Webster, J Provand
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(? -? ) UK author whose The Oracle of Baal: A Narrative of Some Curious Events in the Life of Professor Horatio Carmichael, M.D. (1896) is a complicatedly told Lost Race tale for boys. In 1750, a century before the main narrative begins, an ancestor of the protagonist is seduced by a She figure originally from Africa but now in Scotland; the two become pirates before returning to the hidden African land of her birth, a lost Graeco-Carthaginian civilization where, after he wills his estate to his Scottish descendants, she has him killed because he has escaped her unholy sexual allure (see Sex). A century later his heir – accompanied by the frame-story narrator – finally reaches the lost City of Wayangari inhabited by descendants of ancient Greeks, who have enslaved the Affris, an Ape as Human tribe some of whose members walk upright. The Affris eventually revolt, destroying Wayangari, but then soon descending deeper into animal barbarism (see Devolution). Children of Wrath [for subtitle see Checklist] (1899) is a fantasy in which twelve brothers defile the temple of Hera and are cursed for two thousand years. [JC]
John Provand Webster
born
works
- The Oracle of Baal: A Narrative of Some Curious Events in the Life of Professor Horatio Carmichael, M.D. (London: Hutchinson and Company, 1896) [illus/hb/Warwick Goble]
- Children of Wrath: Being the Memoirs or One, Judah Elvero, a Prince of the Tribe of Benjamin Written in the Year 1697 (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1899) [illus/hb/]
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