De Profundis (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)

By H. De Vere Stacpoole

This early work by H. de Vere Stacpoole was originally published in 1917 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography as part of our Cryptofiction Classics series. 'De Profundis' is a short story of a voyage from Hong Kong to fix a broken cable that results in an encounter with a creature of the deep. Henry De Vere Stacpoole was born on April 9th 1863 in Kingstown, Ireland. Stacpoole's writing career started with the publication of 'The Intended' in 1894, but his most famous work is 'The Blue Lagoon', a romance novel published in 1908. The book was met with critical acclaim and was adapted to film twenty times in twelve years. The subsequent years proved to be Stacpoole's most prolific with a number of works being published in quick succession, 'Pierrot' in 1896, and 'Death, the Knight, and the Lady' in 1897. The Cryptofiction Classics series contains a collection of wonderful stories from some of the greatest authors in the genre, including Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. From its roots in cryptozoology, this genre features bizarre, fantastical, and often terrifying tales of mythical and legendary creatures. Whether it be giant spiders, werewolves, lake monsters, or dinosaurs, the Cryptofiction Classics series offers a fantastic introduction to the world of weird creatures in fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Feb 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473399594

Book preview

De Profundis

By H. de Vere Stacpoole

A Cryptofiction Classic

Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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from the British Library

Introduction

The genre of cryptofiction has grown up in the shadow of its older brothers, science fiction and fantasy. While the latter two continue to move towards the mainstream of literary tastes – as evidenced by reaction to modern series such as Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire – many readers have probably never even heard of cryptofiction. Odd, when one considers that some of the most famous authors in the Western tradition have dabbled in cryptofiction, and that even today works of cryptofiction frequently feature on bestseller lists.

Cryptofiction takes its name from another, non-literary practice: cryptozoology. Cryptozoology is generally regarded as a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists, relying as it does upon anecdotal, often unverifiable evidence. However, it still boasts many enthusiasts, and continues to exert considerable artistic allure. Focused on the search for animals whose existence has not been established – who are literally kryptos, Greek for hidden – cryptozoology traces its roots to the work of the 19th-century Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943). Oudemans’ 1892 work, The Great Sea Serpent, was a collected study of global sea serpent sightings, which hypothesised that all these serpents might stem from a previously unknown species of giant seal.

Around the same time that Oudemans’ work came to prominence, cryptozoology experienced its early crossovers with the fiction of the day. Following in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) – which featured a mysterious giant sea