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Bram Stoker’s Other Gothics

“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 are a selection of reviews of Stoker’s works that are generally classified under the broad heading of Gothic: Under the Sunset (1882), The Snake’s Pass (1890), The Mystery of the Sea (1902), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), The Lady of the Shroud (1909), and The Lair of the White Worm (1911). Assembled from the list provided by Richard Dalby and William Hughes in their Bram Stoker: A Bibliography (Essex: Desert Island Books, 2004), these reviews appeared in many of the leading publications of their day, including The Spectator, Punch, The Academy, and The Athenaeum as well as in more specialised journals such as The Dial, The Bookman, The Reader Magazine.

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Bram Stoker Series #2

Cover design by Brian J. Showers
Introduction by Carol A. Senf

ISBN: N/A

Extracts from Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving

“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 influence on Stoker’s life.”

Bram Stoker’s tribute to his late, former employer in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906) proved to be one of his most successful books during Stoker’s lifetime. While Dracula has since surpassed Personal Reminiscences in popularity, the latter title contains many fascinating accounts central to the author’s life. Selected and introduced by Elizabeth Miller, this booklet features the most interesting portions of Stoker’s semi-autobiographical account. Extracts focus on Stoker’s early meetings with Irving, anecdotes from his years managing the Lyceum Theatre in London, and his association with many of the famous people of his day including Whitman, Gladstone, Tennyson, Browning, Vambéry and Liszt. The volume also includes excerpts from five contemporary reviews.

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

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Bram Stoker Series #3

Cover design by Brian J. Showers
Introduction by Elizabeth Miller

ISBN: N/A

Four Romances

“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 readers. Even so, these tales are not quite devoid of the elements we have come to expect from the master of horror, mystery, cruelty and black humour. Spanning Stoker’s literary career, this volume reprints “Greater Love” (1914), “Our New House” (1886), “A Yellow Duster” (1899) and “The Way of Peace” (1909). Rounding out the collection is an introduction by Stoker biographer Paul Murray and a never before printed essay, “Rules for Domestic Happiness”, by Charlotte M. B. Stoker—Bram’s mother, who is often credited with instilling in the young author an early sense of fatalism and the macabre.

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Bram Stoker Series #1

Cover design by Brian J. Showers
Introduction by Paul Murray

ISBN: N/A

Thirty Years A-Going

“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 in Trinity College as a rapt undergraduate. Now, at the dawn of an exciting new chapter in the society’s history, he paints a personal picture of its uneven, sometimes unsettled growth—from the heady days of the early 1980s when a plaque was installed on premises lived in by Bram Stoker on Dublin’s Kildare Street; through the short fraught association with Trinity College’s Philosophical Society; the thirteen years of the journal; the Bram Stoker Club; fraternal links with the Clontarf-centred annual Bram Stoker Summer School; to the death of the society’s founder and chairman, Leslie Shepard, in August 2004. The narrative concludes with a putative pencil sketch for the future.

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Bram Stoker Series #0

Cover design by Brian J. Showers

ISBN: N/A

The Old Knowledge

“Make the reader think the evil, make him think it for himself . . .” – Henry James

This first collection of tales by Rosalie Parker contains eight stories that explore the uncanny in the modern world. As Glen Cavaliero observes in his introduction, “like all good stories of the preternatural, these in The Old Knowledge have a subversive effect.” In them, “the world of logical, predictable reality is seen to be at risk from rejected modes of knowledge which can thwart the materialist and victimise those innocents who stumble into another order of reality.”

In “The Rain”, Geraldine heads to the North for a holiday she hopes will provide a welcome break from her busy city life, only to suffer a complicated and enigmatic distortion of her usual world-view. The narrator of “In the Garden” strays into new pastures while explaining her theory of gardening. In “Chanctonbury Ring”, the well-meaning protagonist, helping a lady in distress, gets rather more than he bargained for. The temporary schoolteacher in “The Supply-Teacher” elicits altruism from her class, whilst, in “The Old Knowledge”, a group of archaeologists called in to excavate a prehistoric round barrow have to negotiate local interventions. In “The Cook’s Story” a Gothic country house provides the setting for a modern tale of mystery.

Do not expect blood-and-guts, wraiths or revenants: these stories hold a different kind of terror. “Their unostentatious magic is of an insidious kind; and like the protagonist of the title story, is liable to exert itself in disconcerting ways.”

  • The paperback edition of The Old Knowledge is available through Tartarus Press

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Cover art by R. B. Russell
Introduction by Glen Cavaliero

ISBN: 978-0-9566587-0-8 (hbk)

Curfew

“His eye sockets were appallingly hollow, and he lifted his chin as the blind do when they seek.”

Lucy M. Boston is best remembered today as the Carnegie Medal-winning author of a series of children’s novels set in Green Knowe, an ancient, haunted house based on Hemingford Grey Manor near Huntingdon, Cambridge. She began writing these chilling tales when she was already in her sixties, but they were not her first attempts at fiction. A handful of supernatural tales dating from the early 1930s exist among her papers, and these are here published together for the first time, along with her only play, The Horned Man, which has been out of print since 1970. An introduction by Robert Lloyd Parry considers the literary influences on these works and looks at them in the context of Boston’s personal life.

Of the short stories in this volume only three have been published before— “Curfew”, “The Tiger-Skin Rug” and “Many Coloured Glass”—all having appeared originally in long out of print anthologies for children. Children play pivotal roles in the first two of these stories, but there is nothing specifically juvenile about their language or themes, nothing to exclude them from a mature bookshelf. Indeed in her use of children as witnesses and victims of the supernatural, Boston was—consciously or otherwise—emulating that other great East Anglian supernaturalist, M. R. James.

Boston’s debt to James, in fact, runs deep. The stories collected here offer the same unmistakeable, inexplicable malice that we find in James, and the same lurking feeling of terror: what Boston calls in “Curfew” the “thrill, or chill, of expectation”. And like James’s most celebrated stories, most of those collected here centre around antiquarian objects—an old bell, a rug bought at auction, an intricately carved desk left in a house by a previous occupant—curious trouvés, artefacts of the past that carry more than memories with them.

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Cover art by Elisabeth Vellacott
Introduction by Robert Lloyd Parry

ISBN: 978-0-95665-871-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-746-8 (pbk)

Ghosts

“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.” – Charles Baudelaire

Ghosts contains R. B. Russell’s debut publications, Putting the Pieces in Place and Bloody Baudelaire. Enigmatic and enticing, they combine a respect for the great tradition of supernatural fiction, with a chilling contemporary European resonance. With original and compelling narratives, Russell’s stories offer the reader insights into the more hidden, often puzzling, impulses of human nature, with all its uncertainty and intrigue. There are few conventional shocks or horrors on display, but you are likely to come away with the feeling that there has been a subtle and unsettling shift in your understanding of the way things are. This book is a disquieting journey through twilight regions of love, loss, memory and ghosts.

  • “In Hiding” was shortlisted for the 2010 World Fantasy Awards
  • Listen to the album Ghosts (feat. Lidwine)
  • Listen to the soundtrack for Bloody Baudelaire

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Cover art by yomgaille.com
Introduction by Mark Valentine

ISBN: 978-0-95665-873-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-747-5 (pbk)

Strange Epiphanies

“Man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions . . . ” – Arthur Machen

A mentally disturbed woman is entrapped in Beltane rituals in the Cumbrian fells; a widower mourning his wife falls beneath the mystic allure of Iona; a quest to the Italian Apennines brings a lonely man to a dread Marian revelation; an alcoholic on a Scottish isle is haunted by a deceased chronicler of local legend; in a small German town a sinister doll discloses truths about a murky family tragedy; an unknown journal by a Victorian travel-writer sends a woman on a grim odyssey to Transylvania; in a childhood holiday paradise a man encounters a demented artist’s terrifying legacy. The protagonists in Peter Bell’s stories confront the awesome, the numinous, the uncanny, the lure of genius loci, and landscapes undergoing strange epiphanies.

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Cover art by R. B. Russell
Introduction by Brian J. Showers

ISBN: 978-0-95665-872-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-748-2 (pbk)

Longsword

“Death’s but a Path that must be trod, / If Man wou’d ever pass to God” – Thomas Parnell

Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, by eighteenth century Dublin-born clergyman Thomas Leland, is a fast-paced historical romance of medieval menace and high excitement. Set in the early years of the thirteenth century, it features a blend of real and created characters in a mêlée of intrigue, corruption, lust, and revenge. In part a metaphor for the tug-of-war between the sexes, Longsword is the definitive precursor to the Gothic novel; both in trappings and in style, it provides vital elements of prototype for Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Lewis’s The Monk. Through Longsword, Leland emerges as a forerunner of fellow Dublin clergyman Charles Robert Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer. This 250th anniversary edition is edited and introduced by Albert Power.

  • More on Thomas Leland can be found in various issues of The Green Book

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Cover art by Ellen McDermott
Introduction by Albert Power

ISBN: 978-0-95665-875-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-757-4 (pbk)

Old Albert

“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 the stories in the award-winning collection The Bleeding Horse, Old Albert continues with the idea that not all is well in the leafy Victorian suburb of Rathmines, Dublin.

Hardback edition limited to 300 copies.

Cover art by Jason Zerrillo
Introduction by Jim Rockhill
Afterword by Adam Golaski

ISBN: 978-0-95665-874-6 (hbk)

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