Valerie and Other Stories

Colin Insole

With the nine stories of this collection, Colin Insole conducts a fantastic pavane that depicts human folly and the protracted immolation of dream and ambition.

In nineteenth-century Paris, Doctor Colbert, stifled by bourgeois expectations, longs for a life purified by art, but his inept adventure with the easel leads him only into degradation and tragedy; in a village in Southeastern Europe, children drum and dance in sinister rites to propitiate a malignant, all-seeing moon; a fey and curious orphan, Valerie, is fostered in a dour and repressed English vicarage, and soon reveals to the vicar’s daughter all the ghostly secrets sequestered in the back lanes and whispering shadows of the market town.

Through all these worlds of grotesquerie, enchantment and menace, Colin Insole portrays the irrepressible workings of inhuman reprisal, ever returning to dismantle, with subtle but vicious talons, the schemes of the uncomprehending human protagonists.

About the Author
Colin Insole lives in Lymington, on the edge of the New Forest in England. He has contributed to a number of anthologies, including tribute volumes to Bruno Schulz, William Blake and Emil Cioran. His novella ‘Bluebells I’ll Gather’ was recently published in ‘Darkly Haunting’ by Sarob Press. Colin’s first collection of stories, Elegies and Requiems, was published by Side Real Press (Newcastle upon Tyne) in 2013.

Also available in eBook on Amazon!

Paperback, 244 pages. Release date: July 3, 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-94381-367-4
Price: US$18.50

 
Hardcover, Limited edition to 60 copies, 246 pages.
Release date: July 3, 2018
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