Description

The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things by Mark Valentine

Hardcover – Tartarus Press – December 2025 – 226 pages

The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things offers stories about the ancient mysteries of Palmyra and Jerusalem, the music of Stonehenge and of the fabulously rare record Goat Songs, the uncanny in performances of Milton’s Comus and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and the wondrous influences of a Sancreed Tarot and of a toy cockatrice.

All the stories were originally selected for anthologies or journals. ‘Vain Shadows Flee’ was included in Best British Short Stories 2016 edited by Nicholas Royle (Salt Publishing), and ‘Yes, I Knew the Venusian Commodore’ was translated into Spanish by María Pilar San Roman in an award-winning anthology.

This new edition includes all of the short stories in the original Zagava volume, and adds nine briefer stories or vignettes written around the same time.

Contents:

‘To the Eternal One’, ‘Stained Medium’, ‘The Key to Jerusalem’, ‘Bellman’s Map’, ‘Listening to Stonehenge’, ‘Hark to the Rooks’, ‘Goat Songs’, ‘Mr Bel’s Shop’, ‘Zabulo’, ‘The Secret Characters’, ‘In Cypress Shades’, ‘The Mask of the Dead Mammilius’, ‘Yes, I Knew the Venusian Commodore’, ‘Qx’, ‘The Scarlet Door’, ‘The Clerks of the Invisible’, ‘Vain Shadows Flee’, ‘The Man Who Made the Yellow God’, ‘The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things’, ‘Moss Queen’, ‘As Blank As the Days Yet To Be’, ‘Acknowledgements’.