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For many years, Jim Rockhill has been a staunch advocate for the work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, most probably Ireland’s premier writer of supernatural tales and the uncanny. Between 2002 and 2005, Rockhill edited a major three-volume collection of Le Fanu’s supernatural fiction for Ash-Tree Press, writing a highly informative introduction for each volume. … Continue reading
Brian Catling was a fascinating artist, working across several disciplines. He was a writer, poet, sculptor, painter, film-maker and performance artist and his work often employed several media at once. Perhaps best known for his Vorrh trilogy of novels, Catling also worked in the short form and in 2019 published Only the Lowly, a series … Continue reading
Fitz-James O’Brien was a mid-19th Century Irish writer who, typically of the time, wrote across multiple genres and in a number of forms, including prose, poetry and playwriting. Over time, however, being a devotee of Edgar Allan Poe, and influenced by writers such as Washington Irving, Thomas De Quincey and Nathaniel Hawthorne, O’Brien began to … Continue reading
It’s often the case with a long-running original anthology series that the law of diminishing returns kicks in. This is most certainly not the case with the Uncertainties books, published by Swan River Press. And I think a key factor in the continuing vitality of this series is the policy of inviting different editors to … Continue reading
Helen Grant’s second collection from Swan River Press, following The Sea Change & Other Stories in 2013, explores a wide range of aspects of the uncanny to great effect. In ‘Gold’, an expedition to a crumbling palace keep hidden along an isolated river bed in an unspecified hot desert country uncovers ancient treasure that proves … Continue reading
In 2020 Swan River Press published Ghosts of the Chit-Chat, a collection of short stories edited by Robert Lloyd Parry and featuring the work of a number of writers who had, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, been members of the Chit-Chat Club, a gathering of undergraduates and staff of Cambridge University that … Continue reading
Mark Valentine’s third book with Swan River Press takes a different tack to the previous two collections, Selected Stories and Seventeen Stories, which focused on middle Europe between the wars. Lost Estates gathers stories by Valentine that share in common various aspects of folk horror, a genre that has a long and honourable tradition in … Continue reading
Pringle’s third collection of short stories finds the author exploring in greater depth some of the themes that are central to her previous work. In ‘Another Cancer Story’ a young girl deals with the slow deterioration of her father from terminal cancer and witnesses how this impacts her mother and brother, with the added complication … Continue reading
In her first novel, Hezada, I Miss You, Erin Pringle picks up on themes explored in her two short story collections, in particular the second book, The Whole World at Once, and investigates them in a more sustained and thoughtful manner. A small town in the American Midwest struggles to survive. Half the stores in … Continue reading
The Whole World at Once is Erin Pringle’s second collection of short stories (her first, The Floating Order, is reviewed here) and the wait has been well worth it. While The Floating Order was a finely tuned macabre look at an often incomprehensible adult world mostly through the skewed perspective of children, this new collection … Continue reading
John Kenny 