Brian J. Showers Archives | Swan River Press

In an Uncertain Mode

Conducted by Brian J. Showers

For most of our books we conduct short interviews just prior to the title’s release. In the case of an anthology, the interview is with the editor. However, for Uncertainties 6, I wanted to do something slightly different. Hoping for just a bit more insight into the genre we love, I posed a single question:

What draws you to write tales in the weird/uncanny mode?

Here are the responses . . .

Ruth Barber (“Unfinished Business”)

My stories are a form of therapy, a vehicle for processing negative emotions such as grief, sadness, disappointment, and unfairness. The black humour comes from the random and surreal circumstances in which misery is often meted out.

I had an unhappy childhood where the expression of emotion was discouraged. I began writing from a young age: my stories and poems became an acceptable outlet for my feelings. As fiction my feelings could be safely expressed in a way that avoided any need for responsibility, accountability, or indeed resolution.

I work as a criminal lawyer and write in my spare time. Growing up in an atmosphere of unfair condemnation I feel a degree of empathy with people facing criminal charges and my ability to emotionally disassociate allows me to deal with many unpleasant and traumatic cases. I am, of course, professionally bound to keep the details of my cases confidential however I collect discrete shards of experiences and weave them together to create fantasy tales.

My tales are therefore formed from feelings and moments—the creak of a second hand sofa in a café, the shine on a cheap suit, the smell of fear in the courtroom. My tales examine the secret ticks and vices we adopt to make life bearable and the delusions we create to avoid confronting our demons.

I am the person who knows before you call, the person who can extrapolate your mood from the frequency of your WhatsApp logins, and who predicts the future from the lyrics in the next song on the radio. I know the real reason you just spoke to that person and when you are lying. But I will never tell.

Most importantly dear reader know that I write for myself and not for you. Through my tales you gain the privilege of a glimpse inside my head. Be wary as to whether it is truly a place you want to visit.

James Everington (“The Switch”)

The honest answer to this is probably “because I can’t write anything else”. I’ve a relatively broad taste when it comes to reading, but my attempts to write realistic slices of life, comedic fantasy, or—god help me—poetry have always fallen flat. And I think of it as a plus, for a writer, to eventually realise the narrow circumference of your talent and concentrate your efforts there. And it’s not as if I’m missing out: writing about the strange, the ghostly, the nebulous is my realism, reflecting life as I feel it. The hidden yet nagging sense of something unexplainable or jarring or out of sync with reality. And it’s my poetry, too: a chance to play with language and form and style in the pursuit of capturing in words something fleeting yet indelible. All of which is a highfalutin way of saying that, for me, reading and writing uncanny tales scratches an itch that other genres can’t.

Alison Moore (“Where Are They Now?”)

Some years ago, I wrote a horror novelette under a pseudonym for the Eden Book Society series published by Dead Ink Books. Writing a horror story was a natural and satisfying way for me to process the almost unreal experience of donating a kidney. Analysing that process—the relationship between the experience and the story—for a subsequent article clarified my understanding of how and why the uncanny, in which the familiar and the strange coexist, was uniquely suited to this narrative about transplantation and its very literal breaching of boundaries. The kidney donor in my novelette has a persistent sense that none of this is real, and the surreal quality of the experience is reflected in imagery encompassing stories and dreams and horror films. She feels herself gradually disappearing, from her name to her receding gums. “I swear to God,” says a visitor, “there’ll be nothing left of you soon.” There’s a sense of inevitability: when she’s given some paperwork to sign, giving her permission for the procedure to go ahead, she finds she’s already signed it. Her abdomen is marked with a thick black arrow pointing towards the kidney they’re going to take. “If this mark comes off,” the doctor says, “it will be drawn on again.” I took these and other details in the story directly from the diary I was keeping, but what was innocent in reality gains a sinister quality within the fictional narrative, so that the everyday seems to be giving way to something stranger. The procedure went according to plan and the real-life story was a good-news item on local TV, but the horror story, the version that acknowledges and channels the weirdness of it all, captures what it felt like and as a result feels more true.

Naben Ruthnum (“The Bracken Box”)

I’ve been trying to write weird fiction since I started writing. I certainly think there are other kinds of fiction worth reading and writing, but I can’t deny that the weird ones are special for me, that the great and good ones create an artistic effect that is beyond craft or technique, coming close to what I think is most worthwhile in art. That’s why I so rarely put one out there; I think that this piece in Uncertainties is my only successful piece of weird short fiction.

Aickman talked about the shared qualities between poetry and the strange story, which is true in so many ways. I find writing weird fiction to be as difficult as I find writing poetry, and I continue to keep attempting both. I’m starting to succeed, fitfully, with the weird tale, but with every new attempt to flesh an idea or an impression, there come moments when I feel as unarmed and amateur as I did when I first started writing anything. This is a mode that exposes; while strange stories can be suggestive, can lead without going, if there’s nothing to them, we all can tell that there are no ghosts to be found.

Anne-Sylvie Salzman (“Houses of Flesh”)

I was seven when I tried to read my first “adult” book, The Secret of Sarek (L’Île aux trente cercueils), by Maurice Leblanc; I say “try”, because I stopped after a few pages of sombre omens and mutilated corpses (I tackled it a few years later and loved it, of course). But it left its mark—and more than that. The decayed bodies went on rotting in the recesses of my brain and gave birth to most splendid flowers—as would the painter Odilon Redon. At some point, this conflated with a keen love of nature inherited from my parents (naturalists/entomologists/botanists), older brother (ornithologist), and uncle (entomologist). And it is by poring over some accidents of nature—especially in Scotland, and starting with the drumming of the snipe—that I was eventually driven to write uncanny tales, after having trying my hand at a more urban sort of unquietness.

Eric Stener Carlson (“I See Minza”)

That’s a bit of a strange question. I mean, I get it. “Uncanny” is supposed to mean something just slightly off, something that doesn’t feel real.

But that presupposes that there’s one stream of “reality” (composed of common sense, and fair rules of the game, and generally-accepted behaviour), and then there’s another—almost inexistent—stream of “unreality” (where people act inexplicably, where rules don’t apply, where behaviour is cruel, barbaric and fantastic).

Here’s one example of our attempt to push the uncanny into a quiet, little corner. Recently, I watched a TV show from the UK on ancient belief systems (like druids and the early Christian church). The commentator, trying to explain the social context of the Black Death, said something like, “You see, back then, people believed in something called the ‘devil’, and they thought it surrounded them all the time.”

Really? You don’t believe the devil surrounds us on all sides, trying to tempt us to destruction? I do. I believe in an ever-loving, benevolent God, so I also believe in the polar opposite. I’m not saying the devil is a flesh-and-blood creature (in fact, we may be our own devils), but that doesn’t make him any less real. I’ve investigated war crimes in Argentina and the former Yugoslavia, so I know that for a fact.

Although we’d like to think otherwise, “strange” things are woven into the very fabric of our lives. Once, on an abandoned railway platform in Poland at about 3 a.m., a 300-lb former wrestler appeared out of the darkness, and challenged me to punch him in the stomach as hard as I could (I declined). And in college, there was a “glitch” in my answering machine that made it call up a friend and leave my “Please leave your message at the beep” message. She thought maybe it was a plea for help (it wasn’t, at least not from me).

Why do I write weird tales? It’s my attempt to outline our dappled existence, where what we call the “extraordinary” and the “ordinary”, “natural” and “supernatural”, “real” and “uncanny”, all swirl together on a typical Monday morning. What’s “weird” about that is how often we fail to recognize it.

Méabh de Brún (“Consumed as in Obsessed”)

I love ghosts. I love ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night. I love gothic hauntings in old creaking manors and the folkloric horror of things within the woods. Sometimes people ask me, but do you really believe? Inconsequential. Irrelevant. I am having a ball. But there’s a subtle difference between spooky and strange, and it’s the strange that truly unnerves and fascinates. Those weird uncanny stories that are not so easily explained by a restless, roaming spirit or an old folk-tale. Senseless events without rules, reason or motive that leave you lonely in the half-dark asking, but why? but why? These kinds of stories may not cause a burst of terror in the moment, but they worm beneath the skin. They unsettle. They unnerve. It’s always the inexplicable that leaves you lying awake at night, turning it over your mind like a tongue probing a rotting tooth. I press the weird against the mundane to highlight the horror of the everyday, and to write about the things that are truly scary. The banal and boring evil of a housing crisis. The creeping dread of losing a beloved friend. I would stride up the steps of the haunted manor with a skip in my step and a song in my heart. No ghoul could compare with living through late stage capitalism. Simone Weil once said, “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” By writing in the uncanny, I can add a splash of colour to the grey. A jewel-tone spread of strange and sourceless mould across clean concrete. When I need to get to grips with real fear, it’s the uncanny that gives me the weird gloves to do so. Yes, things are still bad, but now they’re interesting. And after all, in the face of inexplicable horror one should always continue to aim for that glorious goal of having a ball.

Stephen J. Clark (“Interference”)

Writing for me involves being receptive to my imagination and unconscious mind. Once an idea, memory or image emerges then the process of creative play begins, and I interpret and delve into the images and ideas to see where they will take me.

To an extent the story has a life of its own. If I set out with a personal experience or memory or dream in mind, I often discover something unexpected: some long-forgotten detail or surprising insight. It’s this potential for revelation that inspires me. I find that revelation is inextricably linked to my experience of language, which involves encountering arresting metaphors or lucid phrases as part of the process and pleasure of writing.

I think of language as a fabric partly composed of unconscious threads, of personal memories yet also ancient images and ideas, so my writing is a way of engaging with those hidden seams between intimacy and myth. For me, writing from the imagination involves attempting to describe what often resists expression, to utter what would otherwise remain lost, concealed or forbidden, to reach into those zones of uncertainty and possibility. For the fabric can become a map, charting journeys into the domains of the grotesque and the Marvellous. Exploring this personal mythology of poetic images and resonances is a method of catharsis too: of attempting to lay ghosts to rest or to name demons.

For me, writing is a kind of waking dream, using my imagination to form a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious. Whether discovered by chance or through deliberate exploration, I’m fascinated by the experience of encountering alluring and disturbing images and ideas, and my art and stories are the residual evidence of those encounters.

A. K. Benedict (“The Sands”)

Explaining why I write the uncanny would require more words, time, and money for therapy than I currently have, but it is something to do with seeing strangeness in a world that most people think of as “normal”. It’s about being slantwise. Catching the sniff of ghosts in dust motes, fixing restless spirits in ink, bones in words. The uncanny makes more sense than most because we know less than nothing, about anything, and there is joy in acknowledging the twisting of shadows

David Tibet (“Dreams As Red Barn”)

When I was young in Malaysia
I loved the Hebrew Bible
And the New Testament
And the Biblical Apocryphal Writings
Especially Coptic texts
And Apocryphas led me to M. R. James
And his The Apocryphal New Testament
And then I fell in LOVE with his GHOST STORIES
I also loved Enid Blyton
And her NODDY books
And She Wrote in one of them
Amen Amen Amen:
It isn’t very good
In The Dark Dark Wood
In the middle of the night
When there isn’t any light . . .
It isn’t very good
In The Dark Dark Wood . . .
And ever since READING those HALLUCINATORY WORDS . . .
I have searched for The Dark Dark Wood
And found her many times
Amen Amen Amen

David Tibet, Hastings, 4 VII 2023

Buy a copy of Uncertainties 6.

THE GREEN BOOK 17

EDITOR’S NOTE

As it turned out, Issue 15, which was comprised entirely of fiction, proved to be quite popular. So I had a look in my files to see if I could put together another such issue of refugee writings that did not fit elsewhere in our publishing schedule.

Let the curtains rise on Oscar Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House”, first published in The Dramatic Review (11 April 1885), which publisher Leonard Smither’s notes is “not included in the edition of his collected Poems”—I assume a reference to the volume issued by Elkin Mathews and John Lane in 1892. While “The Harlot’s House” has since become available, we would like to present it here as Leonard Smithers had in a portfolio edition in 1904: with five “weirdly powerful and beautiful” drawings by Althea Gyles, known for her lavish cover designs for Yeats’s poetry collections, including The Secret Rose (1897), two covers for The Wind Among the Reeds (1899/1990), and Poems (1900). We will explore more fully this remarkable artist in a future issue of The Green Book.

H. de Vere Stacpoole’s “The Mask”, a deft little shocker set in the Carpathian Mountains, had previously a couple of outings in 1930s anthologies, including My Grimmest Nightmare (1935) and Not Long for This World (1936). While de Vere Stacpoole is best known for his popular novel The Blue Lagoon (1908), his career is sprinkled with tales of the macabre. A profile of his life and writings can be found in Issue 12.

Next is Herbert Moore Pim’s “The Ravished Bride”, a gothic narrative in verse set in the north of Ireland, and quite unlike the stories found in his oddball collection Unknown Immortals of the Northern City of Success (1917). You’ll find his story, “The Madman” in Issue 15, while a full profile of this quixotic author is in Issue 12.

After this we have two stories by Katharine Tynan, neither of which have been reprinted before. We considered both when compiling The Death Spancel and Others, which Swan River published in late 2020, but ultimately decided they wouldn’t strengthen that volume. We rejected “The Heart of the Maze” because it is simply not a supernatural tale; however, it does possess dream-like and faerie tale-type qualities not atypical of Tynan’s work. The second story, “The House of a Dream”, while it does contain psychical elements, we deemed far too similar in plot to “The Dream House”, the latter of which we did include in The Death Spancel. As a commercial writer, Tynan reused plots and themes to keep up with the demands of the fiction markets. Despite this pace, her writing remained of the highest quality: elegant, descriptive, and a pleasure to read.

Following the two stories by Tynan you’ll find three poems by Dora Sigerson Shorter, all of which were selected by Margaret Widdemar for her anthology The Haunted Hour (1920), a volume that also included contributions from Yeats, Tynan, and Walter de la Mare. Widdemar takes for her strict definition of a “ghost-poem” as “poems which relate to the return of spirits to earth”. Sigerson Shorter’s poems deftly evoke a night-time Ireland populated by revenants and other wandering ill-omens, such as the fetch and the banshee. If you want to learn more about Sigerson Shorter’s life and work you can read about her in Issue 13; her remarkable story “Transmigration” can be found in Swan River’s Bending to Earth: Strange Stories by Irish Women (2019).

Finally we have “To Prove an Alibi” by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, a tale of mystery and terror reminiscent of Wilkie Collins’s “A Terribly Strange Bed” (1852). This story is one in a series to feature John Bell, later collected as A Master of Mysteries (1898). Bell is a “professional exposer of ghosts” whose business is to “clear away the mysteries of most haunted houses” and to “explain by the application of science, phenomena attributed to spiritual agencies”. More on Meade can be found in The Green Book 16; we will be seeing more from her soon.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, another issue of weird, gothic, and macabre poems and stories from Irish writers. I write this on Saint Patrick’s Day, under a clear blue sky in Dublin; and I hope some of the convivial cheer and goodwill of the day reaches you as you read this issue.

Brian J. Showers
Rathmines, Dublin
17 March 2021

You can buy The Green Book here.

Want to catch up on back issues? We have a special offer.

Contents

“Editor’s Note”
Brian J. Showers

“The Harlot’s House”
Oscar Wilde with Althea Gyles

“The Mask”
H. de Vere Stacpoole

“The Ravished Bride”
Herbert Moore Pim

“The Heart of the Maze”
Katharine Tynan

“The House of a Dream”
Katharine Tynan

“All-Souls’ Night”
Dora Sigerson Shorter

“The Fetch”
Dora Sigerson Shorter

“The Banshee”
Dora Sigerson Shorter

“To Prove an Alibi”
L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace

“Notes on Contributors”

“That Didn’t Scare Me”: Thoughts on Horror Fiction

“Horror is not a genre like the mystery or science fiction or the western
. . . Horror is an emotion.” – Douglas E. Winter

“That didn’t scare me.” This level of criticism grates my sensibilities. That didn’t scare me. It’s the sort of comment you overhear when leaving the cinema or that you might witness among a torrent of social-media posts, not generally known for their insight or elucidation in the first place. It’s not even the brevity of this comment that bothers me, but rather that this grunt seems to convey a shallow understanding of horror: “That didn’t scare me.”

As a life-long connoisseur of horror, I seldom experience genuine “fear” while reading (or viewing)—that adrenaline-fuelled dread termed “art-horror” by Noel Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror. It does happen to me on occasion though, this sense of frisson: I remember the worrying, childhood anxiety of the doomsday clock in John Bellairs’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls, that horrible cosmic grandeur I experienced the first time I turned the pages of William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, or the overbearing sense of inexorable supernatural fate in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

But if invoking this feeling of fear is such a rare experience—a sort of holy grail of reader reaction—then you might rightly wonder why I carry on exploring this particular section of the library? Am I not effectively one among the crowd, professing with a sneer, that didn’t scare me? It’s a reasonable question. Put another way: If horror doesn’t get you scared, then what are you getting?

In his introduction to the anthology Prime Evil (1988), editor Douglas E. Winter makes an observation, often repeated, what he calls “an important bit of heresy”: “Horror is not a genre like the mystery or science fiction or the western . . . Horror is an emotion.” This is a good place to start: horror is an emotion, and so the success or failure of horror literature is predicated on eliciting an emotional sensation in the reader. Similar to how a joke might be deemed a success or failure depending on the laughs. But there’s got to be more to it than that.

Consider a grand piano, onyx black, appropriately festooned with cobwebs and candelabra bedecked with dripping red candles. Imagine being allowed to play only one note, probably down the far left end of the instrument where the theme from Jaws is usually played. Now imagine that the sole way to enhance the effectiveness of this note is to hammer that one key harder and harder. For many, this is horror. Hammering that single key. Lots of people love that one pounding note too, and feel cheated if they don’t get that adrenaline rush; that didn’t scare me. Sure, that single note might be novel for a moment, sometimes even effective in a particular context, as the musician changes speed or intensity. But you’ll forgive me if I tend to feel overwhelmingly bored with this sort of concert.

*^{Uncertainties 4, painting by B. Catling}*

“Horror is an emotion,” Douglas E. Winter tells us. I would respectfully like to amend that assertion. Horror is a range of emotions. And each of these moods, if they are to be successful, must be cultivated differently. We know that good horror is rarely just a single note. There are far more keys on that piano—and they’re all elegantly tuned. To borrow the subtitle of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, the genre is eine Symphonie des Grauens—a symphony of horrors.

There seems to have been a proliferation of horror-related literary descriptors in the early- to mid-twentieth century (or at least an increasingly formalised awareness of them): cosmic, weird, numinous, uncanny, strange, among others. I believe these words are of merit, not because they define sub-genres, but because they reflect attempts to describe particular nuances of affect (emotional responses) to be found in the “ghost story”—the dominant mode of horror in the late nineteenth century, itself rooted in the gothic tradition. Despite the common trope of the wailing bedsheet, the ghost story has always been quite diverse and adaptable. As is occasionally observed, the “ghosts” in the works of M. R. James are often not ghosts at all, but demons and other such denizens; while the stories of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Henry James practically beg for the qualifier “psychological” so as to set them apart from the less imaginative chain-rattling fare. And yet, even though Algernon Blackwood himself called “The Willows” a ghost story, that attribution would seem a wholly inadequate description for the troubling sentiments that masterful tale evokes. Who can blame Lovecraft for writing an entire treatise pondering the aesthetics of the weird or Robert Aickman for labouring the strange?

This attempt to describe dominant effects found in horror storytelling continues apace; sometimes these descriptions are celebrated, other times they’re inelegantly stated, occasionally there’s some sort of backlash. Current nomenclature includes “quiet horror” or “elevated horror”, “horror adjacent”, “new horror”, and the ostensibly respectable “thriller”. But surely horror means horror. It doesn’t need your fancy terms. Perhaps the worry is that defining a “sub-genre” will limit creativity, possibly that it’s just a marketing ploy, or, worse still, a declaration of vogueishness, a demonstration of an otherwise unspoken desire to be au courant. Or maybe outsiders discovering good horror ruin the mystique of the insular and supposedly marginalised horror geek who has been reading Thomas Ligotti this whole time anyway.

As someone who thinks often about the mechanics of horror storytelling, it makes sense to me that we recognise and try to describe the wide-ranging nuances of emotional sensations available to writers of horror. I believe understanding this diversity makes horror literature a stronger, richer, and more enjoyable pursuit.

Over the years I’ve written down some words that I’ve come to associate with the various emotional resonances found in horror literature. Take a moment to read through them. Think about stories you’ve read that evoke these sensations to varying degrees of success, and how these ideas differ from one another:

Strange
Weird
Dread
Uncanny
Eerie
Wonder
Awe
Decadence
Terror
Occult
Despair
Numinous
Epiphany
Nihilistic
Cosmic
Psychical
Mysterious
Gothic
Melancholy
Unreal
Surreal
Disquietude
Morbid
Oneiric
Mystical
Supernatural
Sublime
Grotesque
Unease
Paranoia
Revulsion

I have not attempted to arrange these words in any sort of order. I’m not sure I would know how. Nor would I feel confident to state that this list is complete; no doubt you can think of more. Call these words what you’d like—sub-genres, modes, atmospheres, moods, sensibilities—but they all describe, directly or indirectly, discreet emotional sensations that a skilled writer can elicit from a reader. It also stands to reason that this variety of effects requires a broad range of appreciative sensibilities—though I understand that not everyone will respond equally to each of these words. Still, there are plenty of emotional sensations available to the skilled writer, the adrenaline rush of fear being only one of them. And this sensation alone is insufficient to judge the vast scope of horror. So much for “That didn’t scare me”.

Numerous essayists over the centuries have attempted to define some of these modes, to delineate their core attributes and limits. Anne Radcliffe made an early attempt at that classic bifurcation, differentiating terror and horror: “the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them”; to these twin poles, Stephen King added revulsion (the “gross-out”, he called it). Edmund Burke gives us the sublime, when “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it”; while Freud sets out a reasonable starting point for the uncanny (“that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”).

Though the weird is often associated with Lovecraft’s examination of supernatural horror in literature, I like Mark Fisher’s more recent philosophical definition in The Weird and the Eerie: “that which does not belong”; and of the eerie: the “failure of absence” or the “failure of presence”. (Fisher also helpfully tells us that the weird and the eerie need not necessarily be aligned with fear either, thank you very much.) The well-known rules for the ghost story proper were set out by M. R. James; so too does Edith Wharton give insight in her preface to Ghosts: “What the ghost really needs is continuity and silence”—although she also notes, “the more one thinks the question over, the more one perceives the impossibility of defining supernatural events”.

It’s true that many have tried to put words to these nuanced facets of horror. Certainly, some overlap or work in tandem, while others command entirely recognisable sub-genres on their own. We can look to Arthur Machen for the mystical (“Omnia exeunt in mysterium”), to Aickman for the strange (“it must open a door where no one had previously noticed a door to exist”), or to Joyce Carol Oates for the grotesque (“a blunt physicality that no amount of epistemological exegesis can exorcise”). There are whole books written on the subject by Dorothy Scarborough, Montague Summers, Peter Penzoldt, Devendra P. Varma, Julia Briggs, Jack Sullivan, Glen Cavaliero, S. T. Joshi—you may not always agree with their conclusions (isn’t that half the fun anyway?), but all are attempting to give names to the various effects a “horror” story can elicit.

Which brings us to the present volume, the fifth in a series of unsettling tales. Believe it or not, Uncertainties is a themed anthology. The remit was nothing so superficial as vampires or zombies or folk horror or Cthulhu (only in dustbowl Oklahoma this time), but rather to exhibit horror’s myriad nuances, to open up strange vistas of unsettling possibilities and other-worldly ideas, to commune with intrusions from the outside and those disquieting gestations from within. “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.

Algernon Blackwood put it well in “The Willows”, a story that’s caused me many sleepless nights in terrible awe of the unknown: “ ‘There are things about us, I’m sure, that make for disorder, disintegration, destruction, our destruction,’ he said once, while the fire blazed between us. ‘We’ve strayed out of a safe line somewhere.’ ”

So you can call these stories whatever you’d like: weird, strange, eerie, uncanny . . . I call them Uncertainties.

Brian J. Showers
Rathmines, Dublin
24 February 2021

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Buy a copy of Uncertainties 5.

Brian J. Showers is originally from Madison, Wisconsin. He has written short stories, articles, and reviews for magazines such as Rue Morgue, Ghosts & Scholars, and Supernatural Tales. His short story collection, The Bleeding Horse, won the Children of the Night Award in 2008. He is also the author of Literary Walking Tours of Gothic Dublin (2006), the co-editor of Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu (2011), and the editor of The Green Book. Showers also edited the first two volumes of Uncertainties, and co-edited with Jim Rockhill, the Ghost Story Award-winning anthology Dreams of Shadow and Smoke. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Previous volumes of Uncertainties are also available:

Uncertainties Volume 4, edited by Timothy J. Jarvis

Uncertainties Volume 3, edited by Lynda E. Rucker

Uncertainties Volume 2, edited by Brian J. Showers

Uncertainties Volume 1, edited by Brian J. Showers

“A Fantastic Shower of Books” by Des Kenny

[The following article appeared, extensively shortened, in the November/December 2015 issue of Books Ireland. It appears here in full by kind permission of Des Kenny of Kenny’s Bookshop & Art Gallery in Galway.]

He emerged from the stacks of books. It seemed as if he had resided there forever waiting his moment to join the human race again. In his hands were two books, a collection of short stories Ivy Grips the Steps by Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish writer from Bowen’s Court, Co. Cork, and a copy of the Bucknell University Press book on the esoteric poet AE, George Russell, two apparently dissimilar writers. But far from being too disparate, these writers, as I was soon to learn, had a common interest in the supernatural, the unknown, and the fantastic.

It was immediately apparent that the man approaching my desk knew his way around books and so it proved. He was able to tell me that Ivy Grips the Steps was the American edition of The Demon Lover, though he believed that there was a slight variation in the contents.

As is wont to happen in a bookshop, a conversation ensued during which we discussed various aspects of the Irish book world and somehow or other Mervyn Wall’s The Unfortunate Fursey was mentioned. This resulted in a fascinating discussion of fantasy books in Ireland during which he disclosed that he had indeed recently republished both Fursey novels.

On further questioning it turned out that man who had emerged from the stacks of books was also a publisher who, in 2003, set up an extraordinary imprint, the Swan River Press, which specialises in limited editions of books relating to the fantastic, the gothic, and otherworldly, with a particular interest in promoting Irish fantastic writers from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

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Brian J. Showers, for that is the bookman’s name, is originally from Madison, Wisconsin. In 2000 he came to Ireland simply because he wanted to live in Europe for a while, and as he only spoke English his options were limited. After briefly considering Edinburgh, Showers took up residency in Rathmines, where he has lived ever since.

Although he had written his first book at an early age (“I have a ‘book’ that I wrote when I was seven or eight years old. A bunch of one page stories – all having to do with ghosts and robots and dinosaurs – that I also illustrated. The whole production was stapled together. Lots of staples!”), it wasn’t until he moved to Dublin that he began to take writing more seriously. “An awful lot of opportunities presented themselves to me when I moved here, including the people I met and the resources available to me, so I consider myself fortunate in that way”.

Since then he has written short stories, articles, interviews, and reviews for several magazines. His short story collection The Bleeding Horse (Mercier Press) won the Children of the Night award in 2008. His has also written Literary Walking Tours of Gothic Dublin (Nonsuch Press, 2006) and Old Albert – An Epilogue (Ex Occidente, 2011).

However, it wasn’t just the writing of books that interested Showers. Soon he became fascinated in the whole process of producing a book, from the putting of words on paper to the putting of the finished book into the reader’s hands:

“All these roles are connected. I think most writers who are published commercially usually get some sort of insight into the publishing business, which is everything from editing to cover design to marketing. I really find that process enjoyable and integral to the creation of a book as a whole.”

His development from writer to publisher was a gradual process. At first he began to create hand-bound chapbooks of his own work: “The chapbooks were elaborate Halloween and Christmas cards that I made to send to family and friends. Only this time I didn’t attempt the illustrations. Those were done by various friends, including Meggan Kehrli, Duane Spurlock, and Jeff Roche. A lot of work went into making these chapbooks—the pages were hand-cut and the volumes assembled by hand—so I only published one title per year. I think the biggest single print run was three hundred, which took at least a month to produce . . . Anyway, I put ‘Swan River Press’ on each chapbook because my house at the time was on the ‘banks’ of the (now) subterranean Swan River. And they proved popular enough that I figured I’d sell off the remainder. After all, postage and materials aren’t cheap!”

Soon other writers began to ask him to publish their work, but chapbooks proved to be too labour intensive and so such collaboration was impractical. The solution was to produce simpler booklets, which soon gave way to professionally printed hardbacks. The word paperback does not seem to be in Showers’s vocabulary. He found that he enjoyed the whole process, especially working with other authors. He sees himself as sticking to the hardback format although at one stage, at the back of his mind, is the idea of doing a deluxe hand-bound edition of AE’s poetry for the sesquicentenary of the author’s birth. Despite the work involved, he had devised a new way to bind booklets, and was looking forward to giving it a go “just for the fun of it”.

The books that carry the “Swan River Press” imprint are a sheer joy to hold. The love and care that goes into their production from the time the first word is written to the final touches of design and illustration is infectious and they are a sheer joy to hold. In fact, there is an irresistible urge to open them and immerse oneself in the magic of the story.

Hopefully before Brian J. Showers merges back into the book stacks, there will be many more wonderful publications for booksellers to sell and readers to read.