What Manner of Man: Preface 🦇

AND SO IT BEGINS…

Thank you for reading What Manner of Man! The first dispatch from Father Ardelian will be delivered to your inbox tomorrow, May 03 — after which there will be a new installment every Friday until [checks calendar] uh, January 03, 2025! (Who wrote this and why is it so long!?) In the meantime, please enjoy the preface!

I should mention that a ✨ New and Improved ✨ preface is also available on Patreon. I am serializing, exclusively for patrons, chapters of the shiny and alluring version of the novel which has been edited and expanded for the purpose of publication. That version includes several exciting, brand new scenes and chapters. (For the record, there are no exciting, brand new scenes in the preface.)

What Manner of Man contains the correspondence, journal entries, and other selected papers of Victor E. Ardelian, of unknown parish¹, who was an ordained priest of the Catholic Church. The events described in the correspondence took place, by my estimate, between the months of February to June or July of the year 1950.

I have undertaken the task of presenting this material on behalf of a close personal friend who, for reasons of his own, wishes to remain anonymous. It recently came into his possession by way of inheritance, as a direct descendant of Vera Ardelian, to whom the majority of the letters were originally addressed. 

Despite their being addressed to her, Vera Ardelian never read any of what follows. 

It wasn’t until some years after Vera’s death that a collection of letters addressed to her was found and, eventually, delivered — along with all the papers from which this material has been selected — to her eldest daughter. This daughter, the aunt of my friend, confided their contents to him. No matter how often he asked, however, she would never consent to their publication. She was not a notably open-minded person, I gather, and there can be little doubt that her refusal was due primarily to the extremely personal and, at times, shocking nature of some of the journal entries — and possibly to the considerable scandal they might even now cause in some quarters. It was only in response to my friend’s earnest pleas that she refrained from destroying these papers outright. It has been his fixed desire for many years that they should be put into connected form and presented to the world. Now, with his aunt’s recent passing, this has at last become possible.

The piecing together of these materials into a coherent, unified narrative has been a labour of over a year and given the two of us more than a few sleepless nights. Many passages were undated and many more were partly or entirely destroyed by water or fire. The order in which they have been presented is in a few instances hardly more than an educated guess.

When you’ve read it, though, I’m confident you’ll agree with me that this was very much worth the effort. The result is a thrilling account of Father Ardelian’s remarkable experiences on the island of Swallow’s Rest — the exact location of which, at the time of writing, no one has yet been able to ascertain² — and, in particular, of his intimate association with a man named Alistair Vane. 

The delicate question of the discretion and good taste of including the full, uncensored version of this text is a matter to which my friend and I have devoted serious consideration. Due to the highly personal nature of the journals, along with some potential offense to the Catholic Church, it was not an easy decision to present these records in their entirety. Ultimately, however, intellectual honesty won out. In light of their undoubted historical significance, it is my friend’s wish that these documents be published in as complete a form as could be managed. My job is not that of censor and neither I nor my friend feels it’s our place to sanitize or suppress any details.

That isn’t to say this story is completely intact, though. In some cases text was deliberately effaced by the author and little of this has proved recoverable. Sometimes whole pages had to be painstakingly reconstructed from fragments. So I must beg the reader’s patience and forgiveness for their weary transcriber if there are occasional omissions or gaps in the text.

I wish to add that despite the shocking and, in some cases, scarcely credible nature of the events described in these papers, it is my belief that it is all — or, at least, very nearly all — true.

What Manner of Man will be presented in weekly installments, as best fits the timeline of events. Readers should be advised of the sexually explicit nature of some chapters. 

Your humble servant,
St John Starling

Thank you for reading! 💜

By the way — were you wondering what the “E” in Victor E. Ardelian stands for? So was I! (When I first revisited this for editing.) If I ever had a middle name in mind, I neglected to write it down. Since all of my patrons necessarily have exquisite taste, I gave them the task of christening him, and I am pleased to report that the “E” officially stands for “Everett”.

Reminder that every week, on Patreon, I’m sharing a chapter from the shiny, new, slightly sexier version of What Manner of Man which has been expanded, improved, and polished generally for the purpose of publication. That version includes entire chapters of original material.

1. Curiously enough, the original parish served by Father Ardelian was unable to be precisely determined despite consulting a variety of church records. Something somewhere seems to have been mislaid.

2. Not altogether surprising, perhaps, as Father Ardelian himself notes the fact that it is not recorded on most maps. At present the nearest I’ve been able to get is that it may be somewhere off the coast of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall. I suspect that several words and phrases in the text by which its location might have been identified have been deliberately effaced.