And Afterward, the Dark

The literature of darkness holds a haunting immediacy for most readers. The life of man, after all, is but a brief interval between one darkness and another, while the world he inhabits is likewise merely an ephemeral flicker within a universe enshrouded by perpetual night. As each finite being runs its course, then afterward comes the dark. Basil Copper has explored this grimly somber realm of human reality with a sensitivity and skill that is almost unparalleled among the fantasy writers of our age. All seven tales in And Afterward, the Dark treat the subject of death, but in each instance this common theme has been magically transmuted through the incomparable alchemy of Copper's marvelous macabre imagination. In The Janissaries of Emilion death emerges from the realm of nightmare, as a troop of ancient horsemen thunder into the waking world to wreak sanguinary vengeance upon a man of the present day. The Tyrolean countryside forms the setting for The Cave, in which the terror-stricken inhabitants of a village inn are besieged by a malignly lurking, viciously predatory monster. The more subtly sinister, albeit equally devastating torments of a Satan cult are revealed through the Archives of the Dead, while in the futuristic world of The Flabby Men, a scientific research station is beleaguered by umbrageous entities spawned from the depths of a poisoned planet. From the misty-spired city of medieval Emilion to the radiation-scarred landscape of the twenty-first century, Basil Copper has conceived a vision of darkness and death, and cultivated that vision with such awesome artistry and imagination as to entitle his works to a classic status among the literature of the macabre.