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In Print – Hardback
The Bleeding Horse
Brian J. Showers
Published: February 2026
“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 …
Strange South Seas
Beatrice Grimshaw
Published: February 2026
“There are places in the Pacific almost as far away as another star.” In the magical and beautiful islands of the South Seas, belief in the supernatural can mean the difference between life and death. Beatrice Grimshaw, though born and raised in Ireland, lived and breathed the culture of the islands for most of her adult life. In these stories, she conjures the Pacific’s darker side, where sorcerers practice their ancient craft, where enchanting forests ensnare the unwary, where ghosts linger for thousands of years, and where beauty often casts a sinister shadow. Strange South Seas is the first collection …
A Mind Turned in Upon Itself
Jim Rockhill
Published: August 2025
“He stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.” – M. R. James A major influence on M. R. James, considered by Henry James “ideal reading for the hours after midnight”, and thought to be one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula through his classic vampire tale “Carmilla”—Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s ghost stories continue to loom large in the Gothic imagination. This study considers Le Fanu’s troubled life, his haunting stories, and his continued influence on horror literature by exploring the richness of his imagination, and the finesse with which he expands upon and combines elements …
A Mystery of Remnant
B. Catling
Published: July 2025
“The death itself was not a bodily thing.” A ghost is an absence defined by its presence, or else a presence defined by its absence. The work of Brian Catling is filled with such visions, intrusions on the threshold of our world and the next. The stories collected within are fragments of a singular imagination, portals into worlds populated by dog-headed giants and reanimated bog bodies, spirits both beastly and mundane. These are tales about visionaries and mystics, about the need to venture into blurry territories of sight in which angels, ghosts and memories merge and reform. Together they showcase …
An Arabian Night-mare
Fitz-James O'Brien
Published: March 2025
“O’Brien’s early death undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror.” – H. P. Lovecraft An Arabian Night-mare and Others (1848-1854) gathers O’Brien’s earliest speculative fiction. The collection opens with the eerie poem “Forest Thoughts”, a meditation on dark Gothic themes, and concludes with the story “A Peep Behind the Scenes”, which explores the metaphorical theater of life. Between these bookends, readers will find poems, fragments, and stories that delve into liminal spaces, nightmares, wild fantasies, and the unsettling theme of mental deterioration. This collection showcases O’Brien’s early fascination with the blurred boundaries between reality and imagination. …
What Was It?
Fitz-James O'Brien
Published: March 2025
“[When O’Brien] turned to science fiction and fantasy, he began to display the full force of his truly outstanding talents.” – Sam Moskowitz What Was It? and Others (1858-1864) showcases O’Brien’s finest speculative fiction, reflecting his growth as a writer. This collection includes “What Was It?”, featuring an encounter with a strange invisible creature, “The Lost Room”, regarded as one of the greatest weird stories ever written, and “The Wondersmith”, where animated puppets are used for diabolical revenge. These stories cemented O’Brien’s legacy, demonstrating his mastery of the genre and his ability to craft unsettling, imaginative narratives that have endured …
Uncertainties 7
Carly Holmes (Editor)
Published: November 2024
“It came out of the dark, and into the dark it has gone again.” – E. F. Benson “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 Wales, England, Germany, Canada, and the United States—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” …
Atmospheric Disturbances
Helen Grant
Published: November 2024
“In its dim depths living things scurried and fluttered, but human voices were very rarely heard.” – The West Window A glimpse of a grotesque illustration combined with the onset of fever instigate a descent into a hellish nightmare. In the wine cellar of an abandoned mansion, something alluring yet ominous is sealed inside a vintage bottle. At the end of a claustrophobically narrow alley lies a gilded façade opulent enough to tempt a thief. And forty miles out to sea, a naturalist on a lonely island hears voices through the radio telling stories of unimaginable disaster—and hope. In her …
Treatises on Dust
Timothy J. Jarvis
Published: July 2023
“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 …
Uncertainties 6
Brian J. Showers (Editor)
Published: July 2023
“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 …
The Ruins of Contracoeur
Joyce Carol Oates
Published: October 2021
“To be fated, to be accursed—isn’t that also to be special?” A group of resourceful young girls punish the men of a small town for unspeakable lusts by luring them to a derelict factory and into the toils of a bizarre contraption; a dead man tries to makes sense of a strange epiphany he experienced one day when out hiking amid gigantic ancient redwoods; and a state judge, fleeing disgrace, settles with his family on an isolated ruinous estate where some dread thing prowls in the night . . . As Lisa Tuttle notes in her introduction, where most writers, …
Leaves for the Burning
Mervyn Wall
Published: September 2020
“Beware lest you get in middle-age what you longed for in youth.” Lucian Brewse Burke, a middle-aged public servant, works in a shabby county council sub-office in the bleak Irish midlands, mired in Kafkaesque bureaucracy and petty skirmishes with locals. Upon the arrival of his old university friends on their way to Yeats’s funeral, things turn toward the eccentric. They embark on a days-long, cross-country spree brimming with booze-fueled nostalgia. To the accompaniment of juke boxes blaring a reminder of the steady of Americanisation of Europe, we see public-houses thronged with saints, senators, and sinners; while outside old stone crumbles …
A Flowering Wound
John Howard
Published: July 2019
“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 …
Uncertainties 3
Lynda E. Rucker (Editor)
Published: September 2018
“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 …
Sparks from the Fire
Rosalie Parker
Published: June 2018
“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 …
Insect Literature
Lafcadio Hearn
Published: October 2015
“The insect-world is altogether a world of goblins and fairies.” As Lafcadio Hearn observes in his essay “Insects in Greek Poetry”, “the capacity to enjoy the music of insects and all that it signifies in the great poem of nature tells very plainly of goodness of heart, aesthetic sensibility, a perfectly healthy state of mind.” And to this, one might add a keen sense of wonder. Insect Literature collects twenty essays and stories written by Hearn, mostly in Japan, a land where insects were as appreciated as in ancient Greece. With a witty gentleness bordering on the eerie, Hearn describes …
The Dark Return of Time
R. B. Russell
Published: May 2014
“I was searching for The Dark Return of Time on the ‘net. It’s odd, but there isn’t a copy for sale anywhere, and it doesn’t turn up on the British Library catalogue, the Library of Congress website, or the Bibliothèque Nationale.” The past doesn’t always stay where it should. It is as though somebody, or something, is forever trying to bring it painfully into the present. Flavian Bennett is trying to leave his past behind when he goes to work in his father’s bookshop in Paris. But a curious customer, Reginald Hopper, is desperate to resurrect his own murky origins. …
Here with the Shadows
Steve Rasnic Tem
Published: February 2014
“Far better to choose an absence than to have an absence forced upon you.” These stories by award-winning author Steve Rasnic Tem drag from the darkness ghosts that haunt us all. Between these covers lurk the spectres of grief, loss, and loneliness: a man discovers he is far from alone in his empty home, a forlorn wife is gifted with an unusual child, a contractor contemplates the sad message left by a grieving father, a blind woman discovers a spiritual manifestation at the edge of a forest, a spectral presence appears in a lonesome Colorado wheat field . . . …
Old Albert
Brian J. Showers
Published: September 2012
“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 …