Small Press Dispatch: By Her Works, Shall Ye Know Her

Roseanna Pendlebury An Attempted Bibliography of the Works of Barbara Livesey is part of a collection which the publisher, Dead Ink, calls “a literary hoax perpetrated […] in order to create a playground for today’s horror authors to let their imagination run wild”. It is thus “published” by the fictitious Eden Book Society, and the author, Stephen George Wallis, is likewise a cover. There are several layers of obfuscation in the book’s format, which only compound when you start reading. The story takes the form of an expanded and editorialized bibliography of the works of the eponymous (and in the implied writer’s opinion likely pseudonymous) Barbara Livesey, a horror author of small fame with a dedicated cult following among those who have encountered her works. The bi(bli)ographer ostensibly composing this work, who as much unpicks her character as collects her texts, runs through the available texts by the author chronologically, setting them within her wider corpus, and…