Chris’s new book Episodes is published today in hardback and ebook. The cover art is striking and extremely handsome.
It’s billed as a short story collection, but this book, it seems to me, is so much more than that. Carefully curated, it presents a valuable and fascinating overview of Chris’s work to date. Here you will find stories from the early part of his career, one of which, ‘The Invisible Men’, has only previously been available as part of the special reissue of Chris’s first collection, Real Time World. What shocks me most about this fifty-year-old story now is how prescient it feels.
Here you will find a novella, The Ament, which was first published in a somewhat obscure anthology in the 1980s and has not been seen since – until now. It’s a powerful piece of work, replete with Priestian themes (identity, reality, twins) and an absolute must-read for fans of The Glamour and The Prestige.
Chris often insists that he doesn’t write horror, yet in I, Haruspex, a novella from the turn of the millennium that has been equally difficult to access until today, you will discover one of the most unnerving works of gothic fiction you have ever read, all twisted up inside a bizarre and compelling story of time travel and WW2 espionage.
Palely Loitering and An Infinite Summer, both key works from the Priest canon and nominated for multiple awards, are hereby made available also for the first time in some years.
The table of contents speaks for itself. What makes Episodes even more special and so much more than just a collection is Chris’s own personal commentary, presented in the form of an introduction as well as individual forewords and afterwords to each of the texts. The story of the stories, in other words, and an important contribution to the overarching and constantly updating history of British science fiction.
This is a book to be savoured and treasured. More even than that, it is a book to challenge and inspire.