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.