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Not to Be Taken at Bed-Time

“The lonely graveyard is far away, an’ the dead man is hard to raise—”

In the late-nineteenth century Rosa Mulholland (1841-1921) achieved great popularity and acclaim for her many novels, written for both an adult audience and younger readers. Several of these novels chronicled the lives of the poor, often incorporating rural Irish settings and folklore. Earlier in her career, Mulholland became one of the select band of authors employed by Charles Dickens to write stories for his popular magazine All the Year Round, together with Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Amelia B. Edwards. Mulholland’s best supernatural and weird short stories have been gathered together in the present collection, edited and introduced by Richard Dalby, to celebrate this gifted late Victorian “Mistress of the Macabre”.

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

Cover art by Brian Coldrick
Selected and introduced by Ricard Dalby

ISBN: 978-1-78380-026-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-752-9 (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)

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)

The Death Spancel

“Come to me, a lonely ghost, / Out of the night and rain.”

Katharine Tynan is not a name immediately associated with the supernatural. However, like many other writers of the early twentieth century, she made numerous forays into literature of the ghostly and macabre, and throughout her career produced verse and prose that conveys a remarkable variety of eerie themes, moods, and narrative forms.

From her early, elegiac stories, inspired by legends from the West of Ireland, to pulpier efforts featuring grave-robbers and ravenous rats, Tynan displays an eye for weird detail, compelling atmosphere, and a talent for rendering a broad palette of uncanny effects.

The Death Spancel and Others is the first collection to showcase Tynan’s tales of supernatural events, prophecies, curses, apparitions, and a pervasive sense of the ghastly.

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

Cover art by Brian Coldrick
Cover design by Meggan Kehrli
Introduction by Peter Bell

ISBN: 978-1-78380-035-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-754-3 (pbk)

Earth-Bound

“‘Tis these places are haunted,” he said, “by the old Chieftains and Kings.”

Originally published in 1924, the nine tales that comprise Earth-Bound were written by Dorothy Macardle while she was held a political prisoner in Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol and Mountjoy Prison. The stories incorporate themes that intrigued her throughout her life; themes out of the myths and legends of Ireland; ghostly interventions, dreams and premonitions, clairvoyance, and the Otherworld in parallel with this one. It is so easy to dismiss them, as some have, merely as part of the narrative of “Irish nationalism” of the time, but it is the supernatural elements that make them much more. She would revisit these themes in later works such as her classic haunted house novel The Uninvited (1941). To this new edition of Macardle’s debut collection, reprinted for the first time in ninety years, we have added four more tales of the supernatural.

  • More on Dorothy Macardle 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 Brian Gallagher
Introduction by Peter Berresford Ellis

ISBN: 978-1-78380-011-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-738-3 (pbk)

Bending to Earth

“He called to it and said, ‘Tell me what you are?’”

Irish women have long produced literature of the gothic, uncanny, and supernatural. Bending to Earth draws together twelve such tales. While none of the authors herein were considered primarily writers of fantastical fiction during their lifetimes, they each wandered at some point in their careers into more speculative realms—some only briefly, others for lengthier stays.

Names such as Charlotte Riddell and Rosa Mulholland will already be familiar to aficionados of the eerie, while Katharine Tynan and Clotilde Graves are sure to gain new admirers. From a ghost story in the Swiss Alps to a premonition of death in the West of Ireland to strange rites in a South Pacific jungle, Bending to Earth showcases a diverse range of imaginative writing which spans the better part of a century.

  • View the Strange Stories by Irish Women poster here.
  • More on Strange Stories by Irish Women 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 Karen Vaughan
Selected and introduced by Maria Giakaniki and Brian J. Showers

ISBN: 978-1-78380-025-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-751-2 (pbk)

Ghosts of the Chit-Chat

“Such things may have attached to them heaven knows what spooks and spirits.”

On the evening of Saturday, 28 October 1893, Cambridge University’s Chit-Chat Club convened its 601st meeting. Ten members and one guest gathered in the rooms of Montague Rhodes James, the Junior Dean of King’s College, and listened—with increasing absorption one suspects—as their host read “Two Ghost Stories”.

Ghosts of the Chit-Chat celebrates this momentous event in the history of supernatural literature, the earliest dated record we have of M. R. James reading his ghost stories out loud. And it revives the contributions that other members made to the genre; men of imagination who invoked the ghostly in their work, and who are now themselves shades. In a series of essays, stories, and poems Robert Lloyd Parry looks at the history and culture of the Club.

In addition to tales and poems never before reprinted, Ghosts of the Chit-Chat features earlier, slightly different versions of two of M. R. James’s best-known ghost stories; Robert Lloyd Parry’s profiles and commentaries on each featured Chit-Chat member sheds new light on this supernatural tradition, making Ghosts of the Chit-Chat a valuable resource for casual readers and long-time Jamesians alike.

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

Cover art by John Coulthart
Selected and introduced by Robert Lloyd Parry

ISBN: 978-1-78380-036-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-744-4 (pbk)

Eyes of Terror

“I was in the dark and alone, yet not alone.”

Despite her wide contributions to genre literature, Irish author L. T. Meade is now remembered, if at all, for her girls’ school stories. However, in 1898 the Strand Magazine, famous for its fictions of crime, detection, and the uncanny, proclaimed Meade one of its most popular writers for her contributions to its signature fare. Her stories, widely published in popular fin de siècle magazines, included classic tales of the supernatural, but her specialty was medical or scientific mysteries featuring doctors, scientists, occult detectives, criminal women with weird powers, unusual medical interventions, fantastic scientific devices, murder, mesmerism, and manifestations of insanity. Eyes of Terror and Other Dark Adventures is the first collection to showcase the best of her pioneering strange fiction.

Hardback edition limited to 350 copies.

Cover art by Brian Coldrick
Selected and Introduced by Janis Dawson

ISBN: 978-1-78380-039-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-750-5 (pbk)

A Vanished Hand

“Only the dead are faithful to Love—because they are dead.”

Clotilde Graves was known for challenging convention. In her early years, she was known as the dramatist “Clo Graves”, but became better known under her fiction-writing persona, “Richard Dehan”. She transgressed contemporary gender norms by dressing in male attire, wearing her hair short, and smoking in public. This border crossing can be seen also in her work, which encompasses a wide variety of forms and modes. And while she wrote relatively few fantastical stories, she was devoted to tales of lingering revenants, mysterious cryptids, and grotesque sciences—often laced with her sardonic sense of humour. This volume seeks to recover this side of Graves’s writing by including stories from across her career, which challenge definition and range across the speculative genres.

Hardback edition limited to 350 copies.

Cover art by Brian Coldrick
Selected and introduced by Melissa Edmundson

ISBN: 978-1-78380-041-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-756-7 (pbk)

The Lure of the Unknown

“Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.” – William Blake

The Lure of the Unknown is a collection of Algernon Blackwood’s essays, talks, reviews and anecdotes exploring encounters with the strange and unusual or, in Blackwood’s preferred word, the “odd”. They include his first attempts to investigate alleged haunted houses, his association with such luminaries as W. B. Yeats, “A.E.”, and Gurdjieff; his thoughts on telepathy, reincarnation, elemental spirits, other dimensions, and his beliefs in what lies beyond our normal perceptions. These writings reveal not only Blackwood’s diverse experiences, but his depth of reading and analysis of the unexplained. Few of these essays have been reprinted beyond their first publication or their broadcast on radio and television. They provide another dimension to an understanding of one of the great writers of the supernatural.

  • More on Algernon Blackwood 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 Chloe Cumming
Selected and introduced by Mike Ashley

ISBN: 978-1-78380-042-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-766-6 (pbk)

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