Brian J. Showers, Author at Swan River Press

John Kenny in Conversation with Mark Valentine about Mark’s new collection Lost Estates.

Mark Valentine is the author of several volumes of short stories including The Collected Connoisseur (Tartarus Press 2010) and Secret Europe (Ex Occidente Press 2012), both shared titles with John Howard. He has also written a biography of Arthur Machen (Seren 1990); and Time, a Falconer (Tartarus Press 2011), a study of the diplomat and fantasist “Sarban”. His books with Swan River Press include Selected Stories (2012) and Seventeen Stories (2013), both collections of his short fiction, and The Far Tower (2019), an original anthology of stories in celebration of W. B. Yeats.

John Kenny: Your previous collections published by Swan River Press focused on Middle Europe between the wars. This time out the focus is more on aspects of folk horror. There exists a strong tradition of folk horror that’s deeply rooted in the English rural landscape. Why do you think that is? And can you tell me who your inspirations are in this regard?

Mark Valentine: I’d like to plead “not guilty” to “folk horror”! I prefer a couple of terms I came upon recently in contemporary 1923 reviews of Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair and Visible and Invisible by E. F. Benson. The publisher, presumably with these authors’ agreement, called them “borderland” and “otherworld” stories, evidently terms then in use and well understood for occult and supernatural fiction. I think they do convey better the sense that can sometimes be felt in certain places of being close to a different realm. I’ve certainly had that experience several times and I appreciate in particular the work of writers who have also tried to express this sense of the numinous, such as Arthur Machen, Mary Butts, Forrest Reid, Jocelyn Brooke, John Cowper Powys and quite a few others in the field. For me, this was also bound up with my discovery in my late teens and early twenties of ancient mysteries books and journals, such as Mysterious Britain by Janet & Colin Bord and its sequels, which made exploring antiquities and remote landscapes seem exciting and strange, as if the world of Machen and these similar writers still existed.

JK: I really like that term “borderland”. Folk horror does seem to be largely connected to rural settings, whereas a couple of your stories in Lost Estates take place in cities: “And maybe the parakeet was correct” and “The End of Alpha Street”. I do think city streets and houses can accrete this sense of the numinous you’ve referred to. I’m thinking of some of Peter Ackroyd’s work, such as Hawksmoor, and that of Iain Sinclair and the whole concept of psychogeography. Is this a concept you think has validity?

MV: Yes, I admire the work of Iain Sinclair too and particularly the way he uses modernist literary techniques in his prose: the supernatural fiction field can sometimes seem a bit fusty and it’s good to see a more contemporary style: another example of a more radical approach would be M. John Harrison. And in fact Machen is now seen as a precursor of psychogeography, with his interest in wandering the back-streets and lonely quarters of London, as seen in The London Adventure, or, The Art of Wandering and with his flâneur Mr. Dyson. My friend and colleague John Howard does this to fine effect too, in his London stories. My understanding of the original concept of psychogeography is that it involves “aimless wandering”, the aimlessness being vital: ambling around just for the sake of it and seeing what transpires. I can see that this might lead to a heightened receptivity, where chance encounters and signs begin to seem significant: again, an approach Machen uses in his stories.

JK: There is certainly a sense of aimless wandering in “The House of Flame”, where the main character takes to the London streets, although he is in search of a kind of spiritual awakening. The story centres around the death in 1885 of Charles George Gordon, who is also referenced in another story in Lost Estates. What drew you to the story of Gordon of Khartoum?

MV: Well, in my childhood there was a series of colourful cards of Famous People given away with boxes of Brooke Bond tea. I was very interested in history and I enjoyed collecting these. The two that appealed to me most were not, as perhaps they should have been, social reformers and scientists, but two enigmatic soldiers: General Gordon and Lawrence of Arabia. No doubt it was because they seemed more mysterious. Later, I read in one of Machen’s autobiographical volumes his recollection of bringing the news of the fall of Khartoum to his father in the rectory at Llandewi, using his schoolboy Greek. This vignette stuck in my memory, and so when I was asked to contribute to a Machen-themed anthology I imagined a version of the youthful Machen and what the figure of Gordon might have meant to him.

JK: While Gordon couldn’t be considered a social reformer, he was actively involved in suppressing the slave trade in Sudan while he was there. I note that many of your stories use as a jumping off point an actual historical event, as in “The Fifth Moon”, which looks at the disappearance of King John’s treasure in 1216. Do you find that having an actual event at the heart of a story lends credibility or is it more a case of your interest in history acting as inspiration?

MV: I am interested in the way that history, legend, and literature interweave. I’ve been following the latest historical thinking on the figure of Arthur, which is now highly sceptical about not only any factual basis for such a king or warlord, but even the whole Britons vs Saxons story. It just isn’t supported by current archaeology or newly available genetic studies. Probably that will need to be refined further as research and analysis continues: the discipline of history itself is always changing. In the case of King John’s treasure, I was already familiar with the lonely landscape around North Norfolk and South Lincolnshire where the loss occurred and so enjoyed setting the story there, and it is an enduring mystery which still fascinates people today: treasure hunts are always thrilling. I also relished studying the various accounts of the incident and trying to trace exactly what was said at the time and how that has been changed through the centuries, making the story more alluring and romantic. In my own researches, for example on legends of the last wolf in England and on the origins of inns signs, I’ve tried to go back to the very earliest sources. They often tell a quite different story to the current one, and that is the case with King John’s treasure too. Then, of course, the imagination comes into play and I began to wonder just what was lost, and what might survive.

JK: It is a fascinating piece of history, yes. It’s clear that not a little research goes in to many of your stories and that’s part of what makes them so compelling. Your mention of inn signs, for example, which is the main subject of “The Understanding of the Signs” and is also an element in “Worse Things Than Serpents”; I’m curious to know if the specifics of the signs mentioned are true. And do the books listed exist?

MV: Yes, all of the inn sign books mentioned in that story are real and almost all of the books the narrator finds in “Worse Things Than Serpents” too. Inn signs have interested me since I was young too: on family journeys I would write down the names of all those we passed, and later started with a friend an inn signs newsletter. When I came back to studying them, I found that the usual explanations for the most popular signs simply don’t hold up. They can often be traced to a stout Victorian study but even there were often advanced tentatively. It’s another example of stories repeated through the ages that only have the thinnest basis. But when you do start to ask what is the origin of the signs, you uncover a much richer and more varied set of possibilities. Also, they seem part of what I have called “folk heraldry”, the popular enjoyment of strange beasts and monsters as local symbols.

JK: Which feeds very much into the history of an area or locality and how people interact or become part of that landscape. I’m thinking of “Fortunes Told: Fresh Samphire” and its possible companion piece “The Readers of the Sands” (by virtue of the fact that they both feature a character named Crabbe). The sense of place in your stories is very well realised. Have you visited all the places in which your stories are set?

MV: Some of the places I know very well but others I haven’t visited at all. But when I’m writing a story I like to have a clear idea of the setting, by studying maps, looking at old postcards, reading old walking guides. I try to imagine just what the character might see, hear and smell in that particular season. What would their journey there be like, what would they do when they got there, what route would they take to their destination? In “A Chess Game at Michaelmas”, for example, the custom in question is a perfectly genuine one and it belongs to a house located just where I describe, though I have adapted it a bit fictionally. So in writing the story I worked out where was then the nearest railway station, and what would be the way the narrator gets from there to the house on foot. As it happens, that would take him past some ancient stones with interesting lore, also genuine, though again adapted slightly.

JK: “A Chess Game at Michaelmas” is one of my favourites in this collection. And the journey to the house is as much an integral part of the story as the custom in question. As is your reference to yew trees in this and a couple of other stories in Lost Estates. Is there a particular significance to these references?

MV: Yes, I have a fondness for slightly overgrown or semi-wild gardens, that point where the art of the gardener has been reclaimed and reshaped somewhat by nature. Topiary, often with yew trees, is already beguiling because of its figuring into strange shapes and when it’s a bit neglected it looks wilder still. I like that blend of artistry, pageantry and yet melancholy they seem to convey.

JK: With the demise of Wormwood, the magazine of fantasy, the supernatural and decadent literature, which you edited, is the primary focus for you now on your own writing? And is there a novel in you or is the short form your first love?

MV: Well, I still contribute to the Wormwoodiana shared blog, where we try to cover similar books and authors to those we might have featured in the journal. I’m usually following up discoveries from my book-collecting expeditions, which may lead to further essays. I even dream about browsing in bookshops, and sometimes remember titles from the dream shelves.

I’m currently working on an anthology of essays about Malcolm Lowry and his use of magic and myth, which I think are quite important themes in his books. As to fiction, I’ve enjoyed in more recent years writing longer stories (typically 12,000-15,000 words) and would like to try a few more of those, but I don’t think I have a novel lurking anywhere. I like the short story form and I think it still has a lot of possibilities.

Buy a copy of Lost Estates.

If you’d like, you can read John Kenny’s full review of Lost Estates.

The Green Book 23

“Editor’s Note”

As a whole, I like to think that The Green Book serves as a sort of portrait of Irish Gothic literature in its myriad guises, incomplete though it may be, but ever adding detail to the canvas. Looking over this issue, I feel that most of what has been assembled here are portraits of the proprietors of the darker fantastic—some of the pieces are direct reminiscences, others illustrate their subjects in more oblique ways. I like when this happens—when the themes of an issue, or even just an approach, emerge of their own accord.

The opening triptych of portraits in this issue comes courtesy of the thunder-scarred poet James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), whose beckoning and forlorn visage also adorns this issue’s cover. Those of you who pay attention to such things, take note that 30 October will be the 200th anniversary of Charles Maturin’s death (1782-1824). Mangan’s reminiscence of the author of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) makes for a colourful portrayal; it strikes me now as I read it that this piece is the touchstone for how we now perceive Maturin, with all his eccentricities and swiftly underappreciated Gothic legacy. Maturin’s final resting place seems to be something of a mystery. I won’t speculate here, but if any reader wishes to conduct an investigation—and write up their findings for The Green Book—please do.

Mangan also writes on his contemporary, John Anster (1793-1862), who is best remembered today for his English translation of Goethe’s Faust, later used in the 1925 edition illustrated by Harry Clarke. In his third sketch, Mangan gives us a brief critical overview of the oeuvre of Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), though oddly does not mention Castle Rackrent (1800). This omission is a fascinating one and a reminder that the work of an author which we today hold in the highest regard, might not be the book for which they were celebrated during their lifetime or at the time of their death—after all, when was the last time you read Bram Stoker’s Reminiscences of Sir Henry Irving, much lauded in the weeks following 20 April 1912?

A brief side note, albeit a morbid one: Mangan penned an addendum noting that Edgeworth died during the composition of his sketch. Edgeworth died on 22 May 1849; the sketch was published on the 26th of the same month; Mangan himself scarcely survived another month, dying on 20 June 1849. Edgeworth was buried in the churchyard at St. John’s in Edgeworthstown; Mangan rests in Glasnevin Cemetery on the northside of Dublin.

There is much else to explore in this issue, each article illuminating in different ways its subject. Helen C. Black gives us a bucolic interview with Charlotte Riddell—wonderfully capturing the latter’s personality; while John P. Irish and Douglas A. Anderson each explore aspects of Fitz-James O’Brien’s writing: the former examines a pair of O’Brien’s most popular tales through the lens of mad science, while the latter reconsiders a clutch of stories in the light of recent bibliographic scholarship.

An unfinished canvas comes to us from Richard Bleiler, who has unearthed more biographical information (and a previously unpublished poem) by the enigmatic “Keith Fleming”—Kathleen Fitz-Patrick (1849-1945)—author of Can Such Things Be? (1889) and By the Night Express (1889). There’s an exploration of George William Russell’s mystical transformation into “A.E.”; and finally a trio of pieces by Mervyn Wall, including his dazzling reminiscences of mid-century Dublin’s literary milieu, and his encounter with Gerald Gardner at the Museum of Witchcraft while on holiday in the Isle of Man.

On a final note, I would like to dedicate this issue of The Green Book to the memory of David J. Skal, a writer, scholar and friend who was no stranger to these pages. You might have your own favourites, but of his books, these are mine: The Monster Show, Dark Carnival, Death Makes a Holiday, and Something in the Blood. You can find David’s scholarship in The Green Book issues two, four, and six, the latter of which contains a lengthy interview with him. Thank you for the inspiration, David. Rest easy—and keep doing the Monster Mash wherever you are!

Buy The Green Book 23

Brian J. Showers
Æon House, Dublin
16 January 2024

Remembering David J. Skal

“I’ll show you what horror means!” – Frederic March as Mr. Hyde

Suggested listening: “The Monster Mash” by Bobby Pickett

Although I was fortunate enough to meet and get to know David J. Skal many years later at a post-seminar reception at the Stag’s Head in central Dublin, my first introduction to him was through his seminal volume The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (1993), which at the time was on the New Books shelf in my high school library. I’d told David on the night that I first met him the impact his book had had on me, a young horror fan, and how it repositioned and broadened my understanding of a genre I had always innately loved—he gave horror, from dusty old books to shimmering celluloid to the flickering cathode tube, the sort of validity that I needed at that point in my life. And as all the best horror surveys should do, David’s Monster Show sent me scurrying to the library, to video rental shelves, and to Madison’s once plentiful second-hand bookshops, with full permission to follow that excitement and seek out new horrors. As I write this, I have here my copy of The Monster Show, with its Edward Gorey cover, that David kindly inscribed for me that night in 2008: “That’s Monstertainment!”.

The next time I met David was in 2010, when he was a guest lecturer on the “Popular Literature” course at Trinity College Dublin. He was staying in a massive, newly built apartment complex on Ossory Road off North Strand. It had a spacious central courtyard that his flat faced onto. I recall David telling me during one of my visits there that he fancied himself perhaps the only inmate of the structure; at nightfall, he said, most of the other windows in the complex remained dark and vacant. Maybe. Dracula’s Castle—Recession Gothic.

I was also invited to David’s Halloween party that year. David loved Halloween—of course he did! He wrote a book on it!—and the party was yet another manifestation of that lifelong condition since identified by medical experts as “Monster Kid”. It’s that fundamental impulse that drives some of us. You’ll know in your heart if you’re afflicted and will be familiar with the associated symptoms. David was absolutely stricken by it. He threw the party for his students and Trinity colleagues; I wasn’t affiliated with Trinity at all though, but I was glad to be welcomed. However, though not then a student, it is in large part due to David that I thought . . . perhaps I’d like to do a masters at Trinity. I enrolled the very next year.

David spent a lot of time in Dublin over the subsequent years, occasionally staying with me. He was mainly doing research for his Stoker biography, Something in the Blood, which was published in 2016, so he had a reason for his many returns. But he’d made a lot of friends here in Dublin too—and he was always welcome, his visits felt more like homecomings. Often on his visits we would embark on long walks—and even longer conversations. We talked Irish Gothic and visited places associated with Stoker and Le Fanu, including some pretty obscure locales (the burial place of Stoker’s beloved childhood nurse, anyone?)

Like all good researchers, David asked a lot of questions. Not just of me, but in general. Sometimes I could answer, other times I wondered why I’d not asked the same such questions: “The multi-coloured Georgian doors of Dublin are celebrated now, but were they always painted like that?”. But this tendency to ask questions—in such a concise way, brilliantly free from the assumed—is a skill that I’ve noticed in all the best researchers and scholars. And that was David. He pursued until he was satisfied, until he knew his audience would be satisfied. David always knew his audience.

Another thing people seemed to notice about David when they met him, certainly I did, was his charming and urbane manner—and that voice! It was authoritative, but so warm and inviting. He wanted to share his passions with you. If you’ve seen the documentaries that he’s hosted or narrated, you’ll know his presence and what I mean. David was a natural storyteller, and I recall fondly listening to his memories, how he’d fished sheaves of old archives from a dumpster at Universal Studios, including, remarkably, correspondence from Stoker’s widow Florence—this was to become the backbone of his landmark book Hollywood Gothic (1990). David himself, in his dedication to and celebration of the silver screen, seemed to become a living repository for memories of an era, of the people he’d met, interviewed, and written about over his life, including David Manners, who played Harker in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). He also knew Carla Laemmle, Lupita Tovar, Ricou Browning (The Creature from the Black Lagoon was always my favourite!), Sarah Karloff, Raymond Huntley, and so many more. How wonderful that someone like David came along when he did, just as some of those memories of Old Hollywood, those connections to the distant past, were about to fade.

It was my absolute pleasure when David later asked me to help him with various bits of research as he worked on Something in the Blood. I’d often find myself in the National Library pursuing some scrap of information he was after. It was on one of these occasions that I unearthed, almost by chance, a previously unknown Stoker spook story called “Saved by a Ghost”. I excitedly emailed it to David, who responded with such enthusiasm; I reprinted the story for the first time in The Green Book 6, along with commentary by David. Similarly, David wrote an article for The Green Book 4 when I’d located the only known manuscript copy of Lord Longford’s stage adaptation of Carmilla (1932). “The Lady Who Munched—How Carmilla Stormed the Stage” is a sort of Hollywood Gothic-like examination of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” and it’s trajectory on the stage. More excited emails, of course. Anyway, it’s hard to describe the almost Jamesian thrill of such discoveries, suffice to say I’m so happy to have been able to share these moments with David.

One final memory, perhaps my favourite: David was staying with me in July 2012 on one of his return trips to Dublin. He had asked if I would take publicity photos for him, photos he has since used for the past decade or so. I’m no professional, but David was, and he knew exactly what he wanted, so I obliged. We trounced around Mount Jerome Cemetery in south Dublin looking for perfect backdrops; they were plentiful. David posed and pulled faces for me while I inexpertly snapped away. Rain threatened, but David wanted to use an umbrella as a prop anyway. When Something in the Blood was published, I felt delighted to read David’s warm inscription and acknowledgement note—but also on the jacket’s rear flap was produced one of the photos from the day we shared in Mount Jerome. Before we’d left the house that morning, David asked me, “Do you have a tie I could borrow?” I did. Now, whenever I see those photos—and they’re reproduced a lot, especially now—I feel a special connection. That tie always makes me laugh and remember. I still have it too.

There is much to be said on the impact of David’s work: be it through books like The Monster Show, Dark Carnival, Death Makes a Holiday, or Screams of Reason; his many documentaries for Universal Studios; or his wonderful championing of the Spanish-language film version of Dracula, shot simultaneously alongside Tod Browning’s classic. I’ll leave that commentary to others. As for me, I just wanted to set down this morning just a few of my own memories before they too, like all things, eventually fade away. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to spend time and forge a friendship with someone who I admire so much. It’s often said that you should never meet your heroes. I’ve said before, and I still think it’s true: Meet your heroes. Thank you for the inspiration. I’ll miss you, David. Yours in blood . . .

Brian J. Showers
Æon House, Dublin
12 January 2024

Holiday Postage 2023

It’s that time of year again when you might be looking for gifts to give for the forthcoming holiday season.

We’ve published some great books this year, so do be sure to have a look!

Now It’s Dark by Lynda E. Rucker
Agents of Oblivion by Iain Sinclair
Uncertainties 6 edited by Brian J. Showers
Treatises on Dust by Timothy J. Jarvis
Insect Literature by Lafcadio Hearn
The Green Book 21 edited by Brian J. Showers
The Green Book 22 edited by Brian J. Showers

Postage takes time, but we’ll always do our best to get stuff out to you promptly.

That said, here are the final posting dates according to our third party partners.

Ireland’s postal service, An Post, advises:

USA – Wednesday, 6 December
Rest of World – Wednesday, 6 December
Europe – Thursday, 14 December
Great Britain – Monday, 18 December
Northern Ireland – Monday, 18 December
Republic of Ireland – Thursday, 21 December

More information from An Post can be found here.

For paperbacks, IngramSpark orders need to be placed by Friday, 24 November.

Thank you again to all of you who have supported us throughout the year.

Brian J. Showers
Æon House
Dublin, Ireland

Celebrating 20 Years

Today is the 20th anniversary of Swan River Press.

I started the press in 2003 almost as an afterthought. The first few publications were palm-sized, hand-sewn chapbooks, written by myself and illustrated by Duane Spurlock, Jeff Roche, and Meggan Kehrli (who still designs our hardbacks). The idea was pretty simple: I wanted to write a ghost story to send to friends and family at Halloween, a bit like a greeting card, but far more elaborate. The result was The Old Tailor & the Gaunt Man, a tale that was published in Ash Tree Press’s award-winning anthology, Acquainted with the Night. This chapbook was followed by The Snow Came Softly Down, which I issued the subsequent year for the yuletide season.

Right from the start, as I mentioned earlier, I jotted “Swan River Press” on the copyright pages of these publications, not really intending to make a serious go at publishing. And yet here we are. If you want to know why I chose Swan River Press as a name, there is an entire blog post about it.

These chapbooks were followed by three series of booklets, A5 in size, some staple-bound and others hand-sewn. There was the Haunted Histories Series, which allowed me to work with a few contemporary writers whose stories I’d been enjoying at the time, while the Stoker Series and Le Fanu Series were ways to stretch my editorial, design, and research skills a bit more. Why the format change from chapbook to booklet? Well, the chapbooks took an inordinate amount of time to create. If you’ve got one, you’re lucky! The booklets were easier to do as they didn’t require as much precise cutting and folding. I won’t be doing chapbooks again any time soon.

By 2010 I’d published Swan River’s first hardback book, Rosalie Parker’s debut collection, The Old Knowledge. Both Ray Russell and Rosalie Parker of Tartarus Press, have been instrumental to Swan River over the years, not only for their friendship, but also for their sage advice and guidance as I made the shift from handcrafted publications to something more substantial. Old knowledge indeed! But really, isn’t that the way these things should work?

Swan River’s hardback line initially focused on contemporary writers, but gradually started to incorporate classic reprints as well as unearthing Irish works of supernatural and fantastic literature. I was keen on working with writers I admire, as well as the press being able to accommodate the explorations I was making into Irish genre writing. I’ve found more than enough material to be excited about and to keep us going . . .

While much writing made it into the hardback publications, not everything could be given such treatment. Inspired by Tartarus Press’s journal Wormwood, in 2013 I launched The Green Book, a journal dedicated to stray writing concerning Irish gothic, supernatural, and fantastical literature. Which means this year is our journal’s 10th anniversary.

Swan River Press operated from Rathmines since the beginning, first from a flat on Leinster Road, and then a small house on Alma Terrace. In October 2022 I moved to a small cottage down a quiet lane in a less frequented quarter of Dublin’s city centre. I’ve named the cottage Æon House after the mystic poet and painter A.E. (George William Russell). In addition to his own writing, I’ve always admired his talent as a publisher, editor, and facilitator, one who fostered writers and the literature they produced. Not a bad patron saint. A portrait of A.E. (by William Orpen) now hangs in my office, just beside the original riverine head artwork by Duane Spurlock that we now use as our logo.

I’m truly grateful for the opportunities the press has given me over the years; the privilege to publish the books I have, to work with writers, artists, editors, and designers, to say nothing of the readers who give me a reason to continue publishing. I’ve made many friends and my life has been greatly enriched by all this. It’s hard to overstate the impact of people turning up on your doorstep the way they have mine.

I just wanted to take the opportunity with this blog post to thank all of you for the support you’ve shown over the years. I’ve always striven to produce the highest quality I’m capable of offering, and I’m fairly certain the Swan River team, past and present, has maintained that these past two decades. It’s not always been easy. There has always been hard work and certainly much sacrifice. Whatever the case, here we are. There’s more work to be done. I’m prepared to carry on. And I promise I’ll get around to writing a bibliography one of these days.

While we’ll all have our favourites, below is a list send in by some of our longtime readers. If you’d like to send me your list, please do and I’ll add it to this post.

Thanks again, folks! You’ve no idea how much this milestone means to me.

Brian J. Showers
Æon House
31 October 2023

Ross Byrne, Ireland

Here’s to Swan River Press, raising a glass of Kilbeggan to you guys, many more! Top Five would be:

1. The House on the Borderland (William Hope Hodgson)
2. Green Tea (J. S. Le Fanu)
3. Uncertainties V (ed. Brian J. Showers)
4. Agents of Oblivion (Iain Sinclair)
5. The Death Spancel (Katharine Tynan)

John Birchall, United Kingdom

Many congratulations, Brian. It is always exciting when you announce a new title and the production standards have been consistently superb. Very difficult to choose five, but looking at the shelves these seemed to leap out:

1. Strange Epiphanies (Peter Bell)
2. Earth-Bound (Dorothy Macardle)
3. The House on the Borderland (William Hope Hodgson)
4. Ghosts of the Chit -Chat (ed. Robert Lloyd Parry)
5. Dreams of Shadow and Smoke (eds. Jim Rockhill and Brian J. Showers)

Jason E. Rolfe, Canada

Here are my top-10 favourites (in no particular order):

1. Dreams of Shadow and Smoke (ed. Jim Rockhill and Brian J. Showers)
2. The Lure of the Unknown (Algernon Blackwood)
3. Insect Literature (Lafcadio Hearn)
4. The Satyr & Other Tales (Stephen J. Clark)
5. Uncertainties V (ed. Brian J. Showers)
6. Bending to Earth (eds. Maria Giakaniki and Brian J. Showers)
7. Leaves for the Burning (Mervyn Wall)
8. The Pale Brown Thing (Fritz Leiber)
9. Earth-Bound (Dorothy Macardle)
10. The Silver Voices (John Howard)

Franco Ivaldi, Italy

1. The Anniversary of Never (Joel Lane)
2. The Far Tower (ed. Mark Valentine)
3. Strange Epiphanies (Peter Bell)
4. Here with the Shadows (Steve Rasnic Tem)
5. You’ll Know When You Get There (Lynda E. Rucker)

Anabel Portillo, United Kingdom

1. Green Tea (J. S. Le Fanu)
2. A Flutter of Wings (Mervyn Wall)
3. Bending to Earth (eds. Maria Giakaniki and Brian J. Showers)
4. The Sea Change (Helen Grant)
5. Old Hoggen (Bram Stoker)

Bonus Track: Old Albert by our fearless leader

Alex Blakk, Italy

I favorite the classic Goth and in Italy doesn’t exist a Le Fanu collection, really appreciate that with the CD too! The hard cover editions are really amazing! Wonderful job!

1. Green Tea (J. S. Le Fanu)
2. Reminiscences of a Bachelor (J. S. Le Fanu)
3. Leaves for the Burning (Mervyn Wall)
4. The House of the Borderlands (William Hope Hodgson)
5. Insect Literature (Lafcadio Hearn)

Andrew Sherwell, United Kingdom

Congratulations, Swan River Press. Twenty years old. Damn impressive and testament to the astute vision and hard work of editor, chief cook, and bottle washer, Brian J. Showers. Of consistently high literary merit, each publication from SRP is also a thing of beauty that deserves, indeed begs, to be read. Not many publishers can say that. But there in lies the problem, at least when it comes to this particular exercise, choosing my five favourite SRP releases. My first list featured seven choices. My second, nine, but only three that had made the first list. Things got truly out of hand as I blazed through the third, fourth and fifth versions. At the limit of frustration, and rather cross with myself, I made a discovery. There were only three selections that made each list. Many made several, but only three made them all. So, here you have it, my three favourite Swan River Press publications. Definitely.

1. Agents of Oblivion by Iain Sinclair, illustrations by Dave McKean (May 2023)—Mad and maddening, Agents of Oblivion is classic Sinclair. Equal parts headache inducing and enlightening, fact and fiction, fun and hard work. I’ve read it three times since it came out and I’m still not sure I’ve got anywhere near the bottom of it. Love it.

2. The Satyr by Stephen J. Clark (July 2015)—The only SRP paperback that I own. I’m still kicking myself I didn’t get the hardback; I don’t know what came over me. I often find myself thinking about the tales told within—strongly evocative of time and place with a post-decadence (is that a thing?) feel.

3. The Green Book 19 edited by Brian J. Showers (Bealtaine 2022)—The Green Book is always a fascinating read but this one is my favourite. The Celtic Literary Revival links most of the articles and in particular, the gently messianic influence of A.E., George William Russell. Fascinating insights into his life and times, and directly responsible for me spending too much money on books from the period, books which I had hitherto not known I needed quite so badly.

Happy Birthday, Swan River Press, and thank you. Cake?

[In 2014, for the bicentennial celebration of Le Fanu’s birth, my friend Catie made spectacular green tea cupcakes. – BJS]

Tommy Atkinson, United Kingdom

So many wonderful books to choose from but my absolute favourites:

1. Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (ed. Robert Lloyd Parry)
2. Eyes of Terror (L. T. Meade)
3. Munky (B. Catling)
4. Curfew (Lucy M. Boston)
5. The Satyr (Stephen J. Clark)

Keep up the good work!

Daniel McGachey, United Kingdom

1. The Sea Change (Helen Grant)
2. Strange Epiphanies (Peter Bell)
3. Curfew (Lucy M. Boston)
4. Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (ed. Robert Lloyd Parry)
5. The Pale Brown Thing (Fritz Leiber)

All resonate to some degree with my more Jamesian interests (or obsession?) . . .

James Everington, United Kingdom

1. Uncertainties 5 (ed. Brian J. Showers)
2. You’ll Know When You Get There (Lynda E. Rucker)
3. The House On The Borderland* (William Hope Hodgson)
4. The Dummy (Nicholas Royle)
5. Treatises On Dust (Timothy J. Jarvis)

* I feel that, for the sake of my weird fiction street-credibility, I must say of course I’d already read this before I ordered from you, I just wanted a decent edition rather than the dodgy one I had, as I consider it an utter masterpiece.

David Johnson, United States

Thank you so much for the gift you’ve shared with me, all of these stories, all of this art, music, the ideas, the connections. Finding Swan River Press some five or six years ago has been incredible! It’s definitely shaped my idea of what I want from a small press and who and what I read in general. The House on the Borderland (William Hope Hodgson) was my first, I got it from Jon Mueller’s shop, Within Things. I’d never read any version of it before, but reading Swan River’s production with Jon’s soundtrack in my earphones on repeat was transportive.

My five favourite books I’ve read in the catalogue (The House on the Borderland stands apart) are as follows:

1. The Dark Return of Time (R. B. Russell). Forget about The Club Dumas, this is much more satisfying biblio-noir!

2. The Unfortunate Fursey and The Return of Fursey (Mervyn Wall). Monks in trouble is my favourite micro genre! Great satire as well. Munky (B. Catling) is a very close runner up!

3. Selected Stories and Seventeen Stories (Mark Valentine). Yeah, yeah, these are two different collections. It’s hard to read just a little Valentine though. Once you start . . .

4. Curfew & Other Eerie Tales (Lucy M. Boston). This stuff is just somehow superior!

5. Now It’s Dark (Lynda E. Rucker). This short collection references and alludes to everything from Christina Rossetti to H. P. Lovecraft, all of my favourite things!

5.1 The Satyr & Other Tales (Stephen J. Clark). So cinematic, such great imagery, written and otherwise.

5.2 The Far Tower (ed. Mark Valentine). Okay I’ll stop.

5.3 The Pale Brown Thing (Fritz Leiber). Now I’m done.

Below are my top five most excited To-Be-Read volumes:

1. Longsword (Thomas Leland)
2. The Scarlet Soul (ed. Mark Valentine)
3. Here with the Shadows (Steve Rasnic Tem)
4. The Silver Voices and Written By Daylight (John Howard)
5. Lucifer and the Child (Ethel Mannin)

But starting tomorrow, I’m gonna dive into November Night Tales (Henry C. Mercer)!

Mick Curtis, United Kingdom

Swan River Press has always been a beacon of quality in the sometimes murky world of publishing. My top five:

1. The House on the Borderland (William Hope Hodgson)
2. Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (ed. Robert Lloyd Parry)
3. The Sea Change (Helen Grant)
4. Leaves for the Burning (Mervyn Wall)
5. The Anniversary of Never (Joel Lane)

Patrick Petterson, Norway

Five titles that showcase Swan River Press’ love and care for the classic ghostly & weird alongside a keen eye for brilliant, contemporary authors that keep the genre fresh and exciting. Here’s to another 20 years of Swan River Press!

1. Strange Epiphanies (Peter Bell)
2. Green Tea (J. S. Le Fanu)
3. The Sea Change (Helen Grant)
4. Selected Poems (A.E.)
5. The House on the Borderland (William Hope Hodgson)

The Green Book 22

“Editor’s Note”

I thought this moment might never come. Perhaps on some levels I was even avoiding it due to an oversaturation of the blood-stained, opera-cloaked market. But at long last, we seem to have a Bram Stoker issue of The Green Book in our hands! Some of the keen-eyed might have realised this from the cover, which features as the background Pamela Colman Smith’s illustration for The Lair of the White Worm (1911), while the inset image is a detail from the printed boards of The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). (It dawns on me as I write this that, while there is plenty of White Worm action herein, there’s nothing about Jewel—however, a scarab does make an appearance . . . )

The first piece in this issue is an appreciation of “The Judge’s House” (1891), and an accompanying illustration, by Mike Mignola, a writer and artist whose memorable creation Hellboy boasts direct lineage from the works of Stoker. This short essay first appeared as the introduction to the Swan River booklet The Definitive Judge’s House (2011), now long out of print. I thought it might be nice to give it another outing.

Next is another personal reminiscence transcribed from a lecture given by Leslie Shepard in 2000. In it, Shepard describes a situation familiar to many book collectors: the rare volume that “got away”. Shepard also outlines a mystery about Stoker, the first of three Stoker-related mysteries to be found in this issue. Those of a certain vintage might recall that Leslie Shepard co-founded the Bram Stoker Society, here in Dublin, in 1980. We’ll come back to the Bram Stoker Society in a moment.

Douglas A. Anderson submitted a year ago an uncollected piece entitled “Black Spirits and White” by Henry Irving—or perhaps not? As Anderson conjectures in his brief note introducing the tale, there is a possibility that Stoker himself might have penned the piece (Mystery #2). Alas, we will likely never learn the answer, however you’re welcome to draw your own conclusion.

After this, we’re reprinting in its entirety another Swan River booklet from the out-of-print Stoker Series: Four Romances by Mr. Bram Stoker (2009). Paul Murray introduces the quartet of stories, noting that they showcase a different side to Stoker’s literary output than readers might be used to: the domestic drama. Augmenting this selection is a short piece by Stoker’s mother, Charlotte, and her rules for domestic happiness. The title pretty much says it all. (As an aside, I posited in the preface to Old Hoggen and Other Adventures (2017) that Stoker might have been planning a collection of “romance” stories prior to his death. For the curious, this volume might have contained stories such as “When the Sky Rains Gold” (1894), “Bengal Roses” (1898), “A Young Widow” (1899), and three of the four stories included in this issue—“Our New House” sneaked its way into Old Hoggen as an adventure. Who the audience is for an entire collection of Stoker’s romances, curious though they may be to the scholar, I am not entirely certain. Anyhow, see what you think.)

I hope you’ll allow me a further indulgence, but I’m running one of my own articles in this issue—an essay with which readers of the late, lamented journal Wormwood might already be familiar. In “Bram Stoker and Another Dracula”, I discuss whether or not Stoker ever intended to write a sequel to Dracula (Mystery #3). It’s a question that fascinates me, and I think I’ve come up with a pretty good answer—but we can never know for sure. This essay was inspired by a paraphrased “interview” with Stoker that appeared in an issue of The Occult Review, just months before his passing in April 1912. In this piece, Mr. Stoker divulges some curious titbits, which I make use of in my own essay. I won’t spoil the surprise, but I thought it worth reprinting this interview in its entirety as well.

I’m sad to report the passing in October 2022 of David Lass, who, along with Leslie Shepard and John Leahy, co-founded the Bram Stoker Society at Trinity College Dublin. An early member of the society, Albert Power, who was present for its inaugural meeting, has provided a memorial tribute to David Lass.

And so I would like to dedicate this issue to not only David, but also Leslie and John. Along with the aforementioned Wormwood, the journal of the Bram Stoker Society was a definitive inspiration for The Green Book.

And finally, to all those aficionados of The Jewel of Seven Stars: better luck next time.

Buy The Green Book 22

Brian J. Showers
Æon House, Dublin
12 July 2023

In an Uncertain Mode

Conducted by Brian J. Showers

For most of our books we conduct short interviews just prior to the title’s release. In the case of an anthology, the interview is with the editor. However, for Uncertainties 6, I wanted to do something slightly different. Hoping for just a bit more insight into the genre we love, I posed a single question:

What draws you to write tales in the weird/uncanny mode?

Here are the responses . . .

Ruth Barber (“Unfinished Business”)

My stories are a form of therapy, a vehicle for processing negative emotions such as grief, sadness, disappointment, and unfairness. The black humour comes from the random and surreal circumstances in which misery is often meted out.

I had an unhappy childhood where the expression of emotion was discouraged. I began writing from a young age: my stories and poems became an acceptable outlet for my feelings. As fiction my feelings could be safely expressed in a way that avoided any need for responsibility, accountability, or indeed resolution.

I work as a criminal lawyer and write in my spare time. Growing up in an atmosphere of unfair condemnation I feel a degree of empathy with people facing criminal charges and my ability to emotionally disassociate allows me to deal with many unpleasant and traumatic cases. I am, of course, professionally bound to keep the details of my cases confidential however I collect discrete shards of experiences and weave them together to create fantasy tales.

My tales are therefore formed from feelings and moments—the creak of a second hand sofa in a café, the shine on a cheap suit, the smell of fear in the courtroom. My tales examine the secret ticks and vices we adopt to make life bearable and the delusions we create to avoid confronting our demons.

I am the person who knows before you call, the person who can extrapolate your mood from the frequency of your WhatsApp logins, and who predicts the future from the lyrics in the next song on the radio. I know the real reason you just spoke to that person and when you are lying. But I will never tell.

Most importantly dear reader know that I write for myself and not for you. Through my tales you gain the privilege of a glimpse inside my head. Be wary as to whether it is truly a place you want to visit.

James Everington (“The Switch”)

The honest answer to this is probably “because I can’t write anything else”. I’ve a relatively broad taste when it comes to reading, but my attempts to write realistic slices of life, comedic fantasy, or—god help me—poetry have always fallen flat. And I think of it as a plus, for a writer, to eventually realise the narrow circumference of your talent and concentrate your efforts there. And it’s not as if I’m missing out: writing about the strange, the ghostly, the nebulous is my realism, reflecting life as I feel it. The hidden yet nagging sense of something unexplainable or jarring or out of sync with reality. And it’s my poetry, too: a chance to play with language and form and style in the pursuit of capturing in words something fleeting yet indelible. All of which is a highfalutin way of saying that, for me, reading and writing uncanny tales scratches an itch that other genres can’t.

Alison Moore (“Where Are They Now?”)

Some years ago, I wrote a horror novelette under a pseudonym for the Eden Book Society series published by Dead Ink Books. Writing a horror story was a natural and satisfying way for me to process the almost unreal experience of donating a kidney. Analysing that process—the relationship between the experience and the story—for a subsequent article clarified my understanding of how and why the uncanny, in which the familiar and the strange coexist, was uniquely suited to this narrative about transplantation and its very literal breaching of boundaries. The kidney donor in my novelette has a persistent sense that none of this is real, and the surreal quality of the experience is reflected in imagery encompassing stories and dreams and horror films. She feels herself gradually disappearing, from her name to her receding gums. “I swear to God,” says a visitor, “there’ll be nothing left of you soon.” There’s a sense of inevitability: when she’s given some paperwork to sign, giving her permission for the procedure to go ahead, she finds she’s already signed it. Her abdomen is marked with a thick black arrow pointing towards the kidney they’re going to take. “If this mark comes off,” the doctor says, “it will be drawn on again.” I took these and other details in the story directly from the diary I was keeping, but what was innocent in reality gains a sinister quality within the fictional narrative, so that the everyday seems to be giving way to something stranger. The procedure went according to plan and the real-life story was a good-news item on local TV, but the horror story, the version that acknowledges and channels the weirdness of it all, captures what it felt like and as a result feels more true.

Naben Ruthnum (“The Bracken Box”)

I’ve been trying to write weird fiction since I started writing. I certainly think there are other kinds of fiction worth reading and writing, but I can’t deny that the weird ones are special for me, that the great and good ones create an artistic effect that is beyond craft or technique, coming close to what I think is most worthwhile in art. That’s why I so rarely put one out there; I think that this piece in Uncertainties is my only successful piece of weird short fiction.

Aickman talked about the shared qualities between poetry and the strange story, which is true in so many ways. I find writing weird fiction to be as difficult as I find writing poetry, and I continue to keep attempting both. I’m starting to succeed, fitfully, with the weird tale, but with every new attempt to flesh an idea or an impression, there come moments when I feel as unarmed and amateur as I did when I first started writing anything. This is a mode that exposes; while strange stories can be suggestive, can lead without going, if there’s nothing to them, we all can tell that there are no ghosts to be found.

Anne-Sylvie Salzman (“Houses of Flesh”)

I was seven when I tried to read my first “adult” book, The Secret of Sarek (L’Île aux trente cercueils), by Maurice Leblanc; I say “try”, because I stopped after a few pages of sombre omens and mutilated corpses (I tackled it a few years later and loved it, of course). But it left its mark—and more than that. The decayed bodies went on rotting in the recesses of my brain and gave birth to most splendid flowers—as would the painter Odilon Redon. At some point, this conflated with a keen love of nature inherited from my parents (naturalists/entomologists/botanists), older brother (ornithologist), and uncle (entomologist). And it is by poring over some accidents of nature—especially in Scotland, and starting with the drumming of the snipe—that I was eventually driven to write uncanny tales, after having trying my hand at a more urban sort of unquietness.

Eric Stener Carlson (“I See Minza”)

That’s a bit of a strange question. I mean, I get it. “Uncanny” is supposed to mean something just slightly off, something that doesn’t feel real.

But that presupposes that there’s one stream of “reality” (composed of common sense, and fair rules of the game, and generally-accepted behaviour), and then there’s another—almost inexistent—stream of “unreality” (where people act inexplicably, where rules don’t apply, where behaviour is cruel, barbaric and fantastic).

Here’s one example of our attempt to push the uncanny into a quiet, little corner. Recently, I watched a TV show from the UK on ancient belief systems (like druids and the early Christian church). The commentator, trying to explain the social context of the Black Death, said something like, “You see, back then, people believed in something called the ‘devil’, and they thought it surrounded them all the time.”

Really? You don’t believe the devil surrounds us on all sides, trying to tempt us to destruction? I do. I believe in an ever-loving, benevolent God, so I also believe in the polar opposite. I’m not saying the devil is a flesh-and-blood creature (in fact, we may be our own devils), but that doesn’t make him any less real. I’ve investigated war crimes in Argentina and the former Yugoslavia, so I know that for a fact.

Although we’d like to think otherwise, “strange” things are woven into the very fabric of our lives. Once, on an abandoned railway platform in Poland at about 3 a.m., a 300-lb former wrestler appeared out of the darkness, and challenged me to punch him in the stomach as hard as I could (I declined). And in college, there was a “glitch” in my answering machine that made it call up a friend and leave my “Please leave your message at the beep” message. She thought maybe it was a plea for help (it wasn’t, at least not from me).

Why do I write weird tales? It’s my attempt to outline our dappled existence, where what we call the “extraordinary” and the “ordinary”, “natural” and “supernatural”, “real” and “uncanny”, all swirl together on a typical Monday morning. What’s “weird” about that is how often we fail to recognize it.

Méabh de Brún (“Consumed as in Obsessed”)

I love ghosts. I love ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night. I love gothic hauntings in old creaking manors and the folkloric horror of things within the woods. Sometimes people ask me, but do you really believe? Inconsequential. Irrelevant. I am having a ball. But there’s a subtle difference between spooky and strange, and it’s the strange that truly unnerves and fascinates. Those weird uncanny stories that are not so easily explained by a restless, roaming spirit or an old folk-tale. Senseless events without rules, reason or motive that leave you lonely in the half-dark asking, but why? but why? These kinds of stories may not cause a burst of terror in the moment, but they worm beneath the skin. They unsettle. They unnerve. It’s always the inexplicable that leaves you lying awake at night, turning it over your mind like a tongue probing a rotting tooth. I press the weird against the mundane to highlight the horror of the everyday, and to write about the things that are truly scary. The banal and boring evil of a housing crisis. The creeping dread of losing a beloved friend. I would stride up the steps of the haunted manor with a skip in my step and a song in my heart. No ghoul could compare with living through late stage capitalism. Simone Weil once said, “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” By writing in the uncanny, I can add a splash of colour to the grey. A jewel-tone spread of strange and sourceless mould across clean concrete. When I need to get to grips with real fear, it’s the uncanny that gives me the weird gloves to do so. Yes, things are still bad, but now they’re interesting. And after all, in the face of inexplicable horror one should always continue to aim for that glorious goal of having a ball.

Stephen J. Clark (“Interference”)

Writing for me involves being receptive to my imagination and unconscious mind. Once an idea, memory or image emerges then the process of creative play begins, and I interpret and delve into the images and ideas to see where they will take me.

To an extent the story has a life of its own. If I set out with a personal experience or memory or dream in mind, I often discover something unexpected: some long-forgotten detail or surprising insight. It’s this potential for revelation that inspires me. I find that revelation is inextricably linked to my experience of language, which involves encountering arresting metaphors or lucid phrases as part of the process and pleasure of writing.

I think of language as a fabric partly composed of unconscious threads, of personal memories yet also ancient images and ideas, so my writing is a way of engaging with those hidden seams between intimacy and myth. For me, writing from the imagination involves attempting to describe what often resists expression, to utter what would otherwise remain lost, concealed or forbidden, to reach into those zones of uncertainty and possibility. For the fabric can become a map, charting journeys into the domains of the grotesque and the Marvellous. Exploring this personal mythology of poetic images and resonances is a method of catharsis too: of attempting to lay ghosts to rest or to name demons.

For me, writing is a kind of waking dream, using my imagination to form a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious. Whether discovered by chance or through deliberate exploration, I’m fascinated by the experience of encountering alluring and disturbing images and ideas, and my art and stories are the residual evidence of those encounters.

A. K. Benedict (“The Sands”)

Explaining why I write the uncanny would require more words, time, and money for therapy than I currently have, but it is something to do with seeing strangeness in a world that most people think of as “normal”. It’s about being slantwise. Catching the sniff of ghosts in dust motes, fixing restless spirits in ink, bones in words. The uncanny makes more sense than most because we know less than nothing, about anything, and there is joy in acknowledging the twisting of shadows

David Tibet (“Dreams As Red Barn”)

When I was young in Malaysia
I loved the Hebrew Bible
And the New Testament
And the Biblical Apocryphal Writings
Especially Coptic texts
And Apocryphas led me to M. R. James
And his The Apocryphal New Testament
And then I fell in LOVE with his GHOST STORIES
I also loved Enid Blyton
And her NODDY books
And She Wrote in one of them
Amen Amen Amen:
It isn’t very good
In The Dark Dark Wood
In the middle of the night
When there isn’t any light . . .
It isn’t very good
In The Dark Dark Wood . . .
And ever since READING those HALLUCINATORY WORDS . . .
I have searched for The Dark Dark Wood
And found her many times
Amen Amen Amen

David Tibet, Hastings, 4 VII 2023

Buy a copy of Uncertainties 6.

Conversations on Dust

James Machin in Conversation with Timothy J. Jarvis

Timothy J. Jarvis and I met for this conversation in Highbury, North London, a setting he has used frequently for his fiction, to discuss his forthcoming collection Treatises on Dust. We escaped the chaos of the Friday night revel into the sedate early-evening quiet of the Mildmay Club on Newington Green to have our conversation, which came to a timely end as the jazz band was setting up.

James Machin: How was the collection put together? How did you organise the table of contents? Did you take the opportunity to rework any of the stories and add any through-line of continuity?

Timothy J. Jarvis: Definitely—I was very conscious I wanted it to be a collection with a thread. The stories already had some sort of connective tissue. I realised when I was putting it together that there were two kinds of stories I’d been working on over the last ten years or so. One strand ended up being Treatises on Dust, which has this sense of me as a character moving in and out as an observer and collecting strange tales. There’s another strand concerning an eldritch photocopier—I’ve kept those stories back. There’s one newer story—“We Recognise Our Own” (though several are original to the collection)—and I wanted there to be a mixture of longer stories and very short stories of just a page or two, which I have scattered throughout.

I did rewrite to create further connective tissue: I’d just read Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child. The best way to describe it is Derek Raymond-style occult crime, but the novel is totally fragmentary with no linear narrative—and I thought why not try and make the stories work like that—with a sense that they aggregate meaning when you put them in the context of the collection.

JM: There is that consistency of imagery; that accretion of imagery across the stories that takes on a suggestive meaning of its own.

TJJ: I admire contemporary writers such as Mark Valentine who have recurring conceits across their stories, also Laird Baron though his is more cosmic in scale—I really like that mythos thing that comes from Lovecraft and other classic weird tales writers—and I wondered what would happen if you did it, but without the cosmicism.

JM: That’s interesting because my next question was about Lovecraft—and I have a note here to the effect that though you do use Lovecraftian strategies—“pseudobiblia”, deep history, cursed art—you don’t use identifiable Lovecraftian tropes. None of these stories could work in the context of cottage-industry mythos anthologies. It’s to your credit that you don’t resort to that—a single mention of Bloch’s De Vermis Mysteriis aside.

TJJ: I guess the pseudobiblia is one of my favourite aspect of Lovecraft’s work, the use of fictional and actual occult tomes . . .

JM: Including your own Day’s Horse Descend.

TJJ: There’s also a reference to a writer from Gary Budden’s fictional work—I use an author created by him in London Incognita in “We Recognise Our Own”. But it’s Chambers’ The King in Yellow (and by extension Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa”, I guess) that was my real inspiration in doing that sort of thing.

JM: You seem to me to be using the conceit in a much more consciously metafictional way than e.g. Lovecraft—a modernist or postmodernist way reflecting that you’re writing a century later.

TJJ: Part of that is that I like comedy, but I’m not trying to be funny—using the form of comedy but without the jokes. I don’t like earnestness, which can be the Achilles’ heel of a lot of contemporary horror and weird fiction. I like to be playful with nothing taken very seriously.

JM: I don’t think it’s not taking it seriously but rather just that lack of earnestness—maybe that word “ludic” connoting a knowing manipulation of the text.

TJJ: I think a lot of this is Walter de la Mare, actually—people telling stories to one another in restaurants or pubs . . .

JM: Yes, I have another note here: most of your stories are what John Clute would call “Club Stories”, a form that he claims “eases our suspension of disbelief during the duration of the telling . . . but surrenders the tale to the judgment of the world once it has been told”.

TJJ: Yes—that’s absolutely true. My novel, The Wanderer, was written and revised very much under the influence of reading Clute’s The Darkening Garden. Clute is a very important writer for me in understanding how horror works, how the Gothic works. So definitely club stories. I went to a normal primary school but the headteacher was very progressive and had this idea that you shouldn’t make children do anything they didn’t want to do—as a result I was a late starter and didn’t begin reading for leisure until I was quite old, eight or so—but then I started reading not kid’s books, but my dad’s books—he had a collection of Algernon Blackwood and J. G. Ballard and my maternal grandfather was a huge fan of golden age detective fiction, Sherlock Holmes but also Conan Doyle’s horror stories—“The Horror of the Heights” as a found document and the record of someone who’s had this encounter with an eldritch monstrosity—that style of story was a big influence on me.

JM: And there you get the idea of the archive and found documents—the “Archive of Dread”, as Robert Lloyd Parry is calling his new show. There’s also a lot of Machen in there, as well as Dunsany—there is an explicit homage to Dunsany in one of the stories. However, in terms of genre (whether the weird or horror or Gothic), you’re not shy about throwing in really horrible, bloody gore and putrefaction—though not typical horror violence.

TJJ: I do really like splatterpunk as a genre. One of my favourite novels in the mode is Kathe Koja’s The Cypher, which blew my mind when I read it. That sense of the grotesque is really important to me. While people talk approvingly about the subtlety of weird or strange fiction, if you actually read, for example, Aickman’s “Ravissante”, it’s utterly grotesque, sexualised grotesque.

JM: The same goes for Machen. So you’re not trying to write “quiet” horror . . .

TJJ: I’m not really trying to write horror at all. There are extraordinary writers who define themselves as horror writers, but in general, it doesn’t interest me.

JM: It’s also a very mutable term: Ramsey Campbell will say that he’s happy to call himself a horror writer because it’s a very broad umbrella and only a snob would be squeamish about describing themselves as such—but obviously most people think about horror a bit reductively as a set of tropes, tropes that you’re not really using at all.

TJJ: I totally get that thing about snobbery and think Campbell elevates the form, but in general I think a genre is something you just burrow out of. That’s the M. John Harrison thing—you tunnel your way out of something. But then there’s no way of articulating what one wants to articulate without tropes—there’s a hair’s breadth between tropes and archetypes. Tropes aren’t bad things—tropes are tropes not because they’re commercially useful, or not only—but because they come from the collective unconscious.

JM: Which brings me on very neatly to the question of decadence and symbolism in general. Throughout the book there is a consistent use of a sort of symbolist narrative; an episodic series of incidents that turn into a dream or vision quest, which reminds me of some of the alchemical literature where the protagonist experiences a series of trials or encounters which the reader suspects are embedded in this deep web of symbolism—whether Jungian or alchemical—and the story is just the tip of an iceberg, with the main, submerged body of the iceberg being the resonances that that symbolism creates. Not that I’m suggesting this is all very carefully worked out—

TJJ: It’s 100% not carefully worked out—it’s all surface.

JM: Which is where the decadence and Aestheticism comes in . . .

TJJ: Yes—everything is surface and there’s no deeper meaning to anything. The process of composition is not to censor myself but also not to particularly think—to avoiding getting intellectual.

JM: I’ve previously heard you speak admiringly of Aickman’s writing practice, of entering a sort of ‘flow state’ of experiencing the story unfolding rather than actively constructing it.

TJJ: Either I don’t remember my dreams or I don’t dream—for me, the act of writing fiction performs the function of dreams for most people. I actually need to sit down at the laptop in order to undertake that necessary psychological process.

JM: I always think of dreams as performing the same function as when you put your computer into defrag mode to sort the data on your hard drive.

TJJ: I wonder if that’s it—and I have to do that by writing short stories. The first thing I did was a novel and I was much more drawn to novels at the time—but short stories are much more effective in sorting out the clutter of the unconscious. But going back to the symbolism stuff—that aspect of my writing likely wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t have read Comte de Lautréamont. The idea that he died at 23 or 24 and produced this thing, Les Chants de Maldoror . . .

JM: They had too much time on their hands. No TV or social media.

TJJ: He supposedly wrote at night while bashing out discords on his piano in his Parisian garret—that’s what I aspire to. I would love to be Alfred Jarry painting myself green and cycling through Paris out of my mind, well in some way, anyhow.

JM: But that is another angle—because I know you like all that Eastern European absurdist stuff (Grabiński and Schulz and so on) and the surrealism of Leonora Carrington, so that’s all there as well, in the mix.

TJJ: I have to acknowledge Dan Watt (D. P. Watt)—I don’t think I’d write like I do unless I’d read and got to know Dan, because I think he’s an extraordinary stylist, and very much informed my interest in the absurd.

JM: But isn’t that also Aickman as well? When I first put down “The Cicerones”, the first of his stories I read, I can remember feeling very short changed and exasperated. “This doesn’t make any sense!” But then I was haunted by it for weeks.

TJJ: The thing about Aickman is that to get him properly, you do have to understand the British class system. I’m sure I’d have actually liked him despite despising 90% of the things he stood for. But that is also what I like about pubs.

JM: They are a great leveller, a space where you can escape the class system?

TJJ: My grandparents on the maternal side of the family were upper middle class, quite aspirational—my grandfather was a judge—but on my dad’s side they were working class, manual workers, my grandmother came over from Ireland as a teenager to work as a maid in a big house. In terms of British society, this makes me feel quite liminal. The idea of the pub as a liminal space really interests me.

JM: Which also ties into geography—I know it’s where you live and have worked but also Bedford and Luton—they’re a liminal region in terms of class, demographics, spaces between rural and urban, within the purlieu of London but not London, nor Midlands really—though home to John Bunyan who wrote a very famous vision quest full of encounters with strange entities.

TJJ: Living in Bedford and working in Luton was really important for the collection. The pub in Luton which is in a couple of the stories—the Bricklayers Arms—is a real place. My dad’s side of the family are from Luton and I grew up in Bedford. When I moved to London I was very into Iain Sinclair, Machen, and the psychogeography of London and its storied legacy. I moved back to Bedford for work and wanted to think about how that sort of writing would work in that context.

JM: You’re not celebrating the great storied metropolis but neither are you wallowing in misery or being resolutely downbeat.

TJJ: No, I’m not doing that and that’s not my conception of Luton and the people of Luton. When a few years’ ago the far right tried to foment trouble in Luton they were totally rejected by the community, who were horrified. Because that’s not what Luton is. It has its political and economic struggles, but it’s still hopeful and lively and resilient. That particular pub, the Bricklayers, is a really vibrant place. What I love about pubs is that people can cross those class boundaries. I genuinely love that pub, and that community.

JM: You deal with some social realities but there’s no sense that you’re being a tourist in misery—it’s far more nuanced. For example, the relationship between the Bulgarian immigrant seasonal worker and the elderly, bohemian artist in “With Scourges, with Flowering Sprigs”: it’s easy to imagine such a relationship emerging in a pub, facilitated by alcohol.

TJJ: Yes, that sense of boundaries being crossed—or rending the veil even. Every small town will have the usual chain places, but also one or two pubs that will really facilitate that liminality.

JM: I grew up in a small village in Kent and the village pub was exactly like that; a suspension of the everyday. My experience of bars in America is that they seem almost set up to be sleazy, with blacked-out windows and so on. It’s like you’re doing something sketchy by even walking into one.

TJJ: It’s probably literally the only thing about Britain I like—British pub culture.

JM: Not that anything in your book could be considered social realism. With, for example, “And Yet Speaketh”, even though it starts with the mundane situation of two academics having a drink in a pub, you’re not trying to convince the reader that it’s “real”. It’s clear from the outset that it is a fiction, with sixteenth-century doggerel appearing in unlikely places, etc.

TJJ: M. John Harrison is the lodestar for me in this respect. I really love the way he produces a sense of the real that is always riven with the sense of strangeness. I don’t have the chops to do that, so I work within my limitations. In some ways the writer that I’m always working through is Burroughs, particularly his “Western Lands” trilogy, but also the stories in Exterminator!, where you wonder if this is just someone working in bug control in New York and why the whole thing is riven by such strangeness. I aspire to use those same gestures and the conventional literary realist pursuit of subtle character and convincing situations leaves me cold.

JM: Yes, so in terms of the conversations people have in your stories, they’re not realistic conversations. It’s the opposite of naturalistic and very intentionally so . . .

TJJ: Yes, it’s very deliberate—that’s again the influence of Walter de la Mare, with his staginess. I don’t believe in the real, so the idea of mimesis—that technique where you give the reader a mimetic reality and then undercut it—I’m not interested in that. This is very much the Machen “ecstasy” thing—I’m more interested in the fictional representation of the rending of the veil rather than concerned about whether that could actually be a thing. Not to denigrate Stephen King, who in many ways is a remarkable writer, but I’m not interested in the King thing of “here’s the convincing Maine town and the lives of all these nice blue collar people, but then . . . ”

JM: . . . the idea of the horror story being the irruption of horror into “reality”.

TJJ: Yes, because that suggests that there is evil and that it can be overcome and I don’t believe in either of those things.

JM: My reading is that this isn’t philosophical horror, after Ligotti, for example. Though it is Ligottian in places, there doesn’t seem to be a parsable “message” or philosophical underpinning—what’s going on seems to be more aesthetic and symbolist.

TJJ: I love Ligotti and consider him one of the most important writers of the last forty years—but I’m not a pessimist and I don’t hold with the pessimistic worldview. I think life is generally pretty good, but I think it usually lacks transcendence and ecstasy.

JM: And that’s all aesthetics—and that’s not to undervalue the aesthetic. I think there’s often a misapprehension that aesthetics are somehow superficial, but I think that’s wrong: in the face of a meaningless cosmos, aesthetics is everything, it’s the meaning-producing machine.

TJJ: I always come back to Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”: there’s a machine, there’s a chaotic cloud, it’s weird, but it’s formal and it’s structuralist. I’m not keen on Lovecraft’s notion of aesthetics giving order to chaos—why does he hate the mad piping?

JM: But I don’t think that’s quite right re. Lovecraft, because as his own stories demonstrate, what he really likes is an ecstatic chaos because that’s all he writes about. He loves the mad piping!

TJJ: Nietzsche’s thing about blending the Apollonian and the Dionysian—I think the Apollonian stuff is no good and we don’t need it.

JM: Though it is also why we have the wherewithal to eat and live somewhere under shelter.

TJJ: I think it’s probably better to starve and live in chaos isn’t it? Machen thought so.

JM: But he lived such a High-Tory bourgeois life.

TJJ: Which involved a lot of drinking.

JM: Which is Dionysian. To change the subject to specific imagery: why the lists of animals—of fauna and flora too, actually? I was reminded of “The Goblin Market”. Together with the references to the “interconnectedness” of things, I wonder whether this is a source of horror, the teeming world-without-us.

TJJ: I love “Goblin Market”—and both Rossettis have a presence in the collection, and Swinburne too, and the mid-Victorian mood in general. But again, the animals come from Lautréamont: he plagiarised and cut in excerpts from natural history works into his text. At one point there’s this list of various creatures taking over Maldoror’s body—a viper eats his penis and takes its place, a crab holds his anus shut with its claw . . .

JM: Roosters, bulls, nightjars, apes—is it “eco-Gothic”?

TJJ: The last story, how I wanted the collection to end, is with the focus on the affect of loss.

JM: Hence all the disappearances.

TJJ: Yes, and the disappearance that affects me most is the disappearance of the natural world. I wouldn’t necessarily want to write climate change fiction, but the affect of loss is something I want to convey. And the last story is meant to be a very surrealistic post-Apocalypse.

JM: Which is also created in The Wanderer.

TJJ: I’m not a nihilist—I despise some individual people but think humanity as a whole is great . . .

JM: Most people say the opposite.

TJJ: Yes, the thing is that I don’t believe in evil; I’m interested in the affect of ecstasy and the affect of loss.

JM: The preoccupation with artists and writers disappearing is also quite Ligottian.

TJJ: I couldn’t get “The Bungalow House” out of my head. But also the idea that a lost nineteenth-century decadent poet could somehow have this big, persistent influence . . . Ligotti writes a lot about visual artists, but for me literature is the most important artform.

JM: So you have a hierarchy—“all art aspires to the condition of literature, even music”, to misquote Walter Pater?

TJJ: Literature isn’t abstract, but neither is it conceptual, it’s not purely affectual—the connection between literature and magical practice is indicative of this; most notions of magic involve the repetition of magical formula.

JM: That’s the Alan Moore thing: grimoire/grammar; spells/spelling . . .

TJJ: I think words can crowbar open things that images and sounds can’t. So I genuinely think that there is a hierarchy of aesthetic affect and I think that literature is at the top of that tree.

Buy a copy of Treatises on Dust.

James Machin is an editor, teacher, and writer who lives in London. Recent books include British Weird: Selected Short Fiction, 1893–1937 for Handheld Press and his short fiction has been published in Supernatural Tales, The Shadow Booth, and Weirdbook. Together with Timothy J. Jarvis and Sam Kunkel, he is co-editor of Faunus: the journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen.

Excavating Oblivion

In Conversation with Iain Sinclair

Matthew Stocker: I honestly didn’t know how to open this interview, then yesterday I was in a restaurant with my children and wife and I spotted beside many bits of Joyce paraphernalia a quote;

“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”

In Agents of Oblivion, Dublin is mentioned once or twice in passing, but with regards London do you see yourself undertaking the same type of project as Joyce attempted for Dublin?

Iain Sinclair: Dublin wrote Joyce into existence. The city identified its ideal scribe at the optimum moment when the solid structures and achievements of nineteenth-century fiction were ready to be absorbed into the permissions of high modernism. Those special theories of everything hovering over the sweat and stink and chatter. Joyce, as the chosen instrument, had to be expelled, forced to carry out his epic sequence of masterworks at a safe distance. Whatever the cost. Whatever the collateral rewards. Poverty, vanity, a Swiss grave. He gave everything to become—the horror of it!—a cultural resource. A brand. Municipal real estate pimped for cultural tourism. But he links very neatly with the Protestant austerity of Beckett. The one who could revise and refine the task, strip it down, and carry it away from the choking rituals, the provincialism, and the heady particulars of a mesmerising and Oedipal port city.

Living for four years in Dublin was the best possible preparation for appreciating that London could never be excavated in that way. London was not a project for me. It was the curse that never stops giving. A Faustian contract to be worked out through fortunate collaborations, in poetry, film, performance, pilgrimage. Pulling away from London gravity was never successful. Those books were barely noticed or permitted. The point was to live there, to begin with the first step outside my Hackney door. To dig in, to stay. To honour characters who presented themselves and demanded a cameo.

Stocker: The book, Agents of Oblivion, is dedicated to B. Catling and he appears within the text alongside a plethora of other literary giants. I was saddened to read of his passing, I really enjoyed The Vorrh trilogy and Munky (published by Swan River Press, also illustrated by McKean); it makes a lovely companion with Agents.

Why Blackwood, Machen, Ballard, and Lovecraft? Writers/characters such as Brian and Alan Moore and Steve Moore (no relation) play almost a bigger role as travellers through the textuality.

Sinclair: Again, it felt as if those writers, with their own haunting characteristics—writers much more implicated in generic tropes than Joyce—were authentic witnesses and contributors to the weave of London mythology. Reading them, they nudge the pen. They whisper.

They have laid out the model. But it is not finished, never finished. Their words remain contemporary. They are our psychic landscape as much as Woolwich or Farringdon Road or Northolt.

The characters from our own times, like Alan Moore, Brian Catling, and Steve Moore, have doubled identities. They shape worlds, they mine extraordinary language reserves—and they also share experiences that I can subvert or celebrate. As ever: “The living can assist the imaginations of the dead.” And vice versa. Those writers know how to take the dictation and how to exploit it. They pass on the obligations of attentive readership. They pilot the future.

Stocker: Does the book serve a double purpose, on one side to be read/enjoyed/absorbed in its own right, but also as a reading list for the initiate to dive into? As a syllabus, I have been racking my mind as to what the course would be called.

Sinclair: It is my reading list at the time of writing these stories, a period of a few months. It is not a pitch for an established academic discipline. Nobody is required to locate and absorb every referenced figure. I haven’t read those books at an examination pitch. I dipped and pecked and reached out for the shelves when things were flagging.

I should say that the stories were put together in a posthumous dialogue with Brian Catling. And as a companion piece to Munky, the novella he published with Swan River. That also came with perfectly sympathetic drawings by Dave McKean. It was Catling who pointed me towards Blackwood and the John Silence stories the first time I visited his family home, off the Old Kent Road. He was also, in the late 1960s, a devourer of Lovecraft. I heard many stories of Ballard and the era of New Worlds from Mike Moorcock. I appreciated that lineage, what passed down from Moorcock, Ballard, Angela Carter to Alan Moore and Catling. They tapped the fabric of London as London prodded them.

Brian was responding, to his last breath. He projected a fourth volume of The Vorrh, in parallel with Surreycide, a questing return to the mythology of a rubbled childhood among the tenements and canals of Camberwell. That city, that time. The museums lying in wait as he rode in a London bus alongside his adopted father. Because it was always the boy who chose his parent. Who recognised and teased the inheritance from William Blake.

Stocker: You appear to take the reader on a journey linking author after author and their works, it goes beyond intertextuality. It feels like a ghost story, the writers you write about haunt the places and live on in both their writing and the landscape (I should note not all the characters are dead—Alan Moore for one).

While the literary/film characters of the book fill the pages, it is the peppering in of people like William Lyttle that add an extra dimension to your writing. (Less of a question and more calling out an aspect I loved. On second reading, I sat with Google by my side and fell down many enjoyable/educational rabbit holes, was that your intention?) That kind of interplay between a text and the digital world didn’t exist twenty years ago—what, if any, impact do you think that has had on your writing?

Sinclair: Not much. Beyond the convenience of checking dates and facts, with frequently unreliable results. Sometimes—as with the walking films of John Rogers on YouTube—I find inspiration, confirmation. In general, the digital world is a swamp. Easier to drown than swim.

Stocker: As you write, do you start with a map to the journey you take the reader on both with regards the physical places you bring them and the writers that inhabit them? Or is it a chain of events, one naturally leading to the other as you wrote?

Sinclair: I don’t know how “natural” the process is. But there is no pecking order: maps are usually involved, but I might not consult them until the walks are done. And those maps tend to be so old that they have the charm of fiction. Key buildings and sites have vanished. The latest interventions are not yet admitted. The Secret State redacts inconvenient military installations, pharmaceutical and “experimental” facilities. London documentation has to ooze through the cracks in forbidden zones. There is a perpetual struggle to outperform CGI boasts and projections. Writing is a dangerous negotiation. You pay a price to be admitted to the game.

Stocker: The artwork in the book is phenomenal, I am an avid fan of Dave McKean. (Loved your previous collaboration, Slow Chocolate Autopsy) How does that process work, how does the end product gel with the imagery in your head as you write?

Sinclair: Dave has a preternatural gift for fine-tuning his imagery to the extravagant conceits of my prose. In practical terms, as I discovered from the start, with Slow Chocolate Autopsy and London Orbital, the best way forward was to send Dave a bunch of my research snapshots—places, characters, and incidents from which the fiction took off. Dave has that classic Victorian or Edwardian gift of catching the lineaments of character and exaggerating them to achieve a higher truth.

He would do what you wanted, what you pre-imagine—and then much more. I did not for a moment conceive of the range of illustrations he would extract from Agents of Oblivion. What he delivered made it a different and richer book, a graphic novella.

Dave’s animated interventions boosted the films I made for Channel 4 with Chris Petit. There was an unforgettable moment in The Falconer when he finessed a vampiric Hammer Films seizure out of an overheated television interview Peter Whitehead conducted with a Norwegian woman, when he talked about cohabiting with raptors.

Buy a copy of Agents of Oblivion

Matthew Stocker, a graduate of the English Department of Trinity College Dublin and occasional storyteller, lives under the kitchen table and tells stories for food.

The Green Book 21

“Editor’s Note”

Let us begin this issue with B. M. Croker (1849-1920), whose writings our readers might already be familiar with from the Swan River Press edition of “Number Ninety” and Other Ghost Stories (2019; Sarob, 2000), edited by Richard Dalby. Although born in Co. Roscommon, Croker accompanied her husband, John Stokes Croker, an officer in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, to India in 1870. Many of Croker’s novels, and the ghost stories collected in the aforementioned volume, feature colonial India as their backdrop. Likewise, colonial India also serves as the setting for the story we’ve included in this issue, “The Little Brass God”—although once you read it, you might wonder, as I have, why it wasn’t instead titled “The Little Brass Goddess”. The supernaturalism in this story is only implied, a whisper of uncanny influence; perhaps this is the reason Dalby chose not to include it in his selection for “Number Ninety”, in which the stories are more overtly ghostly? Whatever the case, it’s a good read, and I’m happy to include it here.

*Courtesy of the National*
*Library of Ireland*

The centrepiece of this issue is undoubtedly Althea Gyles’s “A Woman Without a Soul”, which, to my knowledge, has never before seen print. This story is mentioned often in the scant scholarship on Althea Gyles (1867-1949) that exists, with most critics curiously referring to the piece as an unpublished “novel” or sometimes “novella”. At just over seven thousand words, it is assuredly a short story—and an intriguing one at that. In his critical profile of Gyles in The Green Book 20, Simon Cooke calls the story a Faustian tale of necromancy and obsession; other scholars have likened “A Woman Without a Soul” to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde, whom Gyles befriended in Paris after an introduction from publisher Leonard Smithers. Kristin Mahoney, in her excellent Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence, goes so far as to write that the story “reads much like a revision of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a feminized retelling of one of Wilde’s most significant works”. Suffice to say, I’m pleased to be able to present this hitherto unpublished story—after patient and careful transcription by Jim Rockhill—to The Green Book’s readership.

For those who are curious about the details, the manuscript for “A Woman Without a Soul” is housed at the National Library of Ireland: it is comprised of two 24-page school exercise books, written in erratic longhand with small edits throughout—including changing the title from “The Woman Without a Soul” to “A Woman Without a Soul”. The final page is signed “A. Gyles / 53 Mount Pleasant Square”, where Gyles lodged in Ranelagh shortly before moving to London in late 1891 or 1892. Coincidentally, Gyles’s former address is a five-minute walk from our old Swan River offices in south Dublin.

As a companion to “A Woman Without a Soul”, we also present a selection of poetry by Gyles, possibly the first such assembly of poems by “the girl with very bright red hair and an eager face”, as Ella Young once called her. According to Arthur Symons, in a letter to Thomas B. Mosher (5 July 1904), Gyles did once assemble a collection a poetry, which she had submitted to a willing publisher. However, the collection never appeared due to the publisher’s objection to her dedication: “to the beautiful memory of Oscar Wilde”. Even if the publisher could overcome the then “tarnished” reputation of Wilde, who died in November 1900, he nevertheless insisted that the word “beautiful” still be removed. Gyles, who harboured a profound adoration for Wilde her entire life, withdrew the collection. For the most part, her poems languished in newspapers and magazines, uncollected, many never even reprinted, until now. With the assistance of Simon Cooke and Ana Portillo, we’ve assembled the largest selection of Gyles’s poetry hitherto published. We feel it only appropriate, for this presentation, to reinstate Althea’s original dedication to Oscar.

If you’d like to learn more about Gyles, be sure to check out The Green Book 17, which reprints Gyles’s marvellously weird illustrations to Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House”; Issue 19, our Irish Theosophy issue, haunted by Gyles on almost every page; and Issue 20, wherein you’ll find Cooke’s profile of this extraordinarily gifted and often overshadowed poet-artist.

Finally, we’d like to introduce you to the equally enigmatic Mary Frances McHugh (1899-1955), whose work, according to Jim Rockhill’s assessment, has fallen into oblivion. In the mid-1930s, McHugh contributed a trio of macabre, dream-like vignettes to a pair of anthologies edited by John Gawsworth. Her stories sit beside those by M. R. James, Arthur Machen, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie—however, unlike these writers, McHugh is now all but forgotten. Near as I can tell, these are her only stories written in the genre. Has anyone else found any further tales or learned more details about this elusive writer?

The cover illustration for this issue is by Norman Keene, and appeared alongside McHugh’s story “Encounter at Night” in Thrills, Crimes and Mysteries (1935). The background—the rather worn-looking bricks—is a photograph showing the front wall of our new headquarters, in a secluded and less-frequented neighbourhood of central Dublin, recently shorn of its mid-century pebbledash, in hopes of restoring some semblance of its turn-of-the-century glory. And this is the first Green Book to issue from our new home . . .

Buy The Green Book 21

Brian J. Showers
Æon House, Dublin
15 March 2023

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The Green Book 23

Remembering David J. Skal

Holiday Postage 2023

Celebrating 20 Years

The Green Book 22

In an Uncertain Mode

Conversations on Dust

Excavating Oblivion

The Green Book 21