The Exorcist's Travelogue

*The Exorcist's Travelogue is a full-colour illustrated sewn hardcover book of 125 pages with dust-jacket, silk ribbon, endpapers and a full-colour frontispiece. Collector's edition limited to only 60 hand numbered copies.*

Imagine if Herodotus had lived on through the centuries, collecting supernatural tales along his travels; or if a collection of scattered medieval fragments could be brought together and made to yield their secrets. Imagine, too, a storyteller who writes for the dead, crafting tributes to past masters from the depths of his nostalgia. Imagine, finally, prose so pristine and economical that every tale is a universe, and you have, then, a true impression of George Berguño’s The Exorcist’s Travelogue, his second collection of short stories.

The eight stories that are showcased in The Exorcist’s Travelogue blend history with the uncanny. From modern Scotland to sixth-century Norway; from Roman Constantinople to Soviet Russia; from medieval Iceland to an eerie contemporary London – the stories glow with compassion for their characters; a kindness that tells of the suffering of those who are spiritually homeless and dispossessed.

An archaeologist stumbles upon an ancient riddle in the Outer Hebrides that can only be solved on an infinite chessboard. In the midst of a famine in Iceland a beached whale brings a message from another world. A young man searches for his long lost father in the secret galleries of the British Museum. A lonely old Lamia revises Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of love. On the day he dies, a maligned Russian author remembers a mysterious conversation with Joseph Stalin. These are some of the strange encounters to be found in this deeply autumnal book; a book that ends with a remarkable true story about an extraordinary incident one summer’s night in Aachen.

Contents

The Son’s Crime

The Leviathan at Rifsker

A Chronicle of Repentance

The Sad Eyes of the Lewis Chessmen

The Loneliness of the One-Night Lamia

The Farewell Letter

Flaubert's Alexandrine