The Sacrifice and Other Stories

The Sacrifice and Other Stories includes four novella-length stories not published in the author’s lifetime.
In ‘The Sacrifice’ a young artist encounters an Eastern-inspired tragedy in an idyllic English country garden, while ‘The Sea-Things’ is a marine mystery-story with a Red Sea setting. In the conte cruel ‘Number Fourteen’ the followers of an obscure South American religious cult gain curious influence over a beautiful dancer in post-War London, while in ‘The King of the Lake’ two young English-women are rescued from a Saharan sandstorm by mysterious horsemen and taken to a secret underground Lake.
All of the works in this collection display Sarban’s ‘strange combination of daydream and nightmare’, first noted by Kingsley Amis, and continue the skilful exploration of his characteristically opposed themes of wonder and fear, power and enslavement, paradise and purgatory.