Customer Reviews

Horror Panegyric

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Keith Seward is a rare and wonderful creature: a fan with an insight and vocabulary the equal of his devotion. Unlike most of us, he can actually explain why he thinks a book is important, without resorting to meaningless, slogan-like declarations. This inspired appraisal of the three Lord Horror novels will move you to appreciation even if you haven't read the books. And if you read Seward's tribute, I promise that you will be driven to seek Lord Horror out, in at least one of his incarnations, even at great personal expense.

Horror Panegyric is a love letter with bold intentions. It dares to explore the nature of good literature and how to recognize its elusive face. Specifically, it seeks to recognize that Britton and Butterworth have written at least one unsung masterpiece, M******s: The Auschwitz of Oz, and two works of near-indescribable genius, Lord Horror and Baptised in the Blood of Millions. It questions why these works have not been given the attention they deserve.

If you have already read the Lord Horror novels, Seward's essay is still worth the price of admission. It is filled with gems like the section called "The Boschian Method in Literature," which works both as art critique and writer's manual on how to break from the dull, exhausting, everyday torture that passes for contemporary literature. If you have not read the Lord Horror novels, then you will want to start here for a very practical reason: Horror Panegyric includes four long excerpts that are the cheapest and easiest introduction to the works you are ever going to find. The actual novels can be so costly and difficult to obtain that they seem forbidden by God. They are as far from mainstream as anything I have encountered. I am surprised they exist at all.

Given the long tradition of resistance Savoy Books has shown to reprinting anything, even their finest publications, I recommend you snatch up Horror Panegyric before it goes out of print. Before it becomes another priceless artifact in Savoy's catalog of lost treasures. (And thank you, Keith Seward, for writing an essay that has given me the language to appreciate Britton and Butterworth even more than I already did.)