CANAPÉS FOR THE DAUGHTER OF CHAOS

Description quoted from an on-line source:
“CANAPÉS FOR THE DAUGHTER OF CHAOS
by William Charlton
Publication Date: October 2012
ISBN: N/A
Sewn hardcover, limited to 100 hand numbered copies, 120 pp with illustrated end papers and a full-color frontispiece.”

“This edition is limited to one hundred numbered copies of which this is number:” 45

There appear to be 112 pages in the version I hold in my hand. There is also a deluxely stiff dust-jacket with an aubrey-beardsley style design on the front. The front of the hard-back cover beneath the dust-jacket shows the words: “E FINIBUS”. Nothing on the inner spine.

Les Éditions de l’Oubli, Bucharest, 1945

which, based on extramural evidence, I guess is another name for Ex Occidente Press or Passport Levant…

This highly aesthetic book measures 4 by 5.5 inches when closed.

This is my very first post-real-time review after recently announcing here my retirement from real-time reviewing after four ostensibly self- and autre-fulfilling years doing it.

Five stories – Benighted, The Elusive Real, The Music Festival, The Antistrophe, The Main Road – by an author whose work I don’t think I have previously encountered.

Delightfully traditional and sporadically supernatural fictions, with quirky almost gratuitous endings, but endings that stay with the reader defiantly, all stemming from an engaging and well-crafted prose style. The characters seemed as if I were meeting real people who happen to find themselves inside the quirky world of this book, amazed at finding themselves thus liberated from carnal existence but equally hidebound by the book’s accoutrements of de luxe paper and print. Inspired by one of the stories, I will say that reading this book was like stepping off the main road for ostensibly gratuitous reasons into whatever land bordered it but finding much with which to durably haunt myself as a result.

I’d say this is a belit as well as a benighted literary book in a new genre called  the Defiantly Quirky with touches of the feistily effete or feminine or the Realms of Traditional Supernatural Literature with Jokes as well as Serious Visions, or Tricks and Trips (in both senses of the word ‘trip’). Physically tangible with baths and things, at times, but not always felicitously physical! And a girl called Woody.

“And now for my kiss.”