Four Novels: A Voyage to Arcturus, The Haunted Woman, Sphinx,...

In A Voyage to Arcturus, the adventurous Maskull accepts an invitation to journey to a distant star system, only to find himself the focus of supernatural forces vying for the freedom or enslavement of human souls throughout the universe. In The Haunted Woman, Isbel Loment becomes fascinated by a house with hidden rooms that only appear to certain people at certain times — rooms in which you can glimpse your own true nature, and something of the true nature of reality, too. But all this is forgotten the instant you leave them... In Sphinx, Nicholas Cabot is determined to spend his newly-inherited fortune perfecting a machine for recording deep-sleep dreams, and finds them revealing insights into a tragic story playing out in the life of a young composer, Lore Jensen, who seems to have betrayed her once-profound musical talent. Devil’s Tor, which Lindsay saw as updating and deepening the themes of his first novel, is about the evolutionary influence of a supernatural (and extraterrestrial) Great Mother on the human race, and how she is now trying to bring together a man and woman in modern-day England to give birth to a new redeemer. These, David Lindsay’s most important novels published in his lifetime, are linked by the constant theme of the quest to find one’s true nature in the face of a deceptive, perhaps hostile, and often deeply trying reality. Images of rebirth and fleeting contact with sources of deeper understanding, are set amidst narratives of wild imagination, shocking violence, mystical experience, troubled love, cloying social mores, and a questioning of the very nature of reality. These novels can be read as philosophical speculation, occult symbolism, visionary revelation, and as unique classics of early 20th century imaginative fiction.

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