Blog Archives
Out of Print – Booklet
The Demon Angler
Mervyn Wall
Published: March 2015
Mervyn Wall’s “The Demon Angler” was first published in The Capuchin Annual in 1943. “Cloonaturk” was first published in Argosy (London) in 1947; it was also printed in Weird Tales in 1989/90. These tales of rural Ireland, verging on the supernatural, reflect the same dark humour and satire found in Wall’s popular novels The Unfortunate Fursey and The Return of Fursey. “The Demon Angler” and “Cloonaturk” were republished in Wall’s only collection, now difficult to find, A Flutter of Wings, in 1974 (Reprinted by Swan River Press in 2017). The Demon Angler & One Other was given away with the …
The Definitive Judge’s House
Bram Stoker
Published: December 2011
“I was probably about thirteen years old when I read Dracula for the first time. I have no idea why. I ordered it from one of those little book catalogues you used to get in school. I shudder to think what would have happened if, instead, I’d tried to read Frankenstein at that age. It surely must have been in the same catalogue. Maybe I’d be an accountant now. Nothing against Frankenstein, but I know me, and I know it would not have hooked me through the eyeball (and brain) the way Dracula did. I distinctly remember finishing the book …
The Complete Ghost Stories of Chapelizod
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Published: October 2011
“One does well not to under-appreciate the ever-alive allure of reminiscences begotten in childhood . . . Chapelizod, like the Irish capital of which it was in effect a suburb, in the early 1800s glumly epitomised the glamour and the grandeur that was gone: ‘Dead walls; dead trees overhanging them; dead lights instead of windows in the houses; the men grave, the women lifeless, the little spirits squeaking and gibbering in the muddy streets!’ Thus must it have appeared to the sensitive mind of the child who grew up to be the author of Uncle Silas, Wylder’s Hand, and The …
Just Like That
Lucy M. Boston
Published: September 2011
Unlike the stories included in Curfew & Other Eerie Tales, “Just Like That” lacks that overt element of supernatural brutality. Where the majority of Boston’s stories adhere to the Jamesian call for “malevolence and terror”, “Just Like That” is more a story of emotional tragedy, and its supernatural manifestation is of the non-threatening order. As if to punctuate this, Boston originally gave this story the title “Gentle Shadow”, which she crossed off, writing “Just Like That” in pencil—this re-titling, perhaps, emphasises the natural element of fate more than the slight supernatural manifestation of fate’s gentle shadow. Just Like That is …
To My Dear Friend Hommy-Beg
Bram Stoker
Published: April 2011
“Hall Caine was an incredible literary phenomenon, becoming the richest and most popular novelist of the late Victorian and Edwardian era, greatly outselling all of his rivals from Henry James to Joseph Conrad. By the end of the twentieth century all of his novels were out-of-print, and ironically his major claim to fame now comes from being the dedicatee of Dracula, albeit under the disguised family nickname of “Hommy-Beg”. It is a bizarre twist of fate that Bram Stoker is now so much more famous worldwide than Hall Caine—an unbelievable reversal of their roles one hundred years ago.” This booklet …
Contemporary Reviews of “Dracula”
Bram Stoker
Published: January 2011
“Over the decades, as with so many other iconic stories, Dracula has fallen prey to numerous popularly held misconceptions. Until recently we had ourselves laboured under one such misconception: that Dracula was not well received by the reading public when it was first published. We believed it to have been something of a disappointment where sales where concerned; an overlooked treasure, ahead of its time, destined to be rediscovered at a later date… we also assumed that some of the subtler aspects of the novel, which give the post-modern reader satisfaction, might have gone over the heads of the nineteenth …
Extracts from Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
Bram Stoker
Published: November 2010
“Henry Irving had died in 1905. Born John Brodribb in a Somerset village in 1838, he was the son of a travelling salesman. He would become one of the best known figures in London, and the first actor be be honoured with a knighthood. He acquired the Lyceum Theatre in 1878 and quickly hired Bram Stoker (then living in his native Dublin) to join him as Acting Manager. Stoker was immediately swept into a whirlwind of activity on which he thrived: seasons in London, provincial tours, and eight North American tours. Biographers concur that Henry Irving was the single greatest …
Bram Stoker’s Other Gothics
Bram Stoker
Published: April 2010
“Just as I would recommend any of Stoker’s works, these reviews serve as a reminder that Stoker’s literary legacy is substantially more than just Dracula, still his best-known work. These reviews, most of them now in print for the first time in over a century, provide fresh insights into Bram Stoker as an author who dabbled in the popular genres available to writers at the turn of the twentieth century, and who made the Gothic genre his own, not only in Dracula, but in other works that today are not as well known as they deserve to be.” Collected here …
On the Banks of the River Jordan
John Reppion
Published: March 2010
“Dear Brian, My name is John Reppion. You may remember that we corresponded briefly last year on the subject of my article “Where Goes the Blackberry Man”. I am currently at something of a loose end whilst my wife, and day-to-day writing partner, is off visiting her sister for a few days prior to Christmas. It is at times such as these that I would normally take the opportunity to work on some of my more esoteric researches. Going through my notes, I came across a mass of material concerning Princes Park—the Victorian park adjacent to where I live—which I …
Four Romances
Bram Stoker
Published: January 2010
“While the stories that make up this collection are not among Stoker’s best, they do cast an interesting light on the psyche of their creator. His lifelong concerns, anxieties, obsessions and ambiguities would cohere into the masterpiece that is Dracula in the 1890s but his other work, including these stories, shine a revealing light into the mind of its creator, a mind more profound, if also more troubled, than has generally been realised.” Here collected for the first time since their original publication in periodicals, these four romances display a side of Bram Stoker’s writing somewhat less familiar to modern …
Thirty Years A-Going
Albert Power
Published: October 2009
“It was on a raw January evening in 1980, at a public meeting held in the darkling pile of Trinity College Dublin’s graduates memorial building, with its ample expanse of grey frontage, high windows and maw-like entrance led up to by a flight of stone steps, that the sturdy first steps to set up the Bram Stoker Society were taken. The date was January 10th and the event had been organised by the college Philosophical Society, of which Bram Stoker had been President in 1869-1870.” Albert Power was present at the January 1980 inaugural meeting of the Bram Stoker Society …
My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Published: July 2009
“My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure” is reminiscent of the great terror tales of mounting alarm such as Wilkie Collins’s “A Terribly Strange Bed”; the hotel scene, to a lesser extent, in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”; James Whale’s The Old Dark House; and the more recent film The Last Great Wilderness (2002) directed by David Mackenzie. In fact, with their often arch and sardonic senses of humour, the latter two examples are most appropriate comparisons. Comfort and safety are fleeting in stories like these. Familiar and generally hospitable surroundings quickly take turns into strange worlds of indefinable menace. Terror mounts. A …
The Seer of Trieste
Mark Valentine
Published: December 2008
“The old Austro-Hungarian imperial seaport of Trieste has been home to several literary figures: Anglo-Irish novelist Charles Lever, Victorian explorer, translator and erotologist Sir Richard Burton, James Joyce, who started his masterpiece Ulysses there, the fine bookseller-poet Umberto Saba, and Italo Svevo, the chain-smoking man of business who caught its curious atmosphere so well in his novels. A place apart, at first mercantile and prosperous, but with a history associated with loss, melancholy and the liminal, it also has a strange undercurrent of the shabby-bohemian and semi-magical. An acquaintance with a genteel seer and almanac-maker in the city led me …
The Nanri Papers
Edward Crandall
Published: August 2008
“Dear Mr. Otani, I am contacting you on behalf of Mr. Masanobu Nanri of Onimaru, Saga City. Mr. Nanri recently showed me some papers and personal effects belonging to his parents (both deceased). These papers have to do with events he describes as ‘likely paranormal in nature’ that have occurred over the years at Akamatsu Primary School, also in Saga City. For your reference, I have included transcripts of the original documents he showed me as well as an explanation of the circumstances under which he showed them to me. Mr. Nanri is concerned, as you will see from the …
Ghostly Rathmines
Brian J. Showers
Published: March 2008
Ghostly Rathmines: A Visitor’s Guide is a companion booklet limited to 125 numbered copies containing artefacts, images, and photographs from locations in the stories featuring in The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories. The booklet was given away free with the first 125 copies of The Bleeding Horse sold through this website. This limited edition booklet is sold out. Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies. Cover art by Duane Spurlock ISBN: N/A
Brutal Spirits
Gary McMahon
Published: February 2008
“My friend and sometime mentor, Charles Edward Urban, died in March 2007. He was seventy years old. Unfortunately, Charles took his own life before I had the chance to ever meet him in the flesh, and our long-distance relationship remained sadly unresolved. I had been fortunate enough to conduct an informal correspondence with him (a loose friendship that took the form of letters and emails) in the few years before his untimely death, which was begun when I sent him a fan letter because a story of his (“The Red Yawn”) affected me profoundly enough to cause me to re-examine …
The Red House at Münstereifel
Helen Grant
Published: June 2007
“Early in 2007, whilst researching an article about Steinfeld Abbey, I came across the collection of documents (originally in German) which comprise this booklet, in a forgotten folder bearing the name of Löher, a name closely connected with that infamous period in European history when witch-hunting was at its height. For reasons which will soon become clear upon perusal of the documents, I have chosen to publish them outside Germany. It is imperative that the facts relating to the history of the Red House in Münstereifel—in so far as they can be established—are put before those persons best equipped to …
Blind Man’s Box
Reggie Oliver
Published: June 2007
“On the thirteenth of July this year, Dr. George Vilier, died suddenly at the age of fifty five. He was lecturer in Theatre Studies at Bath University, and a colleague and friend of mine, so I suppose it should have been no surprise to discover that he had made me his literary executor. Among his papers I found the almost complete MS of his long-awaited work, The Gothic Experience in Victorian Drama, which I hope will soon see publication. I also found a folder which contained the following documents and notes. I am sure that Vilier was intending to use …
On the Apparitions at Gray’s Court
Peter Bell
Published: December 2006
“This intriguing pamphlet, handsomely produced by Swan River Press, is the first in a promised series of fake histories of real buildings. Peter Bell’s fascinating On the Apparitions at Gray’s Court leaves you eager for more. Taking the form of a reprinted academic paper, complete with footnotes, bibliographic references and the kind of entertainingly pernickety detail beloved of the local history enthusiast, we’re very much in M. R. James territory, physically as well as stylistically—a medieval building in the cathedral precinct at York, which has played host at different times to clergy, academics and something altogether less reassuring. “By the …