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Now It’s Dark

“Have I not always loved terrible things?” – “The Seventh Wave”

A student’s research into an obscure pulp writer takes on increasingly sinister tones; three friends reunite to fight an evil they thought they’d escaped decades earlier; a woman in a seemingly perfect marriage finds herself haunted by the mysterious absences in her memories of their life together.

In her third collection, Lynda E. Rucker reminds us that mystery lurks even in the most banal settings—a British holiday park, a Moldovan tower block, a stretch of industrial wasteland—but as these ten stories reveal, there can also remain a dreadful beauty amidst the horror.

  • Read John Coulthart’s blog post about his cover art.
  • Listen to the No Darkness But Ours podcast with Lynda E. Rucker.

Hardback edition limited to 400 copies.
Signed by Rucker, Shearman, and Coulthart.

Cover art by John Coulthart
Introduction by Rob Shearman

ISBN: 978-1-78380-043-8 (hbk)

The Bleeding Horse

“Take my word for it, there is no such thing as an ancient village, especially if it has seen better days, un-illustrated by its legends of terror. You may as well expect to find decayed cheese without mites, or an old house without rats, as an antique and dilapidated town without an authentic population of goblins.” – Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

In the spirit of Le Fanu’s classic trio of tales, Brian J. Showers’ The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories infests his own Dublin neighbourhood with an authentic population of ghosts, ghouls, and goblins. Showers has filled each story with fascinating regional history, local atmosphere, and architectural details that are clearly visible today. While this gives the stories a factual flavour, the supernatural elements are entirely fictional. The result is a realistic and shadow-filled portrait of a modern neighbourhood, written in the traditional style of the classic literary ghost story.

Each story features a recognisable Dublin setting and infuses it with a spectral history. Among the mysteries you will be invited to unravel are: the origins of The Bleeding Horse pub’s gruesome name “‘The Bleeding Horse”); the mysterious events leading to the discovery of Jack B. Yeats’ final painting (“Oil on Canvas”); the eerie and persistent repercussions of a tragic omnibus accident in 1861 (“Favourite No. 7 Omnibus”); the possible resting place of the stolen Irish Crown Jewels and what guards it (“Quis Separabit”); the identify of the strange entity that plagued a 19th c. curate (“Father Corrigan’s Diary”); and more. The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories features black and white illustrations throughout by Duane Spurlock, an introduction by Le Fanu scholar Jim Rockhill, and a cover by Harvey Award winner Scott Hampton.

  • Winner of the Children of the Night Award (2008)
  • Prequel to Old Albert

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

Hardback edition published by Mercier Press (Cork, Ireland).

Cover art by Scott Hampton
Illustrated by Duane Spurlock
Introduction by Jim Rockhill

ISBN: 978-1-85635-578-0 (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.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover art by R. B. Russell
Introduction by Glen Cavaliero

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

Curfew

“His eye sockets were appallingly hollow, and he lifted his chin as the blind do when they seek.”

Lucy M. Boston is best remembered today as the Carnegie Medal-winning author of a series of children’s novels set in Green Knowe, an ancient, haunted house based on Hemingford Grey Manor near Huntingdon, Cambridge. She began writing these chilling tales when she was already in her sixties, but they were not her first attempts at fiction. A handful of supernatural tales dating from the early 1930s exist among her papers, and these are here published together for the first time, along with her only play, The Horned Man, which has been out of print since 1970. An introduction by Robert Lloyd Parry considers the literary influences on these works and looks at them in the context of Boston’s personal life.

Of the short stories in this volume only three have been published before—”Curfew”, “The Tiger-Skin Rug” and “Many Coloured Glass”—all having appeared originally in long out of print anthologies for children. Children play pivotal roles in the first two of these stories, but there is nothing specifically juvenile about their language or themes, nothing to exclude them from a mature bookshelf. Indeed in her use of children as witnesses and victims of the supernatural, Boston was—consciously or otherwise—emulating that other great East Anglian supernaturalist, M. R. James.

Boston’s debt to James, in fact, runs deep. The stories collected here offer the same unmistakeable, inexplicable malice that we find in James, and the same lurking feeling of terror: what Boston calls in “Curfew” the “thrill, or chill, of expectation”. And like James’s most celebrated stories, most of those collected here centre around antiquarian objects—an old bell, a rug bought at auction, an intricately carved desk left in a house by a previous occupant—curious trouvés, artefacts of the past that carry more than memories with them.

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

Cover art by Elisabeth Vellacott
Introduction by Robert Lloyd Parry

ISBN: 978-0-95665-871-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-746-8 (pbk)

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)

Longsword

“Death’s but a Path that must be trod, / If Man wou’d ever pass to God” – Thomas Parnell

Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, by eighteenth century Dublin-born clergyman Thomas Leland, is a fast-paced historical romance of medieval menace and high excitement. Set in the early years of the thirteenth century, it features a blend of real and created characters in a mêlée of intrigue, corruption, lust, and revenge. In part a metaphor for the tug-of-war between the sexes, Longsword is the definitive precursor to the Gothic novel; both in trappings and in style, it provides vital elements of prototype for Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Lewis’s The Monk. Through Longsword, Leland emerges as a forerunner of fellow Dublin clergyman Charles Robert Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer. This 250th anniversary edition is edited and introduced by Albert Power.

  • More on Thomas Leland 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 Ellen McDermott
Introduction by Albert Power

ISBN: 978-0-95665-875-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-757-4 (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.

Hardback edition limited to 300 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.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover art by Jason Zerrillo

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

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