Treatises on Dust

＂From the small bones of the middle ear can be fashioned a key.＂

＂For a while now,＂ Timothy J. Jarvis tells us in the first tale here, ＂I’ve been collecting texts that hint at strange tales.＂ He goes on to explain that these ＂Treatises on Dust＂ are not ghost stories in the traditional sense. Indeed none of the pieces in the collection could be said to be in the vein of traditional supernatural fiction. They are haunted, not by ghosts, but by an obscure volume of French decadent poetry, a seventeenth-century murder ballad, a bone antenna, and by places where ＂the membrane is thin＂.

They cleave closer to what the literary hermit of Arthur Machen’s Hieroglyphics called ＂ecstasy＂. Though perhaps an ecstasy found less in the ＂withdrawal from the common life and the common consciousness＂, than one grubbed up from the murk of that very consciousness.