In the Dwellings of the Wilderness ~ C. Bryson Taylor

I have a thing for Egypt. I think I've mentioned that before. I've had one ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, when I took part in a school play about the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb. I've also mentioned before that one of my favourite films is Hammer's The Mummy (1959). I also have a fondness for vampires (not the sparkly ones). So, you can imagine how over the moon and beside myself with joy I was when I first read Charlotte Bryson Taylor's In the Dwellings of the Wilderness... which contains a vampiric mummy! Did all of my Christmases come at once, or what!

Anyway, this wonderful book is the next Nezu Press offering, and it will be out on 8 June. The Independent (New York) described it as ‘A story with a new kind of thrill', and warned 'all who have nerves and nightmares against reading this book.' Current Literature was 'strongly reminded of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s work.' According to the San Francisco Chronicle, it is ‘Weird, almost grewsome, with an incongruity of modern practical life which serves to throw its other characteristics into all the stronger light.’

When Deane, Merritt, and Holloway uncover the entrance to a previously undisturbed tomb while digging in Egypt, they ignore the warning inscribed above its entrance to ‘wake not the soul that sleeps within’. They unblock the doorway marked ‘forbidden’ and uncover the mummy of an ancient Egyptian princess who was buried alive for her sins. And in opening the tomb, they release the devil that dwells within. 

First published in 1904, this new edition of In the Dwellings of the Wilderness includes a 20-page biographical essay by yours truly, “Charlotte Bryson Taylor: ‘Clever Writer of Fiction’ and ‘Angel’ of Washington Fire Department”, which contains a large amount of new information about the author of this atmospheric tale of the mummy’s curse.

ISBN-13: 978-1-917113-16-8

Case laminate hardback, 22.86cm x 15.24cm (6" x 9"), 114 pages

Published: 8 June 2026

The book is available to pre-order from the Nezu Press store (please click here); global shipping is available (with no tariffs for US customers). Alternatively, it will be available from the usual online retailers soon, and you can order it from bricks-and-mortar stores.

Book News ~ The House of Terror by Gerald Biss

The second Gerald Biss offering that's coming out in March is The House of Terror, first published by Greening & Co. Ltd. in 1909. The new Nezu Press edition sports a dashingly good-looking dust jacket featuring a painting by Les Edwards (Edward Miller) and includes a 16-page biographical essay by yours truly: ‘Gerald Biss: The Most Lovable Soul That Ever Existed’ (which is also included in The Door of the Unreal).

Beth Holyoake, an orphan in whose life so far ‘love had no chance’, is called home to a house she has not lived in since she was a young child by her dead father’s twin brother, Lord Angmering. She has high hopes for this new chapter in her life, but her uncle is a controlling bully who wants to marry her off to his reckless drunkard of a son, and the entire household lives in fear of the family curse, ‘The Horror’ that is kept locked up in the east wing. Beth’s aunt, Lady Mary, is her only ally in the house, but she is too afraid of Lord Angmering and his son to be of any assistance. Only Jack Spalding, the estate manager, is able and willing to help Beth solve the mystery of ‘The Horror’ and free her from the clutches of Lord Angmering and his drunken son.

‘An exciting sensational story, with a horrifying mystery.’ ~ St. James’s Budget, November 1909.

‘A clever sensational novel… with much ingenuity and many thrills.’ ~ Manchester Courier, November 1909.

‘The story is told in such a way as to create excitement, and to keep it up until the book is closed.’ ~ Belfast News-Letter, January 1910.

ISBN-13: 978-1-917113-14-4

Hardback with dust jacket, 22.86cm x 15.24cm (6” x 9”), 224 pages

Published: 14 March 2026

The book is available to pre-order from the Nezu Press store (please click here); global shipping is available (with no tariffs for US customers). Alternatively, it will be available from the usual online retailers soon, and you can order it from bricks-and-mortar stores.

Book News ~ The Door of the Unreal by Gerald Biss

Hooo-oooow are you today? Fangs for stopping by. It's been a wuff start to the year, but here's hoping for better things. Okay, enough of the werewolfing about.

As with last year and the one before, the first author Nezu Press is publishing this year is a chap. Gerald Biss, to be exact. And what a lovely chap he was; seriously, everybody loved him... And so do I. Two of his novels will be coming out next month, the first of which is The Door of the Unreal, originally published by Eveleigh Nash Company Limited in 1919. This new edition includes a 16-page biographical essay by me: ‘Gerald Biss: The Most Lovable Soul That Ever Existed’.

When people begin disappearing without a trace at a specific spot on the Brighton Road, the police are left without a clue, but Lincoln Osgood, a well-travelled American who is staying at nearby Clymping Manor, has a theory—one so fantastic, so ‘strange and bizarre beyond all words’, that he fears being labelled a lunatic. With limited time left before the next full moon, which falls on Walpurgis Night, he must convince Scotland Yard that there are werewolves at large in sleepy Sussex and that, if action is not taken in time, a young woman’s soul might be lost for ever. Told in a matter-of-fact way, with the feel of a tense thriller rather than a horror novel, one reviewer described The Door of the Unreal as ‘fascinating in its horrors and written with a skill which makes even the impossible seem likely’.

‘Mr. Biss has taken the legend of the “Werewolf,” brought it up to date, and woven around it a yarn as thrilling and mysterious as the most voracious reader after blood and thunder could possibly desire.’ ~ The Tatler, December 1919.

‘A story of the “creepy” order, fascinating in its horrors and written with a skill which makes even the impossible seem likely.’ ~ Sheffield Daily Telegraph, December 1919.

‘A well-written, splendidly-conceived, and thrilling piece of fiction… absorbing in the extreme.” ~ Sporting Times, November 1919.

ISBN-13: 978-1-917113-15-1

Hardback with dust jacket, 22.86cm x 15.24cm (6” x 9”), 230 pages

Published: 14 March 2026

The book is available to pre-order from the Nezu Press store (please click here); global shipping is available (with no tariffs for US customers). Alternatively, it will be available from the usual online retailers soon, and you can order it from bricks-and-mortar stores.

Merry Christmas from R. Ellis Roberts

I've been collecting ephemera for years, and I bought these Christmas cards recently. They were sent from Richard Ellis Roberts, author of The Other End, to Vera Carr between 1904 and 1912. There was more than one gentleman called Richard Ellis Roberts knocking about at the beginning of the twentieth century, but luckily these cards have the writer's address in London printed on the inside.

Three of the cards (the ones with colour illustrations) were produced by Cuala Press, an Irish private press run by Elizabeth Yeats, the sister of William Butler Yeats. The monochrome card was produced by the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, and that one is signed on the back (see below).

I couldn't help wondering who Vera Carr was, so I began digging about. There were quite a few ladies about with that name, and with nothing but the name to go on I thought I'd never find her. But then I came across an article written by Richard in the Pall Mall magazine in 1910 entitled 'How to Make Interesting Pictures: "The Little Monks" '... 'illustrated from Photographs by Sydney H. Carr'.

Sydney Herbert Baker Carr was a Lincoln-born artist who moved to Penzance in Cornwall in the 1880s. And he had a daughter: Vera. When Richard sent the earliest of the cards, in 1904, she would have been fourteen years old. At that time, her family was living at a house on Albany Terrace in St. Ives. By the time Richard sent the last of these cards, her family had moved to Arkleby on Talland Road.

Vera married in 1916 and moved to Bristol. She died in 1983 and was buried in Arnos Vale cemetery, a place I used to pass every now and then when I lived in Somerset. It's a small world.