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Corruption of Heliotrope

Louis Marvick

Out of print

Details

Status Out of print
Release Date Summer 2021
Size 10 × 30 cm
Pages 12
Workmanship Hand-sewn booklet, printed on a few hand-made cotton rag pages with deckled edges.

Content

When the old man died it fell to a nephew who had never met him, Gregory Hellatrap to liquidate his estate. Gregory puzzled for weeks over the fact that, in emptying the old man’s house, he had come upon loaves of stale bread placed with signs of care in positions meant to assure their secrecy. One loaf he found in a shoebox of commensurate size on an upper closet-shelf in the back upstairs bedroom. Another had been plugged like a stopper into the basement flood drain. There was some blindness or naiveté mingled with the cunning which these secretions implied. If there had been a flood, the bread in the drain would have swollen and been discovered (unless the old man expected the waters to dissolve it). Gregory tossed out the breads with other rubbish; but when, some days later, he discovered a safe deposit box key hidden inside a shoe placed with great care inside a breadbox that was also hidden on the back upstairs bedroom closet shelf, behind the shoebox, he had reason to regret his precipitancy.

About Louis Marvick

Over the span of merely a decade, Louis Marvick has developed a unique prose style of rare elegance, complex beauty and a subtle moral attentiveness in the weird genre. After the novel The ‘Star’ Ushak (Ex Occidente, 2010), the novella The Madman of Tosterglope (Ex Occidente, 2013), and a collection of short stories and novellas, Dissonant Intervals (Side Real, 2016), he has recently written a novel in three episodes whose first two parts have just been published by Zagava.

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