A collection of nine stories by Mark Samuels, who passed away suddenly in December 2023, after this collection had been put together. Seven of the stories are arranged as "The Gallows Langley Sequence of Tales," as they are all set in and around fictional places in Hertfordshire, including the town Gallows Langley and the valley of Thool--a setting used previously by Samuels, most notably in the novel
Witch-Cult Abbey (which I reviewed previously on this blog on February 14, 2021). Six of the seven of these stories are excellent--the final one "A Letter from Jack" is made somewhat lesser by the bringing in of Jack the Ripper, which was just too trite for me. The rest of the sequence develops an attractively bizarre and decadently otherworldly fictional setting. The two uncollected stories reprinted in the section "Other Tales" begin with some imminent or ongoing eschatological catastrophe, but disappointingly don't carry on with the repercussions of it, evolving into smaller and less interesting character studies. Overall this still a pretty good collection, beautifully produced, but it is bittersweet in that it is the last work of Samuels, whose voice will be missed.
