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First welcome to everyone, particularly readers of Abraxas for whom I have an important message. Abraxas Magazine, incorporating the Colin Wilson Newsletter, has shut up shop, the last two large issues are permanently available through Lulu as large-format paperbacks, four times standard size. However, subscribers will be able to obtain copies from the old Abraxas address in St Austell at 'negotiable' rates that will include reduced postage cost and other concessions. And now I must bare my black commercial heart and draw attention to my new book 'The Tregerthen Horror' which is a long and detailed investigation into the death of Ka Cox - Rupert Brooke's former sweetheart - at an allegedly haunted cottage in Zennor. It is a literary detective story that leads into strange and intriguing areas: the occult, espionage, society scandal and the infamous Walton Murder that was investigated by Fabian of the Yard. The price is very reasonable (£12.99) for a Crown Quarto paperback of 220 pages with many illustrations. It is the upshot of much detailed research and has already received a number of appreciative reviews and comments. The official Abraxas Website is: http://abrax7.stormloader.com/abraxas.htm
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Print: $18.87 Download: $12.76 Abraxas Unbound presents a veritable magic theatre of talent, with powerful, leading contributions from Colin Wilson on William Blake, T.E. Lawrence, Edmund Husserl, Phenenomenology and the Big Idea – a Molotov cocktail of consciousness raising, visionary madness and existential analysis. Furthermore there are three important essays by Adam Daly: on the Italian novelist, Gadda, on the lost genius of the 1930s, Lionel Britton, and on ‘Walking Stewart’, friend of Thomas de Quincey and walker extraordinaire. Two outstanding musical contributions, from Gary Lachman on ‘Plato and the Musicians’, and Euan Tait on his friendship with the composer, Howard Ferguson. Antoni Diller provides an arresting summation of the career of Stuart Holroyd, critic and scholar, and the philosopher, John Shand, supplies a supple appraisal of Colin Wilson’s philosophy. Mark Valentine evaluates the career and fiction of Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
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Print: $20.16 Download: $14.34 THE TREGERTHEN HORROR: Aleister Crowley, D. H. Lawrence & Peter Warlock in Cornwall.
Involving murder, mayhem, espionage, sexual scandal and the Beast 666, this bizarre and tragic investigation into the death of Ka Cox at a lonely, haunted cottage in Zennor is one of the strangest stories to have ever come out of Cornwall. Involving a large and larger-than-life cast of characters, including the 'handsomest young man in England', Rupert Brooke, the climber George Mallory, the mad, babbling psychotherapist, Meredith Starr, and the rip-roaring composer, Peter Warlock, the narrative unwinds a tangled tale that enlists the embattled remnants of the Bloomsbury Group, the decadent acolytes of Fitzrovia, a young woman's involvement with a notorious magician, occult orgies in the grounds of a great house climaxing in a flourish of grand guignol when Bob Fabian, ace sleuth of Scotland Yard, joins the ensemble as he seeks to find the perpetrator of the horrific 'witchcraft murder' of Lower Quinton.
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Print: $9.55 Download: $3.19 An anthology of poems and stories from Cornwall from the Writers' Group 'Stray Dogs', headed by poet and novelist, D.M. Thomas, and named after the famous cafe/cellar in St Petersburg where Anna Akhmatova hid during the Civil War and fellow poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Mandelstam, frequented in their early careers.
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Print: $19.14 Download: $9.97 This is the last Abraxas Unbound featuring Colin Wilson on the enigma of Shakespeare's Dark Lady and Mr WH of the sonnets, Tony Shaw on Lionel Britton's background and intellectual ethos, Adam Daly on Lord Rochester and Richard Savage, Paul Newman on Frank Baker, Mark Valentine on L.H. Myers, Anthony Harrison Barbet on E.H. Visiak, plus many other articles and poems and stories.
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Print: $11.15 Download: $7.97 In May 1910 the celebrated magician, Aleister Crowley, is invited to Rempstone, the Dorset manor of Commander Guy Marston. In a room set aside for the purpose, he conjures Bartzabel, the spirit of Mars, who predicts future conflicts in Turkey and Germany. After joining Crowley’s magical order, Marston appears willing to entertain and promote the magician’s cause, but secretly he is frightened and nervous of exposure, embarking on a fierce libel case against the authoress, Jane Panton, who gossiped about his family in a volume of Dorset memoirs. Yet another scandal lurks in the background of this conjuration, for Jane’s son, Douglas Panton, was washed up in Mount's Bay, Penzance, dressed in woman’s clothing and manacled. This gives rise to rumours of blackmail and black magic conspiracy. Other guests at Rempstone include Guy’s beautiful cousin, Daisy Bevan, with whom he has been having a long-standing affair, and the ghost-writer, Algernon Blackwood, whose horror story 'Nemesis of Fire' is set there.
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Print: $14.75 First commissioned by the Film Fund nearly five years ago, this long-awaited script is at last made available. It amplifies a little-known incident in the career of the Beast 666. In 1938, Greta Selleira, a wealthy, attractive heiress, visits the secluded but beautiful valley of Lamorna to continue her long-standing affair with the painter, Lawrence Beech. But another man is in love with her, the poet and magician, Aleister Crowley, whose young mistress also lives near Lamorna. Crowley fascinates and provokes the locals, tries to win Greta over to his well-centred philosophy, harasses and terrifies the poet, Dylan Thomas, and takes up painting. But as these many intrigues are taking place, the shadow of war spreads its stain and gradually it becomes apparent that the small, cut-off community of Lamorna is a doomed Edwardian paradise whose values and way of life are about to be swept away.
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Print: $17.42 Download: $15.95 Many of the poems in this anthology have already appeared in well-known literary magazines. Surreal, bitter and comic, they range from Paul Newman's first book 'In Many Ways Frogs' to his most recent 'The Ass's Shadow'. They vary in content from fungal scrutinies like 'Ogre Observing Mushrooms' to investigative audacities like 'Who Killed the Lightning?' Philosophical reflections such as 'Eternal Recurrence' stand beside curious dilemmas that challenge the imagination. 'Indecision', for instance, depicts a man uncertainly poised between acquiring a giant lobster or a bicycle while 'Orpheus Ascending' transplants the musician to a contemporary urban setting. Some of these poems do not reflect reality so much as the hallucinations provoked by the phenomenal world. The collection is supplemented by three short stories: 'Forever Falling', 'The Bleeding King' and finally 'Sanctorum', an account of a sinisterly potent medieval perfume and how it interfered with the life of a university lecturer.
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Print: $14.72 Download: $7.97 In the tradition of the Gothic tales of Wilde, Poe and Hoffman, the Silver Swan is the story of a hunter who seeks out a fabulous bird, hoping to make it the prize piece of his collection, but finds that he has to pay a terrifying price for his obsession.
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