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Cover design by Mains & O’Keefe
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His Beautiful Hands The Short Fiction of Oscar Cook Edited by Johnny Mains
Come, enter the strange colonial world of Oscar Cook (1888-1952), who spent a decade in the jungles of Borneo (Sabah) serving as a District Officer and magistrate. When he returned home his experiences spilled onto the pages of pulp magazines and Christine Campbell Thomson’s Not at Night series, while Americans read Cook’s exploits in Weird Tales. In 1959, seven years after Cook’s death, the first of two tales was reprinted in Herbert van Thal’s seismic Pan Book of Horror Stories. The sixties saw some of his tales in reprints of CCT’s anthologies, and in the seventies a Cook story was adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. Then that was it: nine known tales were destined to live in a mist of obscurity, his work only known to the cognoscenti. Johnny Mains, award-winning genre editor presents thirty-seven stories with twenty-eight ‘lost’ tales joining the canonical nine for the very first time. One of these tales includes the last story Oscar ever wrote, written under a pseudonym and published in the newspaper he was the editor of. With support from Oscar Cook’s family, Johnny Mains has written a biographical essay on his life and, together with further essays by Mains supporting the stories, His Beautiful Hands represents the debut collection of an author whose grim and grimy yarns of far away exotica are guaranteed to entertain. ----------------------------------------------- Available Editions I can offer you a discount and the best shipping price if you e-mail: flyingspiderster@gmail.com Free shipping within the USA. |
