Valerie and Other Stories

With the nine stories of this collection, Colin Insole conducts a fantastic pavane that depicts human folly and the protracted immolation of dream and ambition. In nineteenth-century Paris, Doctor Colbert, stifled by bourgeois expectations, longs for a life purified by art, but his inept adventure with the easel leads him only into degradation and tragedy; in a village in Southeastern Europe, children drum and dance in sinister rites to propitiate a malignant, all-seeing moon; a fey and curious orphan, Valerie, is fostered in a dour and repressed English vicarage, and soon reveals to the vicar's daughter all the ghostly secrets sequestered in the back lanes and whispering shadows of the market town. Through all these worlds of grotesquerie, enchantment and menace, Colin Insole portrays the irrepressible workings of inhuman reprisal, ever returning to dismantle, with subtle but vicious talons, the schemes of the uncomprehending human protagonists.