In his day, R. Ellis Roberts was a well-known literary critic and writer. He contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals, including the Daily News, Observer, Empire Review, London Mercury, Bookman, Saturday Review, and Guardian. He was literary editor for the New Statesman and Time and Tide, and he hosted a book review programme for BBC Radio. In 1923, his only collection of uncanny short stories, The Other End, was published by Cecil Palmer and received glowing reviews. The critic for the Bookman declared the author ‘as well able to write stories of his own as to criticise those of others’, having achieved a mastery of his subject that at times ‘challenges comparison with Poe and Hawthorne’. And Gerald Gould, in the Saturday Review, suggested that no nervous person should read the book when ‘alone at night in a remote cottage on a lonely moor’.
And yet, these days he's pretty much forgotten. I really can't understand why nobody's brought out a new edition of his collection of uncanny tales before; they're so good. But then, so many writers are chucked by the wayside once they kick the bucket. It's very sad.
Anyway, this new edition of The Other End, along with the contents of the first edition, includes four reviews written by R. Ellis Roberts about the work of Arthur Machen, of whom he was an admirer. The reviews were written for the Bookman, Daily News, and Sewanee Review. It also includes a biographical essay by me: ‘R. Ellis Roberts: The Critic Who Read for Pleasure’.
I'll post more about the book later, but for now I'll just say that you can pre-order it directly from Nezu Press (Publisher shop: Click here). Or you can do so from the usual online retailers; the book will be showing up in all the usual places soon.
Nezu Press, 14 February 2024.
978-1-7393921-7-8.
Hardback with dust jacket, 258 pages.
