I Am Your Brother

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Very Good+ in Good dj. (c.1935). First American Edition. Hardcover. [spine moderately turned, tiny chunk out of cloth of front hinge near base of spine, light soiling to page edges, internally very clean; jacket well-worn with various small tears/creases, minor paper loss at several corners, large chunk missing at base of spine, soiling to rear panel]. Very uncommon novel by a somewhat enigmatic author (who may or may not have died in World War II). Set in London, it tells the story of Julian, a tormented young composer who discovers that his late mother had for years been keeping his monstrously deformed brother (apparently the result of some kind of artificial-insemination experiment gone awry) confined in the attic of their house, feeding him raw meat and reading him fairy stories. After Mom gets hit by a bus, the responsibility for Brother now falls on Julian, who (being of delicate and artistic temperament) is already not exactly the most stable individual on the planet. A very strange novel (described by one writer as "a little like ‘The Dunwich Horror’ with a London setting"), it was quite a sensation in its day, but was apparently never reprinted and is now nearly impossible to find. J. Maclaren-Ross, writing about his encounter with Marlowe in the late 1930s, said the author told him that the novel "originated as a bedtime story told to the children of Sir Roderick and Lady Jones [Enid Bagnold, to whom the book is dedicated] while staying with them in the country." The author also spent a little time in Hollywood in the mid-1930's, where he made some minor (uncredited) contributions to the screenplay of DAVID COPPERFIELD. This may not be an especially pretty example of the rare dust jacket, but at least the ultra-creepy front-panel illustration is intact. (Note that while the jacket art is uncredited -- unless the artist's signature appears on a piece that's now missing -- it seems obviously the work of Rex Whistler.) .