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The Scarlet Soul

“Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile.” – Oscar Wilde

Art, obsession, love, lust, sorcery—ten contemporary writers respond to the imperishable themes of Oscar Wilde’s great Decadent romance, The Picture of Dorian Gray. What happens when a face, a form, an uncanny force changes everything we thought we knew? What survives of us when we stray into a borderland of the mind, where our deepest urges seem to call up remorseless powers?

Whether in fantastic imaginary realms or in the gritty noir of today, these new stories, all especially written for this anthology, take us into some of the strangest and darkest places of the psyche. These ten boldly original portraits in the attic take many disturbing forms, revealing strong truths about the secrets of our selves, our society, and our very souls.

  • More on Oscar Wilde can be found in various issues of The Green Book

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

Cover art by John Coulthart
Selected and introduced by Mark Valentine

ISBN: 978-1-78380-019-3 (hbk)

Death Makes Strangers of Us All

“She loved to dream, although she knew that the experiences conjured by her unconscious mind were inherently unreliable.”

At the edges of everyday life, on geographical boundaries and in the margins of society, certainties and realities can wear thin. And if we find ourselves in such occult and outland territory late at night, we might glimpse phenomena out of the corner of our eye that cannot possibly be there. At such times even the past, apparently fixed and unchanging in memories and dreams, cannot be relied upon.

But what happens if we find ourselves passing beyond even these frayed perimeters of life? Can others follow us, or are we on our own? And just where will our final journey take us? How can we perceive or understand the changes that death will bring?

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

Cover art by R. B. Russell

ISBN: 978-1-78380-020-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-775-8 (pbk)

The Dummy

“An uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred . . .” – Sigmund Freud

Nicholas Royle’s stories are “immaculately sinister”, according to Olivia Laing in the Times Literary Supplement, while Phil Baker, in the Sunday Times, described Royle as “a real craftsman of disquiet”.

In his third collection, The Dummy & Other Uncanny Stories, Royle focuses on archetypes and phenomena that, through their particular melding of the familiar and the unfamiliar, produce uneasy, or uncanny, effects. In these stories he writes about doppelgängers, ghosts, dummies, disconnected body parts, impaired vision, the dead and the prospect of death, not without a macabre sense of humour.

These stories reflect Royle’s continuing development as an exponent of the form, in which he is always seeking to learn and to grow, and to push against boundaries.

  • “The Blink” was selected for Stephen Jones’s Best New Horror #30.
  • Listen to a reading of “This Video Does Not Exist”

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

Cover art by Bill Bulloch

ISBN: 978-1-78380-022-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-765-9 (pbk)

Sparks from the Fire

“There are many ways to tell a story . . . It is a question of choosing the right one.”

The stories in Sparks from the Fire explore a wide variety of familiar characters and settings, yet there is always something else—a shadow world that haunts, disturbs, and threatens. Sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, recluses and lovers—all find themselves shifting between realities: the prosaic and the mystical, even between life and death. The horrors and wonders of these parallel existences are often glimpsed, sometimes revealed, and occasionally overwhelm. These nineteen tales inhabit a terrain in which the uncanny may at any time intrude into everyday life.

  • “Holiday Reading” was selected for Stephen Jones’s Best New Horror #30.

Hardback edition limited to 300 copies.

Cover art by R. B. Russell

ISBN: 978-1-78380-023-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-776-5 (pbk)

Uncertainties 3

“A stone’s throw out on either hand / From that well-ordered road we tread” – Rudyard Kipling

“What is happening all around us that is beyond the perception of our senses—and what happens when that perception changes?” – from the Introduction by Lynda E. Rucker

Uncertainties is an anthology of new writing—featuring contributions from Irish, British, and American authors—each exploring the idea of increasingly fragmented senses of reality. These types of short stories were termed “strange tales” by Robert Aickman, called “tales of the unexpected” by Roald Dahl, and known to Shakespeare’s ill-fated Prince Mamillius as ‘winter’s tales’. But these are no mere ghost stories. These tales of the uncanny grapple with existential epiphanies of the modern day, and when otherwise familiar landscapes become sinister and something decidedly less than certain . . .

Hardback edition limited to 400 copies.

Cover images by Tobia Makover
Selected and introduced by Lynda E. Rucker

ISBN: 978-1-78380-024-7 (hbk)

A Flowering Wound

“It was only in my dearly loved evenings that I still felt at home.” – Joseph Roth

Two of the stories in this collection by John Howard have their setting in a certain west London suburb—the calm prospect of its small houses and tree-lined roads is deceptive. And throughout this selection of stories, whether in outer London or hyperinflationary Berlin, Romania in the febrile 1930s, or the austerity Britain of recent years, we encounter people who live on the peripheries of their cities and societies—and at the edge of their own lives and illusions. They might think they know the rules, but it often turns out they do not, after all. Or perhaps the rules changed—silently, abruptly. In these stories past and present come together with wounding consequences for those caught out by the system—or its absence.

Hardback edition limited to 350 copies.

Cover art by Jazon Zerrillo

ISBN: 978-1-78380-027-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-777-2 (pbk)

The Far Tower

“All Art that is not mere story-telling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic . . . ” – W. B. Yeats

Stories of magic and myth, folklore and fairy traditions, the occult and the outré, inspired by the rich mystical world of Ireland’s greatest poet, W. B. Yeats. We invited ten contemporary writers to celebrate Yeats’s contributions to the history of the fantastic and supernatural in literature, drawing on his work for their own new and original tales. Each has chosen a phrase from his poems, plays, stories, or essays to herald their own explorations in the esoteric. Alongside their own powerful qualities, the pieces here testify to the continuing resonance of Yeats’s vision in our own time, that deep understanding of the meshing of two worlds and the talismans of old magic.

  • Ron Weighell’s “Under the Frenzy of the Fourteenth Moon” was selected for Best New Horror #31 edited by Stephen Jones.
  • More on W. B. Yeats can be found in various issues of The Green Book

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

Cover art by John Coulthart
Selected and introduced by Mark Valentine

ISBN: 978-1-78380-030-8 (hbk)

Uncertainties 4

“We live in Gothic times.” – Angela Carter

The Gothic tale, disreputable as it is, can, more readily than the realist short story, provoke unease and jolt us from complacency.

Uncertainties is an anthology series—featuring authors from Britain, America, Canada, Australia, and the Philippines—each exploring the concept of increasingly fragmented senses of reality. These types of short stories were termed “strange tales” by Robert Aickman, called “tales of the unexpected” by Roald Dahl, and known to Shakespeare’s ill-fated Prince Mamillius as “winter’s tales”. But these are no mere ghost stories. These tales of the uncanny grapple with existential epiphanies of the modern day, when otherwise familiar landscapes become sinister and something decidedly less than certain . . .

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

Cover art by B. Catling
Selected and introduced by Timothy J. Jarvis

ISBN: 978-1-78380-031-5 (hbk)

Munky

“There hadn’t been monks at the abbey since 1600. Not living ones, that is.”

When the puckish spirit of a monk begins haunting the storied village of Pulborough, known for its ancient abbey, Maud Garner, manager of the Coach and Horses Inn, arranges for the famous ghost hunter, Walter Prince, to come investigate. And from there, things spiral out of control.

Peopled with richly drawn Dickensian grotesques and filled with bizarre and comical incident, Munky is as compelling as it is antic. Catling transports the reader to an interwar England in the throes of change. Part bizarre ghost story, part whimsical farce, part idiosyncratic literary experiment, it could be described as P. G. Wodehouse collaborating with Raymond Roussel, with a dash of M. R. James, if it weren’t so uniquely its own thing.

“Brian Catling’s peculiar genius for observation, and the testing and squeezing of location, always honours what Blake called “the Vegetated Mortal Eye’s perverted & single vision”. It sometimes feels that the Eye has been removed and left overnight in a glass, such are the layers of spectral comedy swaggering into view. Life through the bottom of a deep pint jar. Munky is a delirious blend of terror and pantomime. The spine-chilling realisation, for those who have trespassed anywhere near this territory, where river licks at ecclesiastical land, is that it is all true.” – Iain Sinclair

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

Cover art by Dave McKean

ISBN: 978-1-78380-033-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-745-1 (pbk)

Uncertainties 5

“Surely all this is not without meaning.” – Herman Melville

“Ghost stories,” as Elizabeth Bowen observed, “are not easy to write—least easy now, for they involve more than they did.” But these twelve writers take up the challenge, each in their own way, with expert awareness of the genre’s limitless possibilities.

Uncertainties is an anthology series—featuring authors from Canada, America, the United Kingdom, and the island of Ireland—each exploring the concept of increasingly fragmented senses of reality. These types of short stories were termed “strange tales” by Robert Aickman, called “tales of the unexpected” by Roald Dahl, and known to Shakespeare’s ill-fated Prince Mamillius as “winter’s tales”. But these are no mere ghost stories. These tales of the uncanny grapple with existential epiphanies of the modern day, when otherwise familiar landscapes become sinister and something decidedly less than certain . . .

  • Eoin Murphy’s “Three Sisters Bog” and Carly Holmes’s “Trap” were selected for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year 14.
  • Deirdre Sullivan’s “Little Lives” won the An Post Book Award for Short Story of the Year.

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

Cover art by Ksenia Korniewska
Selected and introduced by Brian J. Showers

ISBN: 978-1-78380-038-4 (hbk)

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