The Greenwood Faun – Nina Antonia (Egaeus Press)

Description

A haunted, haunting novel steeped in the incense, decadence, and paganism of the fin-de-siècle. The Greenwood Faun takes up Lucian Taylor — the hallucinated hero of Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams — and imagines the strange afterlife of his literary masterpiece following his death: how the manuscript, once posthumously published, comes to both save and destroy those who encounter it. Threaded through with opium, poetry, and paganism, with the ghost of Lionel Johnson as psychopomp and the Great God Pan stalking the fields, Nina Antonia conjures a genuinely spellbinding piece of literary decadence.

Praised by David Tibet as “beautifully written… witty, crepuscular, enchanting,” and by Brian Stableford for capturing “the lush sentiment as well as the mordant irony of the fin-de-siècle,” this is a rare and delicate balancing act of homage and haunting.

Published on 5th December 2017 — Faunalia of the ancient Roman calendar — this lithographically printed, sewn hardback runs to 192 pages with colour endpapers, and was limited to just 420 copies.