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Uncertainties 4

“We live in Gothic times.” – Angela Carter

The Gothic tale, disreputable as it is, can, more readily than the realist short story, provoke unease and jolt us from complacency.

Uncertainties is an anthology series—featuring authors from Britain, America, Canada, Australia, and the Philippines—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 . . .

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

Cover art by B. Catling
Selected and introduced by Timothy J. Jarvis

ISBN: 978-1-78380-031-5 (hbk)

Lucifer and the Child

“She did not want to be organised at all. She wanted to be solitary and free.”

This is the story of Jenny Flower, London slum child, who one day, on an outing to the country, meets a Dark Stranger with horns on his head. It is the first day of August—Lammas—a witches’ sabbath. Jenny was born on Hallowe’en, and possibly descended from witches herself . . .

Reminiscent of Machen’s, “The White People”, Lucifer and the Child is a tale of witchcraft—or is it? The author does not commit herself; merely stating that the story is open to natural explanation; alternatively, she invites “the willing suspension of disbelief”.

“There is never any name for the impact of strangeness on the commonplace,” Mannin writes. With this sensibility Lucifer and the Child will at last be recognised as a classic of strange fiction and a work to be enjoyed by contemporary lovers of the genre.

Once banned in Ireland by the Censorship of Publications Board, Lucifer and the Child is now available worldwide in this splendid new edition from Swan River Press featuring an introduction by Rosanne Rabinowitz and cover by Lorena Carrington.

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

Cover art by Lorena Carrington
Introduction by Rosanne Rabinowitz

ISBN: 978-1-78380-032-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-770-3 (pbk)

Munky

“There hadn’t been monks at the abbey since 1600. Not living ones, that is.”

When the puckish spirit of a monk begins haunting the storied village of Pulborough, known for its ancient abbey, Maud Garner, manager of the Coach and Horses Inn, arranges for the famous ghost hunter, Walter Prince, to come investigate. And from there, things spiral out of control.

Peopled with richly drawn Dickensian grotesques and filled with bizarre and comical incident, Munky is as compelling as it is antic. Catling transports the reader to an interwar England in the throes of change. Part bizarre ghost story, part whimsical farce, part idiosyncratic literary experiment, it could be described as P. G. Wodehouse collaborating with Raymond Roussel, with a dash of M. R. James, if it weren’t so uniquely its own thing.

“Brian Catling’s peculiar genius for observation, and the testing and squeezing of location, always honours what Blake called “the Vegetated Mortal Eye’s perverted & single vision”. It sometimes feels that the Eye has been removed and left overnight in a glass, such are the layers of spectral comedy swaggering into view. Life through the bottom of a deep pint jar. Munky is a delirious blend of terror and pantomime. The spine-chilling realisation, for those who have trespassed anywhere near this territory, where river licks at ecclesiastical land, is that it is all true.” – Iain Sinclair

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

Cover art by Dave McKean

ISBN: 978-1-78380-033-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-745-1 (pbk)

Leaves for the Burning

“Beware lest you get in middle-age what you longed for in youth.”

Lucian Brewse Burke, a middle-aged public servant, works in a shabby county council sub-office in the bleak Irish midlands, mired in Kafkaesque bureaucracy and petty skirmishes with locals. Upon the arrival of his old university friends on their way to Yeats’s funeral, things turn toward the eccentric. They embark on a days-long, cross-country spree brimming with booze-fueled nostalgia. To the accompaniment of juke boxes blaring a reminder of the steady of Americanisation of Europe, we see public-houses thronged with saints, senators, and sinners; while outside old stone crumbles and thin rain drifts down on an ancient country-side. Despite its melancholy pinings for wasted youth, this mid-century portrait of Ireland is rich in grotesque humor and savage absurdity. Leaves for the Burning won Denmark’s Best European Novel award in 1952.

Hardback edition limited to 350 copies.

Cover art by Niall McCormack
Introduction by Susan Tomaselli

ISBN: 978-1-78380-034-6 (hbk)

The Death Spancel

“Come to me, a lonely ghost, / Out of the night and rain.”

Katharine Tynan is not a name immediately associated with the supernatural. However, like many other writers of the early twentieth century, she made numerous forays into literature of the ghostly and macabre, and throughout her career produced verse and prose that conveys a remarkable variety of eerie themes, moods, and narrative forms.

From her early, elegiac stories, inspired by legends from the West of Ireland, to pulpier efforts featuring grave-robbers and ravenous rats, Tynan displays an eye for weird detail, compelling atmosphere, and a talent for rendering a broad palette of uncanny effects.

The Death Spancel and Others is the first collection to showcase Tynan’s tales of supernatural events, prophecies, curses, apparitions, and a pervasive sense of the ghastly.

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

Cover art by Brian Coldrick
Cover design by Meggan Kehrli
Introduction by Peter Bell

ISBN: 978-1-78380-035-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-754-3 (pbk)

Earth-Bound

“‘Tis these places are haunted,” he said, “by the old Chieftains and Kings.”

Originally published in 1924, the nine tales that comprise Earth-Bound were written by Dorothy Macardle while she was held a political prisoner in Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol and Mountjoy Prison. The stories incorporate themes that intrigued her throughout her life; themes out of the myths and legends of Ireland; ghostly interventions, dreams and premonitions, clairvoyance, and the Otherworld in parallel with this one. It is so easy to dismiss them, as some have, merely as part of the narrative of “Irish nationalism” of the time, but it is the supernatural elements that make them much more. She would revisit these themes in later works such as her classic haunted house novel The Uninvited (1941). To this new edition of Macardle’s debut collection, reprinted for the first time in ninety years, we have added four more tales of the supernatural.

  • More on Dorothy Macardle 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 Brian Gallagher
Introduction by Peter Berresford Ellis

ISBN: 978-1-78380-011-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-738-3 (pbk)

Bending to Earth

“He called to it and said, ‘Tell me what you are?’”

Irish women have long produced literature of the gothic, uncanny, and supernatural. Bending to Earth draws together twelve such tales. While none of the authors herein were considered primarily writers of fantastical fiction during their lifetimes, they each wandered at some point in their careers into more speculative realms—some only briefly, others for lengthier stays.

Names such as Charlotte Riddell and Rosa Mulholland will already be familiar to aficionados of the eerie, while Katharine Tynan and Clotilde Graves are sure to gain new admirers. From a ghost story in the Swiss Alps to a premonition of death in the West of Ireland to strange rites in a South Pacific jungle, Bending to Earth showcases a diverse range of imaginative writing which spans the better part of a century.

  • View the Strange Stories by Irish Women poster here.
  • More on Strange Stories by Irish Women 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 Karen Vaughan
Selected and introduced by Maria Giakaniki and Brian J. Showers

ISBN: 978-1-78380-025-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-751-2 (pbk)

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)

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