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A Flutter of Wings

“Strange,” he said to himself. “I had an idea that Pat’s Tommy was dead.”

First collected in 1974, the stories in A Flutter of Wings span Mervyn Wall’s entire writing career, dating back as far as the 1940s. Told in an easy style, tales such as “They Also Serve . . . ” and “Adventure” offer the same satirical sensibilities found in Wall’s classic novel The Unfortunate Fursey; while darker tales such as “Cloonaturk” and “The Demon Angler” are not without a hint of the grimly sardonic. In addition to an introduction by Val Mulkerns and illustrations by Clare Brennan, this new edition boasts the uncollected Jamesian fragment “Extract from an Abandoned Novel”, and Wall’s early play, Alarm Among the Clerks, a savagely hilarious and ultimately brutal depiction of office life.

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

Hardback edition limited to 300 copies.

Cover art and illustrations by Clare Brennan
Introduction by Val Mulkerns

ISBN: 978-1-78380-017-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-764-2 (pbk)

The Scarlet Soul

“Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile.” – Oscar Wilde

Art, obsession, love, lust, sorcery—ten contemporary writers respond to the imperishable themes of Oscar Wilde’s great Decadent romance, The Picture of Dorian Gray. What happens when a face, a form, an uncanny force changes everything we thought we knew? What survives of us when we stray into a borderland of the mind, where our deepest urges seem to call up remorseless powers?

Whether in fantastic imaginary realms or in the gritty noir of today, these new stories, all especially written for this anthology, take us into some of the strangest and darkest places of the psyche. These ten boldly original portraits in the attic take many disturbing forms, revealing strong truths about the secrets of our selves, our society, and our very souls.

  • More on Oscar Wilde 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 John Coulthart
Selected and introduced by Mark Valentine

ISBN: 978-1-78380-019-3 (hbk)

Old Hoggen

“Old Hoggen had disappeared: and murder was naturally suspected.”

At the time of his death in 1912, Bram Stoker was preparing for publication three volumes of stories. The first, Dracula’s Guest, saw print in 1914; the second and third never manifested. Old Hoggen and Other Adventures is a tantalising possibility of one of these unrealised selections, and the stories in this volume span the author’s entire career. In reading them, one thing becomes clear: adventure and mystery rival even the gothic in Stoker’s literary heart. And yet, one will find among these pages many of the same themes found in Dracula: reverence for the dead, the malice of wicked men, black humour, hidden fortunes, daring bravery, exotic locales, a deep love of the sea, and the creeping intrusion of the supernatural.

  • More on Bram Stoker 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 Jason Zerrillo
Introduction by John Edgar Browning and Brian J. Showers

ISBN: 978-1-78380-018-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-769-7 (pbk)

Death Makes Strangers of Us All

“She loved to dream, although she knew that the experiences conjured by her unconscious mind were inherently unreliable.”

At the edges of everyday life, on geographical boundaries and in the margins of society, certainties and realities can wear thin. And if we find ourselves in such occult and outland territory late at night, we might glimpse phenomena out of the corner of our eye that cannot possibly be there. At such times even the past, apparently fixed and unchanging in memories and dreams, cannot be relied upon.

But what happens if we find ourselves passing beyond even these frayed perimeters of life? Can others follow us, or are we on our own? And just where will our final journey take us? How can we perceive or understand the changes that death will bring?

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

Cover art by R. B. Russell

ISBN: 978-1-78380-020-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-775-8 (pbk)

The House on the Borderland

I am an old man. I live here in this ancient house, surrounded by huge, unkempt gardens.”

An exiled recluse, an ancient abode in the remote west of Ireland, nightly attacks by malevolent swine-things from a nearby pit, and cosmic vistas beyond time and space. The House on the Borderland has been praised by China Miéville, Terry Pratchett, and Clark Ashton Smith, while H. P. Lovecraft wrote, “Few can equal [Hodgson] in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and significant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and abnormal.”

“Almost from the moment that you hear the title,” observes Alan Moore, “you are infected by the novel’s weird charisma. Knock and enter at your own liability.” The House on the Borderland remains one of Hodgson’s most celebrated works. This new edition features an introduction by Alan Moore, an afterword by Iain Sinclair, and illustrations by John Coulthart.

  • Listen to Jon Mueller’s soundtrack for the novel online and buy a digital copy here.

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

Cover and illustrations by John Coulthart
Introduction by Alan Moore
Afterword by Iain Sinclair

ISBN: 978-1-78380-021-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-739-0 (pbk)

The Dummy

“An uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred . . .” – Sigmund Freud

Nicholas Royle’s stories are “immaculately sinister”, according to Olivia Laing in the Times Literary Supplement, while Phil Baker, in the Sunday Times, described Royle as “a real craftsman of disquiet”.

In his third collection, The Dummy & Other Uncanny Stories, Royle focuses on archetypes and phenomena that, through their particular melding of the familiar and the unfamiliar, produce uneasy, or uncanny, effects. In these stories he writes about doppelgängers, ghosts, dummies, disconnected body parts, impaired vision, the dead and the prospect of death, not without a macabre sense of humour.

These stories reflect Royle’s continuing development as an exponent of the form, in which he is always seeking to learn and to grow, and to push against boundaries.

  • “The Blink” was selected for Stephen Jones’s Best New Horror #30.
  • Listen to a reading of “This Video Does Not Exist”

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

Cover art by Bill Bulloch

ISBN: 978-1-78380-022-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-765-9 (pbk)

Sparks from the Fire

“There are many ways to tell a story . . . It is a question of choosing the right one.”

The stories in Sparks from the Fire explore a wide variety of familiar characters and settings, yet there is always something else—a shadow world that haunts, disturbs, and threatens. Sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, recluses and lovers—all find themselves shifting between realities: the prosaic and the mystical, even between life and death. The horrors and wonders of these parallel existences are often glimpsed, sometimes revealed, and occasionally overwhelm. These nineteen tales inhabit a terrain in which the uncanny may at any time intrude into everyday life.

  • “Holiday Reading” was selected for Stephen Jones’s Best New Horror #30.

Hardback edition limited to 300 copies.

Cover art by R. B. Russell

ISBN: 978-1-78380-023-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-776-5 (pbk)

Uncertainties 3

“A stone’s throw out on either hand / From that well-ordered road we tread” – Rudyard Kipling

“What is happening all around us that is beyond the perception of our senses—and what happens when that perception changes?” – from the Introduction by Lynda E. Rucker

Uncertainties is an anthology of new writing—featuring contributions from Irish, British, and American authors—each exploring the idea 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, and when otherwise familiar landscapes become sinister and something decidedly less than certain . . .

Hardback edition limited to 400 copies.

Cover images by Tobia Makover
Selected and introduced by Lynda E. Rucker

ISBN: 978-1-78380-024-7 (hbk)

Not to Be Taken at Bed-Time

“The lonely graveyard is far away, an’ the dead man is hard to raise—”

In the late-nineteenth century Rosa Mulholland (1841-1921) achieved great popularity and acclaim for her many novels, written for both an adult audience and younger readers. Several of these novels chronicled the lives of the poor, often incorporating rural Irish settings and folklore. Earlier in her career, Mulholland became one of the select band of authors employed by Charles Dickens to write stories for his popular magazine All the Year Round, together with Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Amelia B. Edwards. Mulholland’s best supernatural and weird short stories have been gathered together in the present collection, edited and introduced by Richard Dalby, to celebrate this gifted late Victorian “Mistress of the Macabre”.

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

Cover art by Brian Coldrick
Selected and introduced by Ricard Dalby

ISBN: 978-1-78380-026-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-752-9 (pbk)

A Flowering Wound

“It was only in my dearly loved evenings that I still felt at home.” – Joseph Roth

Two of the stories in this collection by John Howard have their setting in a certain west London suburb—the calm prospect of its small houses and tree-lined roads is deceptive. And throughout this selection of stories, whether in outer London or hyperinflationary Berlin, Romania in the febrile 1930s, or the austerity Britain of recent years, we encounter people who live on the peripheries of their cities and societies—and at the edge of their own lives and illusions. They might think they know the rules, but it often turns out they do not, after all. Or perhaps the rules changed—silently, abruptly. In these stories past and present come together with wounding consequences for those caught out by the system—or its absence.

Hardback edition limited to 350 copies.

Cover art by Jazon Zerrillo

ISBN: 978-1-78380-027-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-777-2 (pbk)

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