Oliver: Holidays from Hell

In this, Reggie Oliver’s seventh collection of stories the Devil and the Seven Deadly Sins go on holiday to an English seaside resort. And there are other visits to the seaside, which equally deserve Oliver’s suggestively ambiguous title of a ‘Holiday from Hell’, notably by a recently bereaved solicitor troubled by thoughts of mortality, and immortality in ‘The Rooms are High’. In ‘The Perfect Author’ a highly successful author at a seaside crime writing convention seems to be haunted by one of her less appealing creations.

And, with his gift for varied and unusual settings, Oliver takes us elsewhere: to late seventeenth-century Oxford in ‘Absalom’, to Paris in 1867 (‘The Green Hour’), to a remote and terribly strange hotel in Wales called ‘The Druid’s Rest’, to the London of the swinging sixties in ‘The Prince of Darkness’, and, in ‘Rapture’, to what could perhaps be the end of the world.

‘No one story is like another’ as poet and critic Glen Cavaliero has written of Oliver’s work. And as Pulitzer prize winning Michael Dirda of the Washington Post wrote: ‘Once you’ve read one story by Reggie Oliver you’ll want to read them all.’

Contains: ‘Introduction' by Robert Shearman, ‘Holiday from Hell, ‘The Silken Drum’, ‘The Green Hour’, ‘The Perfect Author’, ‘Absalom’, ‘The Druid’s Rest’, ‘The Rooms are High’, ‘The Prince of Darkness’, ‘The Book and the Ring’, ‘The Maze at Huntsmere’, ‘Trouble at Botathan’, ‘A Day with the Delusionists’, ‘Rapture’, ‘Love at Second Sight’, ‘Afterword’.

Reviews:

"Each of the 14 stories in Oliver’s seventh collection (after Flowers of the Sea) is a gem of subtly evoked horrors whose climaxes are skillfully understated but still effectively chilling." from a "starred" review in Publishers Weekly

"Oliver is the leading contemporary exponent of the antiquarian ghost story as established by M.R. James." Locus

"Oliver also provides neat and evocative line drawings as illustrations at the start of each story, making this an all-round, very attractive package." Peter Tennant, Black Static 62

"...a wonderful , enticing collection of great stories, apt to prove once again what an incredibly deep pleasure reading can be." Mario Guuslandi, British Fantasy Society

An interview with Reggie Oliver can be viewed here: