Italo Calvino once said that he dreamed of writing the kind of stories that, lost to the world for an unknown number of years, are found in the attic of an abandoned house. Rhys Hughes, poking around in the same roof-space, has beaten him to it. As a result, we are proud to present a selection of the best stories from Hughes’s fortuitous find. We believe that they are suffused with the particular flavour of atticness after which Calvino yearned. Stories From a Lost Anthology is a new collection of tales (although, of course, they’ve been mouldering in that attic for an unspecified period) by Rhys Hughes, an acknowledged master of the short story. Fantastic, clever, funny, Hughes’s plotting and puns are frequently outrageous, but somehow, through a strong but warped internal logic, all is made probable, even believable. Many of the stories are set in the author’s native Wales, although they may not describe that country as the official guidebooks would have it. Have you ever wondered what happens in the rooms above a Welsh public house? Or to a vampire when it’s polarity is reversed? And how exactly would you kidnap Dylan Thomas, a half-century after his death? As Michael Moorcock says of Rhys Hughes in his Introduction to this collection, “Few living fictioneers approach this chef’s sardonic confections, certainly not in English. . . . His easy, Welsh harping will, I promise, stay with you, infectious, charming, oddly persuasive. Be warned: His images will inform your dreams.”

Castor Jenkins is a Welshman who tells stories that may (or may not) be true...but no matter how fantastic, no one can prove they never happened! In the tradition of Lord Dunsany's The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens and Arthur C. Clarke's Tales of the White Hart, here is a collection of club stories full of wonder and marvels, as only Rhys Hughes could have told them.

Mirrors in the Deluge, by master story-teller Rhys Hughes, is a collection of 32 unrelated tales that take elements from fantasy, science fiction, horror and other genres and give them a lateral shift.  Like much of Rhys’ work these quirky stories between them encompass parody, pastiche and puns. The fun, as ever, starts with the title of each story – gently leading an unsuspecting reader into preconceived ideas and expectations; expectations that are soon spun around, turned on their head (or other extremities), and pushed in an unexpected direction. Thus, a saunter merely through the contents page is already a hugely entertaining experience and one more akin to savouring the hors d’oeuvres of a grand feast than consulting a list of shortcuts into a literary tome. In fact, the gastronomic metaphor serves us well here; the courses on offer range from tantalising tuck to a gourmand’s repast, but never mere vittles – perhaps the way to enjoy this book is to digest one story, three times a day (four if you’re a halfling who needs second breakfast), rather than trying to gorge on all the available delights and delicacies at one sitting. To complete this gourmet’s guide, a tempting sampling of the stories must include:   The Soft Landing, a unique story told from the perspective of a photon;   Travels with my Antinomy, how do you solve a paradox when you’re part of it?;   Vanity of Vanities, the internet achieves consciousness and takes over, but with very different consequences than you might imagine;   The Fairy and the Dinosaur, in which a fairy can’t find what she wants for her picnic in the goblin market, is offered cloned prehistoric plums but turns to a time-travelling robot to go back to the age of the dinosaurs and eat an original plum.   Other titles to tempt you include The Martian Monocles, The Prodigal Beard, A Dame Abroad, The Unkissed Artist Formerly Known as Frog, The Goat That Gloated, The Taste of Turtle Tears, The Bones of Jones, and The Haggis Eater.

Orpheus on the Underground is the new Rhys Hughes collection from Tartarus, containing fifteen previously unpublished stories (‘The Concise Picaresque Adventures of the Wanderlust Bridge’ first appeared in Strange Tales II). Ranging from the ghostly, through horror to the entirely fantastic, Hughes’ marvellously inventive tales steer the reader through the bizarre labyrinths of his unique talent for the strange. In ‘The Upper Reaches’, two pilots discover a world beyond their mission, while the eponymous hero of ‘Orpheus on the Underground’ attempts to shoe-horn classical myth into the transport system of a modern metropolis. ‘Behind Every Ghost’ takes a conventional aphorism to its illogical limit, while ‘The Phantom Festival’ explores the history of music on various levels. In the ‘The Quixote Candidate’, a would-be film director is persuaded to give what may turn out to be an overly comprehensive interview.In the years since the publication of his first collection (Worming the Harpy, Tartarus Press, 1995), Rhys Hughes has become one of the éminence grises of the strange tale. He wears his reputation lightly, and it is the sheer fun and individuality of Orpheus on the Underground that make the stories so memorable

The unusual escapades of a self-exploding golem with a twisted horn and attitude somewhere on the astral plane and also on foot right here. Rhys Hughes once again foists his mad tale-spinning ability upon the world with this brand-new novel of monsters attacking all that is bad (musicians, Frenchmen… you know, those sort of people), tipping his hat in the direction of both ‘Hellboy’ and Philip José Farmer in the process. when this author describes something as “this is the maddest thing I’ve ever written”, you know you’re in for something ‘special’.

‘Herodotus is indeed an unusual cat. As with most felines he was born with nine lives, though he has done his best to reduce this number. Sometimes I will baste a vole for him, or grill a dogfish, while he relates his adventures with a slow languid wink in the smoky light of the charcoal ovens. Often we will share a bottle of Chablis or dip our tongues into the sherry syllabub and talk about old times and bewail a world that has changed far too much.’The tales contained within Worming the Harpy and other Bitter Pills are set in a surreal world of nightmares all too closely identifiable with real life. If The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was retouched by Ralph Steadman, with The Rolling Stones ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ as a soundtrack, you would have only the slightest inkling of the scintillating and horrific world conjured by Rhys Hughes.