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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
I had the good fortune to interview Victor Rees recently about his and Iain Sinclair’s assembling of a tribute to the late great Brian Catling: A Mystery of Remnant. The book gathers a number of short stories, an essay, a play and a poem, all of which admirably serve to give readers a flavour of … 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
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
This week, I was asked to write a guest blog for What She Might Think, writer Erin Pringle-Toungate‘s excellent website. As you will guess from the title of the piece, it highlights the sad lack of libraries in my youth. Not there weren’t libraries near me; there were several. The blog focuses more specifically on … Continue reading
John Kenny 