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Post by dem bones on Jun 18, 2021 16:00:01 GMT
Will start with this splendid issue. Jennie Gray [ed] - Udolpho #21 (Gargoyle's Head Press, Summer, 1995) Jan Muller: Detail from Minerva and Mercury arming Perseus Jonathan Walker - Edvard Munch Ian Simmons - Vampires Among Us Arthur Machen - Tom O'Bedlam Marie Mulvey Roberts - Rosina Bulwer Lytton Terry Hale - Writing as Revenge E. L. Bulwer Esq - A Manuscript found in a Madhouse Dr. John Fleetwood - From Good Art to Bad Medicine Rudolph Kenna - The Warlock of the West Bow Editor's Letter A Tribute to Devendra Varma David Montague - Gothic Moods & Abbeys Dr. Linda Montague - People & Places: The Catacombs of Paris & Rome Reviews: Stefan Ball - The Gothic World of Robert Tressal Emma Hooper - New Books & Reprints: Montague Summers' The Vampyre
. E. L. Bulwer Esq - A Manuscript Found in a Madhouse: ( Literary Souvener, 1829). "At my birth the nurse refused me suck; my mother saw me and became delirious; my father ordered that I should be stifled as a monster; The physicians saved my life — accursed be they for that act! .... I exist upon poisons, and my nourishment is scorn." Raised by a compassionate old spinster, the cruelly deformed narrator eventually takes to the woods to live out his days a hermit. Comes the afternoon when, skulking behind a vicarage, he hears two young women in conversation, one of whom rashly claims that she cares nothing for a man's looks, he can be the ugliest specimen in all creation as far as she is concerned. "I ask for genius and affection. I ask for nothing else." His hopes raised, the lovestruck gargoyle writes her an impassioned letter. She replies in kind. A postal romance leads to clandestine meetings in pitch darkness where she need never catch sight of his nightmare face, even though, she constantly reassures him that, a man of such poetic soul could never be loathsome in her eyes. The entreaties of her heart-broken father go unheard. Wedding bells. At last the lovers stand face to whatever. He softly brushes aside her veil .... Story reads like a precursor of Robert Leslie Bellam's I am a Monster, and was written during author's tempestuous marriage to Rosina Bulwer Lytton, who retaliated in kind, pursuing a literary career to attack her erstwhile husband over a series of novels, most notably A Blighted Life: A True Story, written in 1866, but not published in book form until 1880, by which time Edward was seven years in his grave. Dr. Marie Mulvey Roberts concludes her introduction to the modern reprint; "The importance of A Blighted Life is that it did draw attention to the wrongs suffered by married women and the abuse of asylums as a means of containing troublesome wives." Ian Simmons - Vampires Among Us: 'Real' vampires, or folk who claim to be, undead, blotchy-looking and unliving in LA, Dallas, Luton, various territories of the former Soviet Union, etc. Also the bizarre and terrible case of Tracy Wiggington and the killer Lesbian Vampire cult of Kangaroo Point. Quotes Dr. Stephen Kaplan as a credible source which, from memory, tended to set rival 'experts' and touchy real 'real' vampires frothing at the fangs. Dr. John Fleetwood - From Good Art to Bad Medicine: Story of John St. John Long, artist turned overnight Harley Street "qualified physician", whose lethal 'magic' liniment contributed greatly toward the agonising deaths of at least four too-trusting patients. Gerald Gaubert
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