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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)

The Fatal Move

“I cannot endure these frequent fits of terror much longer.”

Written in Belfast and Bangor during the partition of Ireland, the six strange stories comprising Conall Cearnach’s The Fatal Move are unusual documents of the time. “Cearnach” was the pseudonym of F. W. O’Connell, a peculiar Protestant divine, linguist and Irish language scholar, oddball essayist, and early national broadcaster. His sole fiction collection showcases a wide scope: the conte cruel, the ghost story, the locked-room mystery, and the science-fictional satire. What unifies the stories is O’Connell’s playful, outward-looking perspective, inspired by his love of the diverse cultures and languages of the world and his home country in equal measure. A unique figure in Irish life, Cearnach’s character is perhaps more present in these stories than the anxieties of the time in which they were written. For this volume, Reggie Chamberlain-King provides an extensive introduction examining O’Connell’s life and works.

  • Read about the design of Swan River Press’s edition of The Fatal Move
  • Listen to “The Weird World of F. W. O’Connell” on BBC Radio
  • More on Conall Cearnach can be found in issues of The Green Book

Hardback edition limited to 350 copies.

Cover art by Thomas Grogan
Selected and introduced by Reggie Chamberlain-King

ISBN: 978-1-78380-037-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-779-6 (pbk)

Uncertainties 5

“Surely all this is not without meaning.” – Herman Melville

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

  • Eoin Murphy’s “Three Sisters Bog” and Carly Holmes’s “Trap” were selected for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year 14.
  • Deirdre Sullivan’s “Little Lives” won the An Post Book Award for Short Story of the Year.

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

Cover art by Ksenia Korniewska
Selected and introduced by Brian J. Showers

ISBN: 978-1-78380-038-4 (hbk)

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.

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

The Ruins of Contracoeur

“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, as most people, tend to “settle down” as they age, to work within ever more constrained limits, Joyce Carol Oates’s remarkable imagination, in the sixth decade of her career, manifests no sign of such complacency. The six savage, glittering stories in this volume show it has, on the contrary, become ever more transgressive and restless.

Hardback edition limited to 500 copies.
Signed by Oates, Kehrli, and Tuttle.

Cover art by Meggan Kehrli
Introduction by Lisa Tuttle

ISBN: 978-1-78380-040-7 (hbk)

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.

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