Quartier Perdu by Sean O'brien
Sheltering from an air raid in an empty underground station, a young woman encounters a strangely out-of-place vessel passing along the platform.A librarian cataloguing the manuscripts of a recently deceased horror writer notices one particular box, relating to his most mystical work, has disappeared.
A young academic takes up residency in the former home of an obscure Belgian poet in order to better understand the strange rumours surrounding his demise.
Sean O'Brien's stories are all lit with the unmistakable hue of the Victorian gothic: from the rantings of a deranged psychiatric patient, to the apparition of demons swarming into a remote, rural railway station; solemn oaths are broken and need atoning for; minor transgressions are met with outlandish curses. Often we join O'Brien's protagonists attempting to take time out from their troubles, but removing themselves from their normal lives only lets the supernatural in, and before they know it personal demons find very literal ones to conspire with.
'O'Brien's ever-lurking sense of humour turns satirical in his caricature of an academic, a media and communications lecturer specialising in post-Buffy theory, who is lured into becoming a human sacrifice in the annual college productionAtmospheric and highly literate, with a sense of writerly power in reserve, these gothic tales from a prizewinning poet strike a relishable balance between playful and macabre.' - The Sunday Times; 'Sean O'Brien's new collection of short stories carries an unexpected but welcome hint of the golden age of British horror cinema. [...] Time and again in these slivers of contemporary Gothic, protagonists start from a place of ominous normality and end in some fashion entombed, trapped or driven mad.' - The Times Literary Supplement
Sean O'Brien is a poet, critic, playwright, anthologist, broadcaster, novelist and editor. He grew up in Hull and now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published seven collections of poetry to date, including the prize-winning Downriver (2007) and November (2011). His Collected Poems was published in 2012. His book of essays on contemporary poetry, The Deregulated Muse, was published in 1998, as was his acclaimed anthology The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945. His Newcastle Bloodaxe Poetry lectures were published as Journey to the Interior: Ideas of England in Contemporary Poetry (2012). He has edited a selection from Andrew Marvell (2011) and, with Don Paterson, The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems of Peter Porter (2010), and Train Songs: Poetry of the Railways (2013). His collection of short stories, The Silence Room, was published by Comma in 2008. He has translated Dante's Inferno and the poems of Corsino Fortes. His plays include The Birds, Laughter When We're Dead, and Keepers of the Flame. His translation of Tirso de Molina's Spanish Golden Age comedy Don Gil of the Green Breeches was staged in Bath in 2013, and in London and Coventry in 2014. He contributes to the Guardian, The Independent and the Times Literary Supplement. Radio work includes versions of Zamyatin's We, Greene's The Ministry of Fear and a Radio 4 documentary on Ted Lewis, the author of Get Carter. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781905583706 |
| ISBN 10 | 1905583702 |
| Title | Quartier Perdu |
| Author | Sean O'brien |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Comma Press |
| Year published | 2018-06-07 |
| Number of pages | 240 |
| Prizes | Short-listed for The Shirley Jackson Awards 2018 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |