FICTION

HIEROGLYPHIC TALES by Horace Walpole, illustrated by Jill McElmurry (Mercury House: $12.95 paper; 96 pp.). Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Oxford, 1717-1797, is far more spoken of than read. Best known today as the genius behind Strawberry Hill, his outlandish manor house on the Thames, Walpole was equally notorious in his time for writing “The Castle of Otranto,” now regarded as the first gothic novel. Walpole was a prolific writer--we learn in the introduction to this book that his posthumously published letters amounted to 48 volumes--and in “Hieroglyphic Tales” the publisher has dredged up one of his more fantastic works. Walpole, one of England’s pioneering self-publishers, printed only a handful of copies of “Hieroglyphic Tales,” and it’s easy to see why: they are bizarre, grotesque and often baffling, both anticipating and outdoing modern experimental fiction. An archbishop swallows a human fetus, thinking it a peach in brandy; a corpse seeks the hand of a nonexistent royal heir; goat eggs are prescribed for the elimination of freckles. Although this collection is mainly of historical interest, Walpole occasionally makes room for wicked satire--as when he righteously notes, apropos the goat eggs, “It would be fine indeed if learned men were obliged to believe what they assert.”