‘Some many call it black poetry;
some off-beat science-fiction; some a plain marrow-chiller... Of course,
readers who go only for ‘naturalistic’ novels should stay away—but
devotees of Poe and Tennessee Williams should welcome the pseudonymous
English novelist Sarban... His book is a stunning tour de force, a
horror-thriller with depth’—The New York Times
Book Review
‘This strange combination of daydream and
nightmare’—Kingsley Amis.
‘I frankly confess myself scared.
Who “Sarban” is, I do not know; but I should not wish to take his
imagination to bed with me. [It] would be indescribable, if only the
author did not describe it with such conviction’—The Observer
‘Sarban is one of the old weird
authentics. No outline of mine can possibly convey the skill with which
old man Sarban maintains suspense and builds up imagined fears upon
unimagined horrors’—Daily Express
‘Sarban has an imagination as
grandiloquent, as exfoliatory as that of Beckford, the author of
Vathek... Here is no straightforward piece of make-believe. It is
terrifying, horrible, something that runs athwart the processes of human
nature and fills the reader with a dreadful wonder’—John O’ London’s
Weekly