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The Other End
R. Ellis Roberts
In his day, R. Ellis Roberts was a well-known literary critic and writer. He contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals, including the Daily News, Observer, Empire Review, London Mercury, Bookman, Saturday Review, and Guardian. He was literary editor for the New Statesman and Time and Tide, and he hosted a book review programme for BBC Radio. In 1923, his only collection of uncanny short stories, The Other End, was published by Cecil Palmer and received glowing reviews. The critic for the Bookman declared the author ‘as well able to write stories of his own as to criticise those of others’, having achieved a mastery of his subject that at times ‘challenges comparison with Poe and Hawthorne’. And Gerald Gould, in the Saturday Review, suggested that no nervous person should read the book when ‘alone at night in a remote cottage on a lonely moor’. This new edition of The Other End includes four reviews written by R. Ellis Roberts about the work of Arthur Machen, of whom he was an admirer—for the Bookman, Daily News, and Sewanee Review—and a biographical essay by Gina R. Collia, ‘R. Ellis Roberts: The Critic Who Read for Pleasure’.
Published: 14 February 2024.
ISBN-13: 978-1-7393921-7-8.
Hardback with dust jacket, 22.86mm x 15.24cm (6" x 9"), 258 pages.
Price: £25.00
Contents:
Intro.: R. Ellis Roberts: The Critic Who Read for PleasureFiction: The Hill • The Rabbit Road • The Wind • The Ebony Box • Under the Sun • The Great Mother • The Other End • The Minotaur • The Narrow Way • The Cage • Robin • The Samaritan Non-Fiction: Arthur Machen, The Bookman, 1922. Arthur Machen: The Money Rewards of Authorship, Daily News, 1923.Arthur Machen, Sewanee Review, 1924.Strange Happenings to Ordinary People, Daily News, 1933.
Some Reviews for the 1923 Edition
'Mr. Ellis Roberts is as well able to write stories of his own as to criticise those of others. Here, moreover, he has set his hand to a kind of story-telling that is not often practised successfully and achieved a mastery, at times, over the grim, the terrible, the eerie, the bizarre, over the fine, elusive mysteries of the spirit, that challenges comparison with Poe and Hawthorne.' The Bookman, 1923.
'Serene, yet glancing constantly with wit and humour; lucid, with the lucidity of deep, bright water, and the beauty of that water's living movement.' Daily News, 1923.
'Mr. Roberts is so good a scholar, so good a psychologist, and so good a writer, that he makes it all seem real... No nervous person, alone at night in a remote cottage on a lonely moor, should read this book.' Saturday Review, 1923.
'Mr. Roberts is not content with the mere thrill of the strange and uncanny, though he gets that excellently, but rather rests his effect on the sense of the vital reality of these unrecognised powers, whose presence seems, indeed, less an intrusion upon our world than upon theirs.' Liverpool Daily Post, 1923.
‘For all the uncanny air that enfolds these stories, the supernatural elements in them are so quietly taken for granted, and are blended with so much of everyday circumstance that even their unrealities are made to seem curiously real.’ - The Bookman, 1923.
Full dust jacket for the new Nezu Press edition
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