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Treatises on Dust

“From the small bones of the middle ear can be fashioned a key.”

“For a while now,” Timothy J. Jarvis tells us in the first tale here, “I’ve been collecting texts that hint at strange tales.” He goes on to explain that these “Treatises on Dust” are not ghost stories in the traditional sense. Indeed none of the pieces in the collection could be said to be in the vein of traditional supernatural fiction. They are haunted, not by ghosts, but by an obscure volume of French decadent poetry, a seventeenth-century murder ballad, a bone antenna, and by places where “the membrane is thin”.

They cleave closer to what the literary hermit of Arthur Machen’s Hieroglyphics called “ecstasy”. Though perhaps an ecstasy found less in the “withdrawal from the common life and the common consciousness”, than one grubbed up from the murk of that very consciousness.

  • “To Have a Horse” was selected for Nicholas Royle’s Best British Short Stories 2024.
  • Treatises on Dust has been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2024.

Hardback edition limited to 425 copies.
Signed by the author.

Cover art by øjeRum

ISBN: 978-1-78380-046-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-781-9 (pbk)

Uncertainties 6

“I am writing only for my shadow . . . I must make myself known to him.” – Sadegh Hedayat

“Ghost stories,” as Elizabeth Bowen observed, “are not easy to write—least easy now, for they involve more than they did.” But these eleven 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 Ireland, France, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom—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 . . .

  • Alison Moore’s “Where Are They Now?” was selected for Nicholas Royle’s Best British Short Stories 2024.

Hardback edition limited to 450 copies.
Signed or inscribed by the editor on request.

Cover art by David Tibet
Selected by Brian J. Showers

ISBN: 978-1-78380-045-2 (hbk)

Agents of Oblivion

“How long have things been coming apart in this way?” – The Lure of Silence

“Generally speaking the dead do not return,” pronounced Antonin Artaud. But the dead are permitted to visit those who welcome them. Their spectral, machine-made voices echo in deep tunnels under London. Voices without hosts. Without agency. They make their oracular pronouncements even when nobody is listening on the vast empty platforms of the Elizabeth Line. They have their codes and their secret meanings.

Four stories starting everywhere and finishing in madness. Four acknowledged guides. Four tricksters. Four inspirations. Algernon Blackwood. Arthur Machen. J. G. Ballard. H. P. Lovecraft. They are known as “Agents of Oblivion”. And sometimes, in brighter light, as oblivious angels . . .

As host, as oracle, Iain Sinclair moves through this quartet of tales, through a spectral London that once was, or might never have been.

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

Cover art and illustrations by Dave McKean

ISBN: 978-1-78380-044-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-771-0 (pbk)

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)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-780-2 (pbk)

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.
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)

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