Brian Catling was a fascinating artist, working across several disciplines. He was a writer, poet, sculptor, painter, film-maker and performance artist and his work often employed several media at once. Perhaps best known for his Vorrh trilogy of novels, Catling also worked in the short form and in 2019 published Only the Lowly, a series of interlinked tales that effectively form a fractured novella. Since his death in 2022, editors Victor Rees and Iain Sinclair have looked to assemble a fitting tribute to Catling’s life and work, gathering previously published pieces and discovering short fragments and prose experiments on his laptop; A Mystery of Remnant, published by Swan River Press, is the result. Let me, however, dispel any fears that this new collection is a compendium of sweepings from the floor; it is anything but. What emerges in this book is a composite picture of a complex and genuine iconoclast, an artist absorbed in an investigation of existence and non-existence, and the border between.
In ‘Heart of the Forest’, Catling delves into the psyche of Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), a painter of dreamlike landscapes, in search of sources of inspiration in the haunted woods that surrounded him. Catling captures the sense of place and time perfectly in a deeply evocative exploration. ‘A Box of Lites: A Case of Fogs’, about a man who works admin behind the scenes in the Law Courts in London, dwells on his journey to and from work via a series of pubs by which he maintains a state of alcoholic haze in order to get through the days. There’s a heady whiff of the psychogeographic to this story in the network of pubs and environs that weave their way into the man’s conscious and subconscious thoughts and behaviour. In ‘House’, a man recalls a recent visit to a friend’s house where a brief manifestation of the uncanny shakes him to the core and precipitates a futile grasping at the inexplicable.
The standout stories for me are ‘Further Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, a sequel to or extension of the classic Edgar Allan Poe tale of cosmic horror, and ‘A Pendon Parva Ghost’, in which a self-appointed arbiter of artistic good taste guides a group of acquaintances through the Pendon Museum, a repository of local history not far from Dorchester Abbey that houses a remarkable scale model of the surrounding landscape as it was up to the 1930s, replete with fantastically detailed miniature houses, farmyards, people, and animals. For all that the self-appointed arbiter professes an appreciation of this diorama, the museum’s curator points out a moment of potential magic that he realises he’s incapable of apprehending.
Other highlights include ‘Vanished!’, the story of a sprite of sorts, or perhaps a demon, that gains access to a family’s home and offers companionship of differing and dubious natures to each of the family’s members, ‘April 6th 1744’, a retelling of the angelic visitation experienced by Emanuel Swedenborg and the epiphany that spawned his religious philosophy, and ‘Written Rooms and Pencilled Crimes’, a series of quasi-related vignettes that touch on aspects of rooms or areas haunted by absences.
The inclusion of a poem, ‘Large Ghost’, a short play, ‘Ugler I Mosen’, which pleads for the re-interment of the essence of a bog man, and an essay, ‘X Certify’, which celebrates Catling’s viewing of The Revenge of Frankenstein as the pivotal moment in his decision to become a creator, serve to illustrate just how diverse Catling was in his approach to seeking what lies in the liminal spaces just beyond out senses.
The publication of A Mystery of Remnant is an essential addition to Brian Catling’s body of work, one that shines a light on various of his obsessions/interests, and a vital selection that will send those not already familiar with his work in search of more.
A Mystery of Remnant by B. Catling (Swan River Press, hb, 143pp, €40.00)
John Kenny 
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