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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 House on the Borderland

I am an old man. I live here in this ancient house, surrounded by huge, unkempt gardens.”

An exiled recluse, an ancient abode in the remote west of Ireland, nightly attacks by malevolent swine-things from a nearby pit, and cosmic vistas beyond time and space. The House on the Borderland has been praised by China Miéville, Terry Pratchett, and Clark Ashton Smith, while H. P. Lovecraft wrote, “Few can equal [Hodgson] in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and significant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and abnormal.”

“Almost from the moment that you hear the title,” observes Alan Moore, “you are infected by the novel’s weird charisma. Knock and enter at your own liability.” The House on the Borderland remains one of Hodgson’s most celebrated works. This new edition features an introduction by Alan Moore, an afterword by Iain Sinclair, and illustrations by John Coulthart.

  • Listen to Jon Mueller’s soundtrack for the novel online and buy a digital copy here.

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

Cover and illustrations by John Coulthart
Introduction by Alan Moore
Afterword by Iain Sinclair

ISBN: 978-1-78380-021-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-739-0 (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)

“Number Ninety”

“Did you never have a dream that haunted you, and terrified you, and made you ill at ease?”

The bestselling Irish author B. M. Croker enjoyed a highly successful literary career from 1880 until her death forty years later. Her novels were witty and fast moving, set mostly in India and her native Ireland. Titles such as Proper Pride (1882) and Diana Barrington (1888) found popularity for their mix of romantic drama and Anglo-Indian military life. And, like many late-Victorian authors, Croker also wrote ghost stories for magazines and Christmas annuals. From the colonial nightmares such as “The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor” and “The North Verandah” to the more familiar streets of haunted London in “Number Ninety”, this collection showcases fifteen of B. M. Croker’s most effective supernatural tales.

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

Cover art by Alan Corbett
Selected and introduced by Richard Dalby

ISBN: 978-1-78380-028-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-753-6 (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)

Lucifer and the Child

“She did not want to be organised at all. She wanted to be solitary and free.”

This is the story of Jenny Flower, London slum child, who one day, on an outing to the country, meets a Dark Stranger with horns on his head. It is the first day of August—Lammas—a witches’ sabbath. Jenny was born on Hallowe’en, and possibly descended from witches herself . . .

Reminiscent of Machen’s, “The White People”, Lucifer and the Child is a tale of witchcraft—or is it? The author does not commit herself; merely stating that the story is open to natural explanation; alternatively, she invites “the willing suspension of disbelief”.

“There is never any name for the impact of strangeness on the commonplace,” Mannin writes. With this sensibility Lucifer and the Child will at last be recognised as a classic of strange fiction and a work to be enjoyed by contemporary lovers of the genre.

Once banned in Ireland by the Censorship of Publications Board, Lucifer and the Child is now available worldwide in this splendid new edition from Swan River Press featuring an introduction by Rosanne Rabinowitz and cover by Lorena Carrington.

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

Cover art by Lorena Carrington
Introduction by Rosanne Rabinowitz

ISBN: 978-1-78380-032-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-770-3 (pbk)

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