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Seventeen Stories

“The general effect was a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom.” – M. P. Shiel

Mark Valentine’s stories have been described by critic Rick Kleffel as “consistently amazing and inexplicably beautiful”. He has been called “A superb writer, among the leading practitioners of classic supernatural fiction” by Michael Dirda of The Washington Post, and his work is regularly chosen for year’s best and other anthologies.

This new selection offers previously uncollected or hard to find tales in the finest traditions of the strange and fantastic. As well as tributes to the masters of the field, Valentine provides his own original and otherworldly visions, with what Supernatural Tales has called “the author’s trademark erudition” in “unusual byways of history, folklore and general scholarship”. Opening a book will never seem quite the same again after encountering this curious volume of Seventeen Stories . . .

  • “The Axholme Toll” and “The Fall of the King of Babylon” were both selected for Stephen Jones’s Best New Horror.

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

Cover art by Jason Zerrillo

ISBN: 978-0-95665-879-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-743-7 (pbk)

Here with the Shadows

“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 . . . Here with the Shadows is a volume of supernatural impressions and quiet vacancies, and in each story Tem reminds us that sometimes only a whisper separates us from the eternal.

  • “The Still, Cold Air” was selected for Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015

Hardback edition limited to 400 copies.

Cover art by Jason Zerrillo

ISBN: 978-1-78380-000-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-773-4 (pbk)

The Dark Return of Time

“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. Hopper believes that a rare and mysterious book, The Dark Return of Time, may be the key to what happened before he arrived in Paris. In this quiet thriller by R. B. Russell, the futures—and pasts—of these two men will soon cross.

Hardback edition limited to 400 copies.

Cover art by Jason Zerrillo

ISBN: 978-1-78380-001-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-774-1 (pbk)

The Silver Voices

“I found the white cities just as they were in my dreams.” – Joseph Roth

Transylvania: the country beyond the forest and land of the seven fortress towns. In The Silver Voices we encounter the previously unknown eighth town: Sternbergstadt. Now known as Steaua de Munte, it’s one of those places where past and present continually meet, with no-one being entirely sure which has the upper hand. In Steaua de Munte history can never be said to be dead and buried; it plays too many tricks on the present and future for that.

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

Cover art by Meggan Kehrli

ISBN: 978-1-78380-002-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-763-5 (pbk)

Dreams of Shadow and Smoke

“Perhaps other souls than human are sometimes born into the world, and clothed in human flesh.” – Uncle Silas

With Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and James Joyce among his admirers, the ghost stories and novels of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) cast a long shadow on the literary landscape. Dreams of Shadow and Smoke features ten new tales of the fantastic and macabre written in celebration of the bicentenary of Dublin’s “Invisible Prince”. Revisit a world in which certain elixirs remain capable of awakening the mind to the presence of unknown forces; where the monuments, portraits, and other legacies of history lay traps for the unwary; and the logic of finance butts up against the unyielding rules of folklore. We would like to think that should Le Fanu be handed this book, he would smile at the results and deem it worthy of his consideration.

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

Cover art by Jason Zerrillo
Introduction by Jim Rockhill & Brian J. Showers

ISBN: 978-1-78380-003-2 (hbk)

Reminiscences of a Bachelor

“I know there is a God—a dreadful God—and that retribution follows guilt.”

For the first time in over 150 years, “The Watcher”, Le Fanu’s classic tale of supernatural menace, is reissued from the pages of the Dublin University Magazine along with its original companion piece “The Fatal Bride”, a brooding gothic novella not reprinted since its first publication in 1848. Like matched duelling pistols, Reminiscences of a Bachelor offers the most exquisite balance of craftsmanship, beauty, and peril. In these tales of Old Dublin, honour is ever at stake, the fate of lovers lies mired in the past, and something even worse than deceit stalks the streets, something just as deadly to the soul as it is to the flesh.

  • More on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 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 Paul Lowe
Introduction by Matthew Holness

ISBN: 978-1-78380-004-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-759-8 (pbk)

The Return of Fursey

“Henceforth I will serve Evil. I’ll become a most depraved character. I’ll turn really wicked.”

This worthy sequel to The Unfortunate Fursey follows the continued exploits of that reluctant sorcerer Fursey, now a middling grocer in the realm of King Ethelwulf. But when Fursey’s wife is seized by an Irish delegation led by her jilted fiancé, Fursey resolves to embrace evil, return to Ireland, and reclaim his wife. Readers will delight in the return of Fursey’s unhelpful familiar Albert and the Prince of Darkness; plus such memorable new characters as George the Vampire, Sigurd the Skull Splitter, and the wealthy Festus Wisenuts. “The Return of Fursey shows no lessening at all in Wall’s quality of imagination,” wrote critic Robert Hogan. “As with the best of Charlie Chaplin, or of Anton Chekhov or O’Casey, the laughter is very akin to high art.”

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
The paperback edition is no longer available.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover art by Jesse Campbell-Brown
Introduction by Michael Dirda

ISBN: 978-1-78380-006-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-768-0 (pbk)

The Unfortunate Fursey

“In Ireland anything may happen to anyone anywhere and at any time, and it usually does.”

The forces of evil have launched a determined offensive on the sanctified precincts of Clonmacnoise, and gain a bridgehead in the cell of Brother Fursey. But the hapless monk is so tongue-tied with fright that he cannot utter the necessary words of exorcism. When the other monks discover this, poor Fursey is expelled, and sets forth on the first stage of his travels accompanied by a fantastic procession of cacodemons, hippogriffs, imps, furies, and other dreadful creatures, not to mention the elegant gentleman in black who is their commander-in-chief. Reviewed in the Irish Times as “wildly fantastic, intensely satirical, and wickedly comic” and described by critic E. F. Bleiler as a “landmark book in the history of fantasy”, Mervyn Wall’s The Unfortunate Fursey remains a classic of modern Irish literature.

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
The paperback edition is no longer available.
Please check with our Booksellers for remaining copies.

Cover art by Jesse Campbell-Brown
Introduction by Michael Dirda

ISBN: 978-1-78380-005-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-767-3 (pbk)

The Satyr

“It was the straying that found the path direct.” – Austin Osman Spare

In the final throes of the Blitz, Austin Osman Spare is the only salvation for Marlene, an artist escaping a traumatic past. Wandering Southwark’s ruins she encounters Paddy Hughes, a fugitive of another kind. Falling under Marlene’s spell Hughes agrees to seek out her lost mentor, the man she calls The Satyr. Yet Marlene’s past will not rest as the mysterious Doctor Charnock pursues them, trying to capture the patient she’d once caged. The Satyr is a tale inspired by the life and ethos of sorcerer and artist Austin Osman Spare.

Another three novellas of occult enchantment follow: a bookseller discovers that his late wife knew the Devil, in the Carpathian Mountains refugees shelter in a museum devoted to a forgotten author, and in Prague a portraitist must paint a countess whose appearance is never the same twice.

This omnibus is comprised of The Satyr (2010) and The Bestiary of Communion (2011); newly illustrated, expanded, and revised.

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

Cover art by Stephen J. Clark

ISBN: 978-1-78380-007-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-741-3 (pbk)

The Anniversary of Never

“It was like a black and white film, or someone else’s memory.”

Joel Lane’s award-winning stories have been widely praised, notably by other masters of weird fiction such as M. John Harrison, Graham Joyce, and Ramsey Campbell. His tales also regularly appeared in the “best of” annual anthologies of Ellen Datlow, Karl Edward Wagner, and Stephen Jones. With this posthumous collection, Lane continues his unflinching exploration of the human condition.

“The Anniversary of Never is a group of tales concerned with the theme of the afterlife,” observed Lane, “and the idea that we may enter the afterlife before death, or find parts of it in our world.” These stories of love and death will burrow deep into the reader’s mind and impregnate it with a vision often as bleak as the night is black.

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

Cover art by Polly Rose Morris
Introduction by Nicholas Royle

ISBN: 978-1-78380-008-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-749-9 (pbk)

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