The Lay of Old Hex

ADAM BOLIVAR is a formal poet of dark fantasy, a weird fiction writer and a playwright for marionettes with a particular interest in balladry, alliterative verse and "Jack" tales. He is the author of The Lay of Old Hex (Hippocampus Press, 2017), The Ettinfell of Beacon Hill (Jackanapes Press, 2021) and Ballads for the Witching Hour (Hippocampus Press 2022). A second volume of his occult detective Ettinfell saga is due out from Jackanapes Press in 2024 and third is forthcoming. A marionette-maker, he has written and performed in several original marionette plays performed by puppet troupes in Boston, Berkeley, Portland and Salem, Oregon. A native of gambrel-roofed Boston, Massachusetts, he now resides in the gloomy dreamlands of Portland, Oregon with his golden-haired wife and son.

The ballad is one of the most ancient forms of poetic expression, and it has been used for the expression of weirdness and terror at least since the days of Sir Walter Scott. In recent years, the accomplished weird poet Adam Bolivar has lent new vitality and piquancy to this venerable literary mode.The present volume, a masterpiece of folk horror, assembles a wealth of Bolivar's spectral balladry, prose tales, and vignettes, telling the story of Jack Drake, whose mother gives him a Silver Key that triggers his subsequent journeys and adventures. It becomes evident that many of these adventures echo the work of H. P. Lovecraft, a dominant influence on Bolivar's poetry, flawlessly conveying terror and strangeness in a manner that evokes both old-time legendry and contemporary cosmic horror. In one of the most powerful of his ballads, "The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner," he fuses Lovecraft and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in reinterpreting "The Call of Cthulhu" by means of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.Deftly interweaving English and Appalachian traditions, Adam Bolivar's mastery of the diction and atmosphere of the weird ballad allows him to tap into haunted undercurrents of ancestral memory, producing phantasmal effects seldom found in other forms of weird literature.Weird poetry is thriving in our time, but it is safe to say that few poets today can match the achievement of Adam Bolivar in fashioning this rich conglomeration of hypnotic verse.