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“Number Ninety”

“Did you never have a dream that haunted you, and terrified you, and made you ill at ease?”

The bestselling Irish author B. M. Croker enjoyed a highly successful literary career from 1880 until her death forty years later. Her novels were witty and fast moving, set mostly in India and her native Ireland. Titles such as Proper Pride (1882) and Diana Barrington (1888) found popularity for their mix of romantic drama and Anglo-Indian military life. And, like many late-Victorian authors, Croker also wrote ghost stories for magazines and Christmas annuals. From the colonial nightmares such as “The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor” and “The North Verandah” to the more familiar streets of haunted London in “Number Ninety”, this collection showcases fifteen of B. M. Croker’s most effective supernatural tales.

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
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Cover art by Alan Corbett
Selected and introduced by Richard Dalby

ISBN: 978-1-78380-028-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-753-6 (pbk)

Green Tea

“The delight of hell is to do evil to man, and to hasten his eternal ruin.” – Swedenborg

Published alongside “Carmilla” in the landmark collection In a Glass Darkly (1872), Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” was first serialised in Charles Dickens’ magazine All the Year Round in 1869. Since its first publication, Le Fanu’s tale has lost none of its potency. “Green Tea” tells of the good natured Reverend Jennings, who writes late at night on arcane topics abetted by a steady supply of green tea. Is he insane or have these nocturnal activities opened an “interior sight” that affords a route of entry for an increasingly malignant simian companion? This 150th anniversary edition of “Green Tea”, with illustrations by Alisdair Wood and an introduction by Matthew Holness, is the definitive celebration of Le Fanu’s masterpiece of psychological terror and despair.

Hardback copies of this illustrated 150th anniversary edition were issued with two postcards and are signed by the book’s contributors: Matthew Holness, Alisdair Wood, Jim Rockhill, and Brian J. Showers. Each copy will also include a CD of a specially commissioned recording of Le Fanu’s classic tale, adapted with original music by Reggie Chamberlain-King and performed by Belfast’s Wireless Mystery Theatre.

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

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
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Cover art and illustrations by Alisdair Wood
Introduction by Matthew Holness
Afterwords by Jim Rockhill and Brian J. Showers
Audio dramatisation by Wireless Mystery Theatre

ISBN: 978-1-78380-029-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-78380-778-9 (pbk)

The Far Tower

“All Art that is not mere story-telling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic . . . ” – W. B. Yeats

Stories of magic and myth, folklore and fairy traditions, the occult and the outré, inspired by the rich mystical world of Ireland’s greatest poet, W. B. Yeats. We invited ten contemporary writers to celebrate Yeats’s contributions to the history of the fantastic and supernatural in literature, drawing on his work for their own new and original tales. Each has chosen a phrase from his poems, plays, stories, or essays to herald their own explorations in the esoteric. Alongside their own powerful qualities, the pieces here testify to the continuing resonance of Yeats’s vision in our own time, that deep understanding of the meshing of two worlds and the talismans of old magic.

  • Ron Weighell’s “Under the Frenzy of the Fourteenth Moon” was selected for Best New Horror #31 edited by Stephen Jones.
  • More on W. B. Yeats can be found in various issues of The Green Book

Our limited edition hardback is sold out.
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Cover art by John Coulthart
Selected and introduced by Mark Valentine

ISBN: 978-1-78380-030-8 (hbk)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)

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