Stephen Tennant Livres

Whitstable - 1971. Peter Cushing, grief-stricken over the loss of his wife and soul-mate, is walking along a beach near his home. A little boy approaches him, taking him to be the famous vampire-hunter Van Helsing from the Hammer films, begs for his expert help... Leytonstone - 1906. Young Alfred Hitchcock is taken by his father to visit the local police station. There he suddenly finds himself, inexplicably, locked up for a crime he knows nothing about - the catalyst for a series of events that will scar, and create, the world's leading Master of Terror... Netherwood - 1947. Best-selling black magic novelist Dennis Wheatley finds himself summoned mysteriously to the aid of Aleister Crowley - mystic, reprobate, The Great Beast 666, and dubbed by the press ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’ - to help combat a force of genuine evil...

Throughout his life, Stephen Tennant (1906-1987), a decadent socialite, modernist, dandy and 'the brightest' of the 'Bright Young People', contemplated a novel about 'high life with a capital H and full of crude impossibilities'. Despite his elaborate preparations, the book itself never materialised. Yet, over the course of his life - sequestered in a manor in the English countryside decorated with fishnets, pink satin and golden conch shells, his hair long and died mauve - Tennant produced abundant drawings of potential covers for the book he was never to write. In 'Gutters of Gold', the artist Volker Eichelmann has responded to Tennant's drawings with his own series of freewheeling, evocative paintings and collages. In so doing, and in combining his images with Tennant's, Eichelmann has finally realised Tennant's long-dreamed-of book. As an artist's publication, Gutters of Gold innovatively highlights and expands on preoccupations shared by both Tennant and Eichelmann, such as hedonism, Modernism, and, unusually, how these two concepts can play out in the countryside rather than in an urban landscape.