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On the Apparitions at Gray’s Court

“This intriguing pamphlet, handsomely produced by Swan River Press, is the first in a promised series of fake histories of real buildings. Peter Bell’s fascinating On the Apparitions at Gray’s Court leaves you eager for more. Taking the form of a reprinted academic paper, complete with footnotes, bibliographic references and the kind of entertainingly pernickety detail beloved of the local history enthusiast, we’re very much in M. R. James territory, physically as well as stylistically—a medieval building in the cathedral precinct at York, which has played host at different times to clergy, academics and something altogether less reassuring.

“By the end I was googling away to try and sort the truth from the fiction. It’s a great idea and Dr. Bell pulls it off with ease and elegance. If anyone out there has a second hand copy of the author’s Poltergeist over the Wolds: A Study of Paranormal Phenomena in the East Riding of Yorkshire, I’d be very interested in putting in an offer.” – Robert Lloyd Parry, All Hallows

This limited edition booklet is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Haunted Histories Series #1

Cover art by Meggan Kehrli

ISBN: N/A

Ghostly Rathmines

Ghostly Rathmines: A Visitor’s Guide is a companion booklet limited to 125 numbered copies containing artefacts, images, and photographs from locations in the stories featuring in The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories.

The booklet was given away with the first 125 copies of the 2008 edition of The Bleeding Horse sold through this website.

This limited edition booklet is sold out.
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Cover art by Duane Spurlock

ISBN: N/A

The Bleeding Horse

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.” – Italo Calvino

Drawing on supernatural literature, historical incident, and dubious folklore, Brian J. Showers infests the south Dublin neighbourhood of Rathmines with an authentic population of ghosts and other less welcome entities. Each story brims with local atmosphere and darkened paths still traversed today by unsuspecting residents. The result is a realistic and shadow-filled portrait of a modern locale, and where the spirit of place is not always a hospitable one.

This new edition of The Bleeding Horse collects Showers’s other Rathmines tales, placing them for the first time alongside their neighbours; including “Old Albert”, a strange puzzle box of a novella, which, as John Connolly observes in his foreword, is “a hauntological piece, indebted to the narrative structures of J. Sheridan Le Fanu”.

  • Winner of the Children of the Night Award (2008)
  • Features a new foreword by John Connolly
  • Includes a new afterword by the author
  • The Bleeding Horse was originally published by Mercier Press in 2008

Hardback edition limited to 500 copies.
Signed by Showers, Connolly, Rockhill, and Coldrick.

Cover art by Brian Coldrick
Foreword by John Connolly
Introduction by Jim Rockhill

ISBN: 978-1-78380-057-5 (hbk)

The Old Knowledge

“Make the reader think the evil, make him think it for himself . . .” – Henry James

This first collection of tales by Rosalie Parker contains eight stories that explore the uncanny in the modern world. As Glen Cavaliero observes in his introduction, “like all good stories of the preternatural, these in The Old Knowledge have a subversive effect.” In them, “the world of logical, predictable reality is seen to be at risk from rejected modes of knowledge which can thwart the materialist and victimise those innocents who stumble into another order of reality.”

In “The Rain”, Geraldine heads to the North for a holiday she hopes will provide a welcome break from her busy city life, only to suffer a complicated and enigmatic distortion of her usual world-view. The narrator of “In the Garden” strays into new pastures while explaining her theory of gardening. In “Chanctonbury Ring”, the well-meaning protagonist, helping a lady in distress, gets rather more than he bargained for. The temporary schoolteacher in “The Supply-Teacher” elicits altruism from her class, whilst, in “The Old Knowledge”, a group of archaeologists called in to excavate a prehistoric round barrow have to negotiate local interventions. In “The Cook’s Story” a Gothic country house provides the setting for a modern tale of mystery.

Do not expect blood-and-guts, wraiths or revenants: these stories hold a different kind of terror. “Their unostentatious magic is of an insidious kind; and like the protagonist of the title story, is liable to exert itself in disconcerting ways.”

  • The paperback edition of The Old Knowledge is available through Tartarus Press

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
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Cover art by R. B. Russell
Introduction by Glen Cavaliero

ISBN: 978-0-9566587-0-8 (hbk)

Ghosts

“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.” – Charles Baudelaire

Ghosts contains R. B. Russell’s debut publications, Putting the Pieces in Place and Bloody Baudelaire. Enigmatic and enticing, they combine a respect for the great tradition of supernatural fiction, with a chilling contemporary European resonance. With original and compelling narratives, Russell’s stories offer the reader insights into the more hidden, often puzzling, impulses of human nature, with all its uncertainty and intrigue. There are few conventional shocks or horrors on display, but you are likely to come away with the feeling that there has been a subtle and unsettling shift in your understanding of the way things are. This book is a disquieting journey through twilight regions of love, loss, memory and ghosts.

  • “In Hiding” was shortlisted for the 2010 World Fantasy Awards
  • Listen to the album Ghosts (feat. Lidwine)
  • Listen to the soundtrack for Bloody Baudelaire

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover art by yomgaille.com
Introduction by Mark Valentine

ISBN: 978-0-95665-873-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-747-5 (pbk)

Strange Epiphanies

“Man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions . . . ” – Arthur Machen

A mentally disturbed woman is entrapped in Beltane rituals in the Cumbrian fells; a widower mourning his wife falls beneath the mystic allure of Iona; a quest to the Italian Apennines brings a lonely man to a dread Marian revelation; an alcoholic on a Scottish isle is haunted by a deceased chronicler of local legend; in a small German town a sinister doll discloses truths about a murky family tragedy; an unknown journal by a Victorian travel-writer sends a woman on a grim odyssey to Transylvania; in a childhood holiday paradise a man encounters a demented artist’s terrifying legacy. The protagonists in Peter Bell’s stories confront the awesome, the numinous, the uncanny, the lure of genius loci, and landscapes undergoing strange epiphanies.

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover art by R. B. Russell
Introduction by Brian J. Showers

ISBN: 978-0-95665-872-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-748-2 (pbk)

Old Albert

“If dear Old Albert finds you, / Still your tongue, be still your tongue.” – School Rhyme

The place is Larkhill House, and during its century and a half of existence it has hosted an array of peculiar tenants: the reclusive though brilliant ornithologist Ellis Grimwood; a murderous wine merchant and his young wife; and the Sacred Order of the Mysteries of Thoth, who re-christened Larkhill the “New Temple of Abtiti” and practised there their outlandish and mystical rites. After vacating Larkhill, these individuals—all of them—left something of themselves behind . . . Set in the same haunted neighbourhood as the stories in the award-winning collection The Bleeding Horse, Old Albert continues with the idea that not all is well in the leafy Victorian suburb of Rathmines, Dublin.

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover art by Jason Zerrillo
Introduction by Jim Rockhill
Afterword by Adam Golaski

ISBN: 978-0-95665-874-6 (hbk)

Selected Stories

“Nothing lasts! The faun sleeps, / Smiling, mute, remorseless.” – Ludmila Jevsejeva, Aŭtuna Melodio

In St. Petersburg, amidst an uneasy truce with the revolution, there exists a secret trade in looted ikons. But who are the dark strangers seeking for the Gate of the Archangel? In the small town of Tzern, news arrives of the death of the Emperor; meanwhile a postmaster, a priest, a prophet and a war-wearied soldier watch the dawn for signs of the future. Constantinople: A quest for the lost faiths of the former Ottoman Empire leads a French scholar to believe that the strangest may also be the truest. On the edges of Europe, exiles and idealists meet in a café to talk of their hopes—while sinister forces begin to march. These stories, exquisitely told by Mark Valentine, are about individuals caught up in the endings of old empires—and of what comes next.

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover art by Jason Zerrillo

ISBN: 978-0-95665-876-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-742-0 (pbk)

The Sea Change

“Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” – T. S. Eliot

In her first collection, award-winning author Helen Grant plumbs the depths of the uncanny: Ten fathoms down, where the light filtering through the salt water turns everything grey-green, something awaits unwary divers. A self-aggrandising art critic travelling in rural Slovakia finds love with a beauty half his age—and pays the price. In a small German town, a nocturnal visitor preys upon children; there is a way to keep it off—but the ritual must be perfect. A rock climber dares to scale a local crag with a diabolical reputation, and makes a shocking discovery at the top. In each of these seven tales, unpleasantries and grotesqueries abound—and Grant reminds us with each one that there can be fates even worse than death.

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
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Cover art by Jason Zerrillo

ISBN: 978-0-95665-877-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-758-1 (pbk)

Written by Daylight

“I’m already dead, and I’m a dead man speaking, and that’s why they can’t hear.” – Joseph Roth

Sunsets in a London suburb, and a transformation into an Earthly paradise; paths winding through a Transylvanian palace gardens, and an obsessed journey towards a Mediterranean dream; a city so ancient that even its total disappearance has been forgotten, and an island of shifting sands that can never be truly mapped . . .

The vivid and diverse settings of these stories are façades obscuring reality for the exiles and outcasts who find their way into them. Seemingly born out of time and place, they seek the right routes to bring them to where they want to be, but there are many diversions on the way. In these stories of haunted landscapes and intimidating cities many possibilities confront the unwary, but there is usually only one choice to be made.

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover art by Eoin Llewellyn

ISBN: 978-0-95665-878-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-772-7 (pbk)

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