Of most interest is «The Gynarchs», as yet unpublished complete although extracts appear in Discovery of Heretics: Unseen Writings (coll 2011) about a Post-Holocaust matriarchal Utopia. "The Sea-Things" (in The Sacrifice and Other Stories, coll 2002) reveals a new merman-like race of Supernatural Creatures. Of these "The King of the Lake" in The Sound of His Horn and The King of the Lake (coll 1999) has a Lost World setting in the Sahara but is ostensibly an erotic Arabian fantasy. Recent research has unearthed previously unpublished material by Wall and resulted in a reissue of his works augmented by new material.
Most of the short stories assembled in Ringstones, and Other Curious Tales (coll 1951) and The Doll Maker, and Other Tales of the Uncanny (coll 1953) are fantasy, but the haunting and nightmarish The Sound of His Horn ( 1952) has often been conscripted to the sf ranks by sf critics, for it is partially set in an Alternate History, a Germany 100 years after the Nazis have triumphed in World War Two (see Hitler Wins) the evocation of this timeless Ruritanian enclave, however, is as a pure fantasy land, ruled over by a charismatic Master Forester (an avatar of Herne the Hunter), where untermensch dissidents are hunted down for sport the dark, flamboyant imagery of erotic chastisement is startlingly fetishistic. Pseudonym of UK author John W Wall (1910-1989), a career diplomat for the UK from 1933 until his retirement in 1966.
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