Description

The Sanctuary and Other Strange Stories  by R.B. Russell

Hardcover – Tartarus Press – May 2026 – 326 pages

Gathering together lost souls on the Sussex Downs, houses demolished and rediscovered, and half-remembered dreams, The Sanctuary and Other Strange Stories collects uncanny fiction written by R.B. Russell over two decades. Many stories are rooted in moments of real life, but are transformed into something disquieting, from the enigmatic commune of ‘The Sanctuary’ to the ex libris of a lost artist, these stories drift between memory, history and imagination.

Inspired by writers as varied as Mark Valentine and Ian Fleming, Robert Aickman, and Reggie Oliver, and shaped by influences, from forgotten cults and stamp collecting, Russell’s tales explore the boundaries between the ordinary and the otherworldly. Love, death, music and off-beat literary researches intertwine, giving rise to stories that feel both intimate and unsettling.

Whether revisiting previously published uncollected stories or presenting new work, this collection offers a rich cabinet of curiosities: eerie, elegiac, and steeped in the lingering power of place, and the imagination’s darker corners.

Russell has written a number of short story collections and four novels, She Sleeps (2017), Waiting for the End of the World (2020), Heaven’s Hill (2022) and The Woman Who Fell to Earth 2025. Among Ray Russell’s other non-fiction works are Occult Territory: An Arthur Machen Gazetteer (2019), Past Lives of Old Books and Other Essays (2020), Fifty Forgotten Books (2022) and Robert Aickman: A Biography (2022).

Contents: ‘The Sanctuary’, ‘The House on Windmill Lane’, ‘The Brightly Lit Room’, ‘The Travelling Oasis’, ‘A House of Treasures’, ‘The Shepherd’, ‘On Wings of Ghost Linen’, ‘The Sweetshop Man’, ‘The Company You Keep’, ‘Baphomet’, ‘Benjamin and Sarpy, and Jeffryes’, ‘Tuesday’s Child’, ‘InfoDataAnalysis’, ‘Angelhood’, ‘A Cold Gun’, ‘Beetle Mother’, ‘Saint Hill’, ‘Incandescence’, ‘Whistle’, ‘A Distorted Idea of Love’, ‘Frame Inverted’, ‘The Spaces in Between’, ‘Decision’, ‘Flourishing Both in Sunshine and Shade’, ‘They Called Her Sorrow’, ‘The Process’, ‘The Coverham Statuette’, ‘The Song of the Fire’.