 

The Road to En-dor was scripted for film in 2008 by Neil Gaiman and Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller). The film was never produced.

An Adventure
The Moberly–Jourdain incident (also the Ghosts of Petit Trianon or Versailles, French: les fantômes du Trianon / les fantômes de Versailles) is a claim of time travel and hauntings made by Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924).

In 1911, Moberly and Jourdain published a book entitled An Adventure under the names of “Elizabeth Morison” and “Frances Lamont”. Their book describes a visit they made to the Petit Trianon, a small château in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, where they claimed to have seen the gardens as they had been in the late eighteenth century, as well as ghosts, including Marie Antoinette and others. Their story caused a sensation and was subject to much ridicule.

Fantasy, myth, and religious scholars probably know of the eccentric Sabine Baring-Gould’s work. He was prolific in his day, (more than 1,240 publications and 15 children) specifically in writing hymns. The Book of Were-Wolves, written in 1865, is a fascinating read on many levels. First, it shows the transition of literary styles from the late 1800s to today. Second, it is a real attempt at unbiased scholarship by someone whose biases show up in everything else. (He is also remembered as the composer of the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers)

The Book of Were-Wolves is still one of the most frequently cited studies of lycanthropy. 

Another of Baring-Gould's enduringly popular works was Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, first published in two parts during 1866 and 1868, and republished in many other editions since then. “Each of the book’s twenty-four chapters deals with a particular medieval superstition and its variants and antecedents,” writes critic Steven J. Mariconda. H. P. Lovecraft termed it “that curious body of medieval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so effectively assembled in book form.”

We are thrilled to be able to publish Were-Wolves, and to loving reproduce the gorgeous cover of the first edition. 

“Sumptuous, mystifying and wholeheartedly haunting…”

Is Dracula truly dead? Is the life of a model the model life? Could the Prince of Darkness actually be our saviour? And what does it mean to be popular in Japan? The much anticipated second volume of short stories written in David Keyes’ unique voice, these short stories invite you into worlds both haunting and haunted.

On sale now!

The line forms on the right! At long last the second collection of short stories by David Keyes will be released next week. Stay tuned!

Two interesting bedfellows, so to speak.
 
In 1918, Aleister Crowley, the British occultist and so-called wickedest man in the world, composed a lyrical essay on absinthe and aesthetics titled Absinthe – The Green Goddess. He wrote his essay (according to legend, while waiting for a female companion) in the Old Absinthe House in New Orleans. “Art is the soul of life,” he proclaimed, “and the Old Absinthe House is the heart and soul of the old quarter of New Orleans”.
 
The essay was originally to have been included in the February 1918 issue of The International (New York). However, the magazine never published that issue, and an editorial notice the following month simply extended all subscriptions for an extra month, without explanation. After typesetting, and final correction of page-proofs by the author (from which the piece has been edited for subsequent published versions), the whole issue was withdrawn. Most likely compliance with the new war-time sedition laws proved daunting for editor George Sylvester Viereck, who had been openly propagandizing for sympathy with Germany since 1914. When US soldiers were at last sent in large numbers to Europe at the beginning of 1918, the Congress suspended many freedoms of expression, and Viereck passed on the actual editorial management of The International to Aleister Crowley for the last few months before a completely new editorial team assumed control in April of that year.
 
The House of the Vampire was Viereck’s first novel, originally published in 1907, this gothic novella was among the first stories of its type and remains a gripping tale of psychic vampirism.
 
"Weird thriller of a vampiric aesthete who drains creativity from his proteges; Wildean allusions in the characterization and cultural milieu, 1890s Decadence refracted through the New Aestheticism of 1907, of which Viereck was a prominent advocate. An unusual variant on the vampire myth, overwritten but quite effective, especially the uncompromising finale."

The perfect valentine's gift for any witch, historian or midnight eccentric who's wiling away of these lock down hours is in need of a life. First published in 1889 there is nary a mention of Hogwarts or that terrifying talking hat.
The journalist and author W. H. Davenport Adams (1828–91) established a reputation for himself as a popular science writer, translator and lexicographer. He also wrote several children's books. In this 1889 work, Adams gives a general introduction to alchemy in Europe and traces the development of magic and alchemy in England from the fourteenth century onwards. Initially the disciplines were persecuted by the Church and met with 'the prejudice of the vulgar', languishing throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Book 1 Adams portrays the English 'magicians' Roger Bacon, whom he considers to have been ahead of his contemporaries; John Dee and William Lilly, astrologists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively; and the English Rosicrucians. Book 2 is a historical account of witchcraft in England and Scotland, from the middle ages to the witch trials of the seventeenth century, and includes a chapter on witchcraft in literature.
Seen here with two of our most popular esoteric gems.