A Sensational Trance by Forbes Dawson weird fantasy

Illustrated by F Mackenzie (20 plates)
First edition, first printing published by Downey & Co, London, 1895.
Condition: Good, 178pp, publisher's original black cloth with gilt stamped titles to upper board and the spine. Corners are bumped, and the spine tips are rubbed, boards are still deep in colour and the gilt titles still rather bright, publisher's name to bottom of the spine has faded a touch. Endpapers are toned/foxed, pages are tightly bound and have some thumbing marks. Chipping to the bottom of p118 and 123/24. The illustrations are superb.

*Weird fantasy novel. A purely fantastic vein has never been more thoroughly worked out ... The book recounts a series of wildly impossible dreamlike adventures, with absolutely no explanation or rationale as to where one chapter starts and another one ends.

The most powerful chapter of the book is 'The City of the Dead' which takes place in an abandoned London, where all the inhabitants have either died or frozen in time. This book was in fact inspiration for H G Wells 'The War of the Worlds' in imagining an abandoned London, a powerful visual trope which has since been used to great effect in films such as 28 Days Later

"H. G. Wells read this story promptly, if his acknowledgment in an 1898 interview is correct. It (A Sensational Trance) was one source for The War of the Worlds (1897), contracted August 1895, in that it inspired his "vision of 'an empty and depopulated London' ". "Wells explored alternative ways of 'how to get London still and empty' " and settled on flight from an invasion by creatures from another planet, the latter an idea from his brother."
Peter J. Beck, The War of the Worlds (Bloomsbury 2016)