Knut takes place during WWII in the house of the Strobls, a Norwegian aristocratic estate populated by leeching relatives, ruled by the loveless widow Madame Strobl. Sickly son and heir Knut writes of his early life in a confessional manuscript handed to his doting sister Katya, for whom he nurtures intolerable incestuous desires. Knut is a darkly comic take on the gothic novel told in a prose style that captures the tension, violence, and decay of its setting, and parodies its cast of beastly hangers-on and contemptuous aristocrats. A largely neglected artist and writer, Tom Mallin published...

Completed in 1962, first published in 1972, Tom Mallin's third novel Erowina is an encyclopaedic portrait of the titular troubled heroine, whose traumatic experiences in childhood and adolescence are transformed in adulthood into self-hatred and wild abandonment to erotic and sadomasochistic activities, ending with her suicide at thirty-six. Over twenty chapters, Erowina utilises a stunning range of styles and forms, from an autopsy report, confessional stream-of-consciousness, theological conversations, surreal symbolical stories, third-person accounts, scenes in dialogue riddled with puns...