Secret Europe

by John Howard, Mark Valentine

The authors of Secret Europe were inspired by the lives of the many courageous spirits in all parts of the continent who followed their conscience in troubled times: and formed a sort of Secret Europe which tried to preserve the values of our common humanity. The stories often take place in borderlands, not only in terrain but in time too, and sometimes on the borders of this world and other, mysterious worlds. Many are set during times of upheaval—war, revolution, dictatorship—while others concern more personal upheavals. Each of the remote and relatively unknown regions is evoked with a fine sense of place, and we share in the lives of authentic characters who are faced with difficult, often dangerous, choices.

Genres: Fiction, Weird Fiction, Short Stories, Historical Fiction, British Literature, Magical Realism, Folklore

242 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2012

About the author

John Howard was born in London. His fiction has appeared in several anthologies and the collections The Silver Voices (2010), Written by Daylight (2013), and Cities and Thrones and Powers (2013). The majority of his stories have central and eastern European settings; many are set in the fictional Romanian town of Steaua de Munte. The Defeat of Grief (2010) is a novella set in Steaua de Munte and the real Black Sea resort of Balcic; Numbered as Sand or the Stars (2012) attempts a 'secret history' of Hungary between the World Wars.

Between 2003 and 2007 John Howard collaborated on eight short stories with Mark Valentine, six of which featured Valentine’s long-running series character The Connoisseur, an occult detective whose real name is never revealed. All 23 tales of The Connoisseur, including the collaborations, were reprinted in The Collected Connoisseur (2010).

Secret Europe (2012) is a collection jointly written with Mark Valentine comprising 25 short stories set in a variety of real and fictional European locations. Ten of the stories are by Howard and fifteen by Valentine.

John Howard has written articles for numerous magazines including Book and Magazine Collector, Supernatural Tales, Wormwood, Studies in Australian Weird Fiction, and All Hallows. He contributed essays to the Fritz Leiber special issue of Fantasy Commentator (No. 57/58, 2004) and to the books Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner (2007), Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays (2008), and The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch (2009), all edited by Benjamin Szumskyj.

John Howard also wrote the introduction to the Ash-Tree Press edition of Francis Brett Young’s classic 1924 horror novel Cold Harbour (2007).

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

"It was Stevenson, I think, who most notably said that there are some places that simply demand a story should be told of them. . . But there are also, I believe, places which have their story stored already, and want to tell this to us, through whatever powers they can; through our legends and lore, through our rumors and our rites. By its whispering fields and its murmuring waters, by the wailing of its winds and the groaning of its stones, by what it chants in darkness and the songs it sings in light, each place must reach out to us, to tell us, tell us what it holds."

The above Mark Valentine quote is very much in the spirit of this outstanding collection, tales that have been stored away in places waiting for a sensitive ear to give voice to their hidden secrets. There’s something here of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Christopher Priest’s Dream Archipelago - the fancy, the pure delight, the imagined possibilities. And the two British authors' unique literary vision in Secret Europe also utilizes actual history as a benchmark, mostly during or between the two great world wars.

It’s the combination of these two ingredients, the geography and history of Europe along with imagined people, cities, countries and events that makes Secret Europe such a singular read. And speaking of the delight one can having in reading, I was recently asked the following question after posting my review of another of Mark’s books: Did reading a high quality edition of The Collected Connoisseur published by Tartarus Press make a difference? The answer is an emphatic “yes” on three counts: 1) reading any Tartarus book is an aesthetic experience in itself; 2) the print on the page is clear and extremely readable; 3) I had a heightened sense of Mark’s polished literary voice when reading from such a beautifully produced book.

In their Introduction, Mark Valentine and John Howard explain how they split the geography of Europe between them, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea, and wrote their own separate chapters (twenty-six chapters in total) all the while attempting to imagine the atmosphere of each local and the attitudes and concerns of the inhabitants. Respecting the title Secret Europe, in addition to the places and events being heretofore unknown to readers, there's one important meaning as expressed in the authors’ own words: “Many courageous spirits in all parts of the continent followed their conscience: and they formed another sort of secret Europe, one which tried to preserve the values of our common humanity.”

While reading Secret Europe, it is wise to keep in mind the whole notion of what comprises history for a city, region, country or continent is continually open to reinterpretation - facts, so called, are never as fixed as textbooks might suggest. Additionally, an undeniable aspect of history is the personal stamp historians bring to the subject - people and events are seen and judged through a particular lens, colored by a set of values and ideas. This to say, history is personal and subjective not an isolated museum piece frozen under glass and enclosed within a frame. So, in keeping with the spirit of playing in the fields of subjectivity and possibility, I'll turn to four specific chapters to share a taste of the secrets contained within Secret Europe.

SILENCE AND FIRE
The tale opens: "I had seen a picture in a magazine of a city after an air raid. It was mostly black, a mass of shadow, except where the flashes of fire lit up the silhouettes of a spire and a tall building. They shone as if they must be standing on the edge of a medieval vision of the inferno. Deep, deep darkness, and the flaming roar of light, in stark contrast: that is what the photograph had shown. I knew that this was, had been, a real city: but the picture had still seemed a tableau, a piece of art, a fiction."

A magazine photograph, a city, a piece of art, a fiction - is Mark Valentine referencing real Europe or secret Europe? Or perhaps both? Questions to keep in mind as we immerse ourselves in this haunting tale.

THE GOAT-EYED
What is a Europe of secrets without a tale of the fantastic? An ancient city was fortified by an impregnable stone wall and four gates facing the cardinal directions: The Night Gate facing west, The Dawn Gate facing east, The Turkish Gate facing south and the Gate of the Magi facing north. Each gate was guarded by its special hereditary keeper, a keeper that according to city lore took on the characteristics of the gate he guarded.

Alas, the Warden of the City overseeing the gatekeepers called a special meeting and informed the four that a number of the citizens of their great city reported strangers to have entered, strangers seemingly like themselves but with one glaring exception: when the citizens meet their gaze, these strangers have goat’s eyes. Goat's eyes!

Following this revelation, those entering the city underwent the most careful scrutiny, even to the point where a squinting ragamuffin shoelace-seller was reported along with others who had rust colored skin or brown eyes, even a young woman with a high bleating laugh was subjected to police interrogation. But when a young stranger dressed in dark clothes and a fierce gaze was permitted entry, overnight the city was transformed in ways both stark and strange, leaving no doubt their fair city was now under the sway of goat’s eyes. A Valentine worth a stack of gold florins.

CABARET ZOLTAIRE
Secret Europe expands out to present a jaunty episode that reformulates an evening of outlandish zaniness in true Dada spirit at or near the original Cabaret Voltaire where artistic expression was given over to nonsense and childhood innocence as a bold revolt against the seriousness that propelled nations to continually pit youth against youth in a war that crippled, disfigured or poisoned healthy young bodies not otherwise consigned to mass graves.

As Hugo Ball read his Dada Manifesto in 1916 so the artists at the Cabaret Zoltaire proclaim their “first imperial alphageographic confederation in all the world” where they implore minor localities to abandon a bunch of tinheads fighting over hairlines on a map and join the Empire of Z to realize a new transnational destiny. The audience responds enthusiastically – Zut! Zut!

A representative from the town of Zvenigoroika accepts a high office in the Empire of Z. Artists unfurl a black flag with bold silver Z and sell passports to the Z Empire for one Zloty. But then the Imperial Minister for Exzternal Affairs proposes a confraternity between X and Z whereupon the Imperial Zurveyor displays a map with Zaandam, Zwolle, Zabern, Zwicken. The audience yells - A zong! A zong! More mappings and the Zong Zong turns to Zug Zug until z-utter pandemonium, all to Zzzzz Zzzzz Zzzzz Zzzzz.

THE WHITE CITY
John Howard’s narrator participates in plans to establish a revitalized city under an infinite Baltic sky, a city of the future. He walks the city streets for hour, locating new buildings designed by an especially inventive architect. There are two he has never been able to locate, two buildings that are modern white cubes. He recognizes they might never have been actually built but nonetheless, these two buildings have come to mean the future for him. “The potential they stand for is wholly human and humane, a bright and clean future, the inspiration that I and all Estland so sorely needs. To move forward without them would be to wander on to the wrong path, to stumble away from the brightly-lit street and fall headlong into the wreckage and waste of a new dark age.”

This last quote underscores two critical attributes pertaining to not only The White City but Secret Europe taken as a whole. Firstly, the authors’ literary aesthetic both partakes of the rich tradition of elegant British writing, such well known authors as Wilkie Collins and Algernon Blackwood, and looks to the future with both courage and sensitivity. Secondly, a point I especially appreciate, the explosion of imagination in the pages of Secret Europe invites a reader to likewise create explosions of their own imagination - case in point, when reading about those two white cube buildings that stand for so much for the narrator, I reflected on a white cube building that, for me, symbolizes a future for humanity embracing both harmony and great beauty: Moshe Safdie’s Habitat, a model community and housing complex in Montreal.


Habitat 67, designed by Moshe Safdie for the 1967 World Expo


British author Mark Valentine, born 1960


British author John Howard, born 1961

[Patrick.G.P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Europe’s forgotten corners are nestled beneath social and political upheaval, the shifting of power, hidden agendas and the re-drawing of borders. This is the backdrop of Secret Europe, a collection of tales set in Europe before the great war up until WW2. The tales revolve around old traditions, strange secrets, hidden artifacts, and occulted lore that lurks beneath the surface tension. Both Howard and Valentine has a keen sense of place and history, and wonderfully evokes, not only the shades of an alternated history, but also the strange and the hidden. The notion that Europe’s roots are buried deeper than most people suspect, far deeper than conflict and politics.

Mark Valentine has the uncanny ability to convey the profoundly mysterious like few other authors I’ve come across, and some of his stand-out tales in this collection highlight his ability perfectly; The Other Salt, the journey to find a hidden depository of a rare, high-grade salt, in the midst of a treacherous swampland. The Goat Eyed, a walled-in city with prominent gate-keepers, unable to keep a sinister, goat-eyed cabal from infiltrating their city. And A Lantern for Carpathia, a historian who stumbles upon a hidden republic deep in the forested mountains of Carpathia. As with Valentine’s other work, the highlight of the tales is the mystery itself, and it comes off wonderfully in these stories.

This is my first encounter with the work of John Howard, and I must say I got lost wandering in his elegant prose and sense of history in this book. His stories transported me to the small republics of Europe, and I felt I could hear the snow crunch under my shoes and feel the coming of strife and change on the wind. Howard’s The White City is a tale that will stay with me for a long time, a small European republic besieged by totalitarian forces opens up for a quiet but very powerful way of showing resistance in the face of fascism. Truly remarkable. A Waltz of Masks was another tale of the growing unrest in Europe’s high society before the turmoil of the great war, and how deceit and discontent lurked in the masked background of the glorious emperor’s ball. Howard’s tales beautifully conveys the struggles of the oncoming war and power struggles that Europe faced from the late 1800s up until the 1940s. After reading this, I absolutely need to explore more of Howard’s work.

This was just an outstanding collection of stories, taking place sometimes in an alternate history, yet gives an incentive to view history from a different viewpoint, taking into account that Europe’s secrets are not always readily given or found.

[Fraser Burnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of tales. Highly recommended.

[Timothy Jarvis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mesmerizing collection of strange fiction. These tales cover the whole gamut of moods and tones, but are held together by setting: the backwaters of Europe between the wars, the fraying hems of unravelling empires. But the gaze is unflinching, not wistful, nostalgic. Though the atmosphere throughout is uncanny, the supernatural element is largely muted (though the denouement of stories such as 'The Other Salt' and 'The Atelier at Iasi' did give rise to a shudder, and the alt-historical 'The Hunting Castle' is powerful and unsettling).

There are strong characters and situations here, but ultimately place, geography, culture, and history, is the clear protagonist. A compelling and affecting weird travelogue, quite unique, though Jan Morris's 'Hav' is a good comparison.

[Nguyen Dang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I no longer revisit it as often as before, Secret Europe is indisputably my favourite volume ever to have been released by Ex Occidente & its various imprints.

Born & raised in an East Asian setting, my ignorance of European history & culture was absolute, 'til I was fortunate enough to leave for the distant Australian shores, free to indulge in & explore as I wish these topics, albeit only through books & travelogues (alas!). Which is to say, this volume fits perfectly with this hobby / line of enquiry of mine, if ever so obliquely. I loved the days & nights spent over the book - ruminating, speculating, feverishly looking up, reading into the source, the historical events & places & people that might have inspired each delightful tale.

In this respect, to this day Valentine's The Goat-Eyed remains the only to baffle me, as the setting seems so... archetypal. It reads as if it could have been a chronicle of any Western city, at any given point in pre-modern history. Most intriguing, and as it happens, this is also one of my favourite tales from the collection.

Two other favourites also bear mentioning:

Valentine's A Lantern for Carpathia - Such an aching, nay, heartrending tribute to a region that never was, a nation that could have been. I was & continue to be the most emotionally affected by this story. Perhaps the affinity is derived in part because the Carpathians' oppression & suffering somewhat echo those of my own people? Who can possibly tell.

Howard's The Hunting Castle - With the possible exception of the Japanese, a typical East Asian's ignorance of European history extends to the Third Reich. As a boomerang effect, I have over time developed a rather perverse fascination with this regime, including artistic & cultural references thereto. Thus inevitably, this short alt-history featuring Albert Speer as the Reich Chancellor of a victorious Reich would rank high in my list. It does help that the piece, though mainly told through character dialogues, is in fact most entertaining.

So there you have it, 5 dazzling stars out of 5.

[Jess M · Rating 4 out of 5]

A spell for dark eyes, Spy’s in the Orchestra, Chessboard cities, Gnostic conversations as the great serpent sleeps, Goat eyed strangers smuggled in through secret gates……

26 tales (Tartarus edition) of inter war intrigue and mystery with a nod to the Decadents. A crescendo is often preceded by a slow, perhaps unmemorable beginning. This is the approach this volume of tales used to lure me in. Bravo!

[Bill Hsu · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started reading Secret Europe on my way to Berlin, and was really looking forward to it. Given my enthusiasm for Howard/Valentine's later Inner Europe, I'm surprised how much trouble I'm having with this. The stories here are much shorter, and the ideas don't seem to me very developed in their specific contexts. For example, I get the references in "The Hunting Castle", but I thought it was a little exercise that I couldn't get into.

"Prince Aziz" was amusing, with the sly and ironic narrator. I also enjoyed "The Atelier at Iasi", a rather Aickman-esque Brit travelogue that goes horribly wrong.

[Jess M]

A spell for dark eyes, Spy’s in the Orchestra, Chessboard cities, Gnostic conversations as the great serpent sleeps, Goat eyed strangers smuggled in through secret gates……

26 tales (Tartarus edition) of inter war intrigue and mystery with a nod to the Decadents. A crescendo is often preceded by a slow, perhaps unmemorable beginning. This is the approach this volume of tales used to lure me in. Bravo!

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A review of Secret Europe by John Howard and Mark Valentine
http://jayrothermel.blogspot.com/2017...

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

These 25 tales, from the tag-team of Howard and Valentine, are set during the stream of social discontent that swept across Eastern Europe between the Wars.
Short though the stories maybe, the economy of words only heightens the emphasis and purpose. To each, there is a great sense of purpose, without ever endangering the flow of the plot.

Some of these are amongst the best short stories I have read. The reason for that is the blend the authors have hit upon, of historic fiction, folklore and just a sprinkle of fantasy.
Howard's themes represent a revenge against the state in some form or other. Valentine's tend to concern the plight of individuals coping with their environments.

Amazingly to me, these sort of stories tend to get less readers than the work both are (arguably) better known for, more fantastical, and weird, often horror.
Originally published in 2012, Tartarus reissued in 2014 and 2019. Though the limited edition hard copies are expensive, the ebooks are not.
There is a twin to this, Inner Europe, which I am thoroughly looking forward to.

I have purposely not referred to any one story here. My intention is to read it again, and make a short review of most.. so bear with me please..

[Tom]

It took me a while to get into this collection. At first, I found the stories tantalising but disappointing; too short to be narratively satisfying. As I got further in, I found a few of the stories much more substantial, while I was also falling into the rhythm of the shorter pieces. By the end, I found that the best of them were polished little mysteries that gave just enough to get me invested and then dazzled with their, often enigmatic, conclusion.

[Des Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfect ending to our perfect book. Thanks for allowing me to share it.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is one of its observations.

[Gennady Gorin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Calvino but better.