Incurable - The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson

Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era's Dark Angel, edited by Nina Antonia / ISBN 9781907222627 / 205-page paperback with flaps, 5 x 7.5 inches, from Strange Attractor Press (UK) [note that stain on the cover is part of the design] *** Writings that shed new light on one of the most gifted, if reclusive, poets of thefin-de-siècle. A lost poet of the decadent era, Lionel Johnson is the shadow man of the 1890s, an enigma “pale as wasted golden hair.” History has all but forgotten Johnson, except as a footnote to the lives of more celebrated characters like W. B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde. Johnson should have been one of the great poets of the age but was already drinking eau-de-cologne for kicks while a teenager at Winchester College. His attraction to absinthe damaged his fragile health and cast him forever into a waking dream of haunted rooms and spectral poetry. A habitual insomniac, he haunted medieval burial grounds after dark, jotting down the epitaphs of