I was very honoured indeed to be asked by William Breeze to add a few words to this excellent and beautiful and very comprehensive collection of the vast majority of Crowley’s short fiction. It is also remarkably cheap! I strongly recommend his fiction which, if sometimes uneven, at its best can be absolutely stunning.
The Drug and Other Stories
ISBN: 978-1-84022-638-6
Author: Aleister Crowley
Total pages: tbc
Price: £2.99
With an introduction by William Breeze and a foreword by David Tibet.
This volume brings together the uncollected short fiction of the poet, writer and religious philosopher Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). Crowley was a successful critic, editor and author of fiction from 1908 to 1922, and his short stories are long overdue for discovery. Of the 49 stories in the present volume, only 30 were published in his lifetime. Most of the rest appear here for the first time.
Like their author, Crowley’s stories are fun, smart, witty, thought-provoking and sometimes unsettling. They are set in places he had lived and knew well: Belle Epoque Paris, Edwardian London, pre-revolutionary Russia and America during the first World War. The title story The Drug stands as one of the first—if not the first—accounts of a psychedelic experience. His Black and Silver is a knowing early noir discovery that anticipates an entire genre. Atlantis is a masterpiece of occult fantasy, a dark satire that can stand with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. Frank Harris considered The Testament of Magdalen Blair the most terrifying tale ever written.
Extensive editorial end-notes give full details about the stories. Go to www.wordsworth-editions.com and enter CROWLEY in the search facility.
