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The Ballads and Poems of J. Sheridan Le Fanu

“When in the year 1880 I wrote a memoir of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, as a Preface to his “Purcell Papers”, I was not aware that, besides being the author of the Irish poems contained in that collection of Irish stories and of the celebrated “Shamus O’Brien”, Le Fanu had anonymously contributed half-a-dozen other poems to the Dublin University Magazine between the years 1863 and 1866; two of which . . . exhibit Le Fanu’s genius in a new and unexpected light. They show him to have been capable of dramatic and lyrical creation on a distinctly higher plane than he had hitherto reached . . . The same magnetic attributes of superhuman mystery, grim or ghastly humour and diabolic horror which characterise the finest of his prose fictions meet us again.” – from the Introduction by A. P. Graves

This booklet reproduces much of the contents of The Poems of Le Fanu, which was first published in 1896. The original introduction by Alfred Perceval Graves is herein reproduced as are the appendices. New to this edition are extracts from Seventy Years of Irish Life in which the author’s brother, William Le Fanu, included extracts of juvenile poetry (“O’Donoghue” and “Valentine to Miss K”); and a selection of contemporary reviews.

  • More on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu can be found in various issues of The Green Book

Booklet edition limited to 200 copies.

J. S. Le Fanu Series #2

Cover design by Brian J. Showers
Introduction by Alfred Perceval Graves

ISBN: N/A

My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure

“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 candle going out may be discomforting, but an accident befalling your only light source is downright sinister. Like Aunt Margaret, the reader is cursed with an active mind courtesy of the author’s vivid prose rich in regional flavour and Gothic detail. It’s only a matter of time—we can just feel it in our bones!—before the other shoe drops.

“My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure” first appeared in the March 1864 issue of the Dublin University Magazine, which was then under the editorship of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. The DUM was a regular venue for Le Fanu’s work. The February issue contained the final instalments of his novel Wylder’s Hand, while the April issue saw the publication of “Wicked Captain Walshawe of Wauling”—”My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure” appeared in the interceding issue. Believed by M. R. James and S. M. Ellis to be the work of Le Fanu, “My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure” shares many motifs, themes, and effects found in the Irish author’s work. This new edition will feature commentary on the story and its authorship by two leading Le Fanu scholars, Jim Rockhill (introduction and annotations) and Gary W. Crawford (afterword).

  • More on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu can be found in issues of The Green Book

This limited edition booklet is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

J. S. Le Fanu Series #1

Cover art by Allison Elrod
Introduction by Jim Rockhill
Afterword: Gary William Crawford

ISBN: N/A

J. S. Le Fanu: A Concise Bibliography

“As my book J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwood Press, 1995) has shown, cataloguing Le Fanu’s work is no easy task. There are many snares and chasms, omissions and errors to be found on the bibliographer’s journey. Most difficult is the fact that many of Le Fanu’s works were published anonymously in Victorian magazines. This has been further complicated by the fact that Le Fanu’s account books, notebooks and other papers were dispersed and lost after his death. There are undoubtedly many unsigned items produced by Le Fanu’s pen that will never be found.

“This concise edition of that bibliography was edited, re-organised and amended by Brian J. Showers, with assistance from Richard Dalby. A major difference is that the magazine appearances are listed chronologically to help give a sense of Le Fanu’s development as a writer. The listing of books is selective as to first editions and major appearances, as is the secondary material with annotations provided for landmark critical works.” – from the “Preliminary Word” by Gary W. Crawford

  • More on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu can be found in various issues of The Green Book

Booklet edition limited to 200 copies.

J. S. Le Fanu Series #0

Cover design by Brian J. Showers
Preliminary Word by Gary William Crawford

ISBN: N/A

The Demon Angler

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 first 100 numbered sets of The Unfortunate Fursey/The Return of Fursey.

  • More on Mervyn Wall can be found in various issues of The Green Book

This limited edition booklet is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover design by Brian J. Showers

ISBN: N/A

Just Like That

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 a booklet with an initial print run limited to 125 copies containing a hitherto unpublished story by Lucy M. Boston. The booklet was given away free with the first 100 copies of Curfew & Other Eerie Tales sold through this website.

This limited edition booklet is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover art by Peter Boston
Introduction by Brian J. Showers

ISBN: N/A

Ghostly Rathmines

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 with the first 125 copies of the 2008 edition 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

The Bleeding Horse

“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 tales, placing them for the first time alongside their neighbours; including “Old Albert”, a strange puzzle box of a novella, which, as John Connolly observes in his foreword, is “a hauntological piece, indebted to the narrative structures of J. Sheridan Le Fanu”.

  • Winner of the Children of the Night Award (2008)
  • Features a new foreword by John Connolly
  • Includes a new afterword by the author
  • The Bleeding Horse was originally published by Mercier Press in 2008

Hardback edition limited to 500 copies.
Signed by Showers, Connolly, Rockhill, and Coldrick.

Cover art by Brian Coldrick
Foreword by John Connolly
Introduction by Jim Rockhill

ISBN: 978-1-78380-057-5 (hbk)

The Definitive Judge’s House

“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 and thinking, ‘Well, this is it. I have found my thing.’ It’s like finding that city or, if you’re very lucky, that house where you know you want to spend the rest of your life. And that’s pretty much what I’ve done.”

Just in time for Christmas comes the definitive edition of Stoker’s famous haunted house story, “The Judge’s House”. This facsimile edition, celebrating the 120th anniversary of the tale’s first appearance, reproduces the text from Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914). And especially for the occasion, Mike Mignola, the esteemed creator of Hellboy, has provided an original frontispiece—a portrait of Stoker’s baleful and vindictive Judge—and an introduction entitled “Bram Stoker and I”. Also included is a reproduction (in miniature) of the story’s 1891 appearance in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News‘s Christmas annual, Holly Leaves. Rounding out the booklet are endnotes and an afterword by Gothic scholar Jack G. Voller. And remember, “Rats is bogies, I tell you, and bogies is rats!”

  • More on Bram Stoker can be found in various issues of The Green Book

This limited edition booklet is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Bram Stoker Series #6

Cover design by Brian J. Showers
Introduction and frontispiece by Mike Mignola
Endnotes and afterword by Jack G. Voller

ISBN: N/A

To My Dear Friend Hommy-Beg

“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 explores the intimate, lifelong friendship between Stoker and Caine in their own words. Accompanying an introduction by Stoker scholar Richard Dalby are rare and un-reprinted pieces including letters, extracts from Caine’s autobiographical My Story (1908) and Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), Stoker’s introductions to The Works of Hall Caine (1905) and hitherto unknown essay “The Ethics of Hall Caine” (1909), Caine’s touching obituary to Stoker (1912), and a reproduction of Stoker’s inscription to Caine in the latter’s copy of Dracula—printed here for the first time.

  • More on Bram Stoker can be found in various issues of The Green Book

This limited edition booklet is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Bram Stoker Series #5

Cover design by Brian J. Showers
Introduction by Richard Dalby

ISBN: N/A

Contemporary Reviews of “Dracula”

“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 century audience. How could a stuffy Victorian possibly get pleasure from this book in the same way a twenty-first century reader might? Needless to say—as this volume of reviews demonstrates—we grossly underestimated not only the horror reader of 1897, but also, to some degree, Mr. Stoker himself.”

Contemporary Reviews of “Dracula” collects together a selection of reviews of Stoker’s seminal work shortly after it was published in England in 1897 and in America in 1899. These reviews—both complimentary and critical — give insight into Dracula‘s initial public reception, unmarred by decades of misconceptions, academic scrutiny and literary legendry. Assembled from the list provided by Richard Dalby and William Hughes in their Bram Stoker: A Bibliography, these reviews appeared in many of the leading publications of their day, including The Spectator, Punch, Vanity Fair, and The Athenaeum. The booklet includes an insightful introduction by Leah Moore and John Reppion, who faithfully adapted Dracula as a graphic novel; and also reproduces first edition US and UK covers, as well as two short reviews of Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914).

  • More on Bram Stoker can be found in various issues of The Green Book

This limited edition booklet is sold out.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Bram Stoker Series #4

Cover design by Brian J. Showers
Introduction by Leah Moore & John Reppion

ISBN: N/A

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