Description

Strange Epiphanies by Peter Bell

Trade Paperback – Swan River Press – Sep 2021 – 187 pages

“…man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions…” — Arthur Machen

A mentally disturbed woman is entrapped in Beltane rituals in the Cumbrian fells; a widower mourning his wife falls beneath the mystic allure of Iona; a quest to the Italian Apennines brings a lonely man to a dread Marian revelation; an alcoholic on a Scottish isle is haunted by a deceased chronicler of local legend; in a small German town a sinister doll discloses truths about a murky family tragedy; an unknown journal by a Victorian travel-writer sends a woman on a grim odyssey to Transylvania; in a childhood holiday paradise a man encounters a demented artist’s terrifying legacy. The protagonists in Peter Bell’s stories confront the awesome, the numinous, the uncanny, the lure of genius loci, and landscapes undergoing strange epiphanies.

Contents
Introduction by Brian J. Showers
Resurrection
M. E. F.
The Light of the World
An American Writer’s Cottage
Inheritance
A Midsummer Ramble in the Carpathians
Nostalgia, Death and Melancholy
Afterword: Marie Emily Fornario — A Historical Note
Acknowledgements