Founding Statement

Rationalism, as a totalizing worldview, leaves us impoverished—unable to recognize value, beauty, or the sacred.
When everything must justify itself by proof or profit, we blind ourselves to realities that defy such accounting.
The numinous doesn’t submit to cost–benefit analysis; awe cannot be quantified.
Late capitalism packages feeling, reducing wonder to content—and its prevailing realism reflects this same impoverishment.
That the market overflows with “fantasy” only clarifies the loss: what once named a mode of vision has become another genre of consumption.
True enchantment—the kind that unsettles and illuminates—has become scarce.

 

The fiction of the weird and the marvelous is not escapism.
At its best, it is a vital and dignified current in literature, traceable to our oldest written stories—from Virgil and Aeschylus to the Táin and the Icelandic sagas; from medieval romance to the Gothic of Emily Brontë, Poe, and Melville; to the weird tales of Machen and Blackwood, and on to the contemporary masters who sustain the tradition.

 

These writers understand what the reductive aesthetics of our age deny:
some truths are accessible only through dream and myth.
There are experiences—of terror and wonder, of encounter with the unknown—that demand the language of the fantastic to be told honestly.

 

The great fantasists are not consolers; they are disturbers.
They insist that the world is stranger, more terrible, and more beautiful than we have been taught to see.
They resist the demand that everything be explicable, manageable, and stripped of mystery.

 

Having studied soil ecosystems, I know that the most vital processes occur in darkness, beneath the surface we can see.
The invisible worlds matter.

 

Frolic Press exists to explore these buried worlds—to recover neglected masterworks, to present them in editions worthy of their literary power, and to publish new works that continue this living tradition.
We believe in fiction that acknowledges the sacred, treats the supernatural as presence, and values strangeness as essential to being fully alive.

 

Frolic is an invitation to readers who have felt what I describe—
to those who know that some of the truest things can only be said slant.

 

 

 

 

—Travis D. Johnson
Founder & Editor, Frolic Press
St. Augustine, Florida · October 2025