Review: Channel the Dark

This is a great anthology that showcases the wide variety of speculative fiction being produced by Irish authors, as well as those from abroad under the wing of Temple Dark Books (which makes them Irish by adoption, surely).

Dystopian-esque SF, various strands of horror and dark fantasy are all on show here. Three stories actually deal with curses, though in such dramatically different ways they show just how varied writing can be (post-apocalyptic in We Do What We Must, urban dark fantasy in Gestalt, smalltown horrors and isolation in Phobia). I seem to like that theme, though I haven’t made use of it in my own writing yet.

There’s also a really unusual and innovative piece about a detective with the sensory powers of a dog, which has a real Gothic/classic lit sort of feel.

Hats off to the editor, Ronald, a formidable SF author in his own right, for his epic poem Fensham’s Wake. Writing poems is beyond my skillset so I’m always impressed by people who can do it, let alone people who can sustain it (thematically as well as content-wise) in a sort of long form.

A bonus is the selection of tasters of Temple Dark’s published novels, along with valuable forewards by the authors which give you a bit of insight into how each extract fits into the whole and also their motivations in writing them. I’ve bought two more Temple Dark novels since, A Land Without Wolves and Hell’s Gulf, and I’m looking forward to starting them.

Review: Glimpses of the Unknown – Lost Ghost Stories

This anthology of previously never anthologised ghost stories is a gem of a find and is the first of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series that I’ve read in full.

There are eighteen stories here from the late 19th century to the 1920s and cover all aspects of ‘horror’, from creeping supernatural to moody atmospheres that unsettle rather than terrify. That’s the joy of the genre, really, in that it can run the gamut without getting tiresome. We have everything from Gothic hauntings to Mesopotamian adventure stories; the editor is right to say that the last one could make a good Indiana Jones movie.

What I found especially interesting is how fresh and contemporary the stories feel. True, some of the settings are of their time, like duels with rapiers and the like or some dubious attitudes by male characters toward women (such as ‘The River’s Edge’ by Mary Schultze), but the actual writing styles are typically engaging and fluid.

As I’ve mentioned the fact that these stories have never been included in a book since their initial publication makes it part archaeological/archival retrieval. There’s a bio and potted history of each writer but some of the authors have no history that can be found, despite the editor’s efforts by going through census and other records to try and match bylines to verifiable historical figures.

There is something well, ghostly, about an author such as Eric Purves (whose story ‘The House of the Black Veil’ is one of the more innovative pieces) now existing solely in reference to the single story he/she/they seem to have published. Ashely in his intro to that story notes that “When John Reed Wade, the editor of Pearson’s Magazine, ran the following story in the May 1929 issue, he announced it as ‘One of the most original mystery stories ever written.” And yet there is no trace of any other Purves work. Was it a pseudonym? We’ll never know.

Not every reader will like every story, which is natural enough in an anthology, but lovers of ghost stories will have plenty to hold their interest here.

David O’Mahony – Irish horror author

Featured

David O’Mahony is a horror and dark fantasy writer from Cork, Ireland. He specialises in ghost stories but can also be found writing contemporary fiction.

A prolific writer of short stories, he was a finalist in the 2024 Globe Soup primal fears competition and his first round entry to the 2024 NYC Midnight short story challenge was praised as a “creative, original take on the ghost story”. He has been published or is about to be published in Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia, India, and Thailand.

An award-winning newspaper designer, his non-fiction work tends to focus on history, in which he has a PhD, or on books and literary matters. Read his non-fiction for the Irish Examiner here.

When not writing he is assistant editor of the Irish Examiner, where he has picked up numerous awards for eye-catching front pages. One of his efforts, marking the publication of the mother and baby homes report and naming all the children who died at Bessborough mother and baby home, featured on Sky News, BBC, and CNN as well as being raised in parliament as an important historical document.

His front page on the murder of Lyra McKee was named front page of the year in 2019, and his team produced the front page of the year for 2020 as well as having an unprecedented double nomination. The Bessborough page won the award in 2021 and he won the 2023 award for Thank you, Vicky.

Story bylines: 

Losing Your Grip, 2RulesofWriting.com, October 2023

Brotherly Love, davidomahony.ie, October 2023

Out of Time, Spillwords, December 2023

A Winter’s Wrath, Christmas of the Dead: Krampus Kountry, December 2023

Head Case, Flash of the Dead: Requiem, January 2024, and Exquisite Death, October 2024 (forthcoming)

Ghost of a Chance, Triumvirate volume 4, February 2024

Ties That Bind, 2RulesofWriting.com, February 2024, and Metastellar, July 2024

Atonement, Soulmate Syndrome: Certain Dark Things, March 2024

Blood Price, Masks of Sanity: Hidden In Plain Sight, April 2024

The Door, Spillwords, May 2024

Indistinct Background Character on a Field of Grey, 2RulesofWriting.com, May 2024

Sacrifices, Flash of the Undead, June 2024

Family Reunion, miniMAG,  July 2024

Opportunity Knocks, Blood Moon Rising,  July 2024

The Archaeological Findings of Ballybrassil, Cork: A Challenge to the Traditional Narrative, Perseid Prophecies, July 2024

Armageddon, AntiopdeanSF,  August 2024

Holy Ground, Spillwords, September 2024

The Coachman, Children of the Dead: Shadow Playground, September 2024

Through the Gateway, Eldritch Encore: Stories Inspired by HP Lovecraft, September 2024

What Gets Left Behind, Stygian Lepus, September 2024 (forthcoming)

Onward, Petting Boo (forthcoming)

Family Tree, Mono No Aware (forthcoming)

Halloween column: The joy of horror

We have been telling stories about the things that terrify us since time immemorial.

We have done it in every medium ever invented, from oral campfire stories to religious illuminated manuscripts to wood etchings to cinema. There is no shortage of examples, and the beauty of horror (let’s just class it all as “horror fiction”) is that it is endlessly adaptable to the circumstances. Like science fiction, it’s a fantastic vehicle for social commentary, because you can make grotesque analogies with reality or real-life behaviours – Jordan Peele did this masterfully in Us and Get Out.

I can’t think of a single genre that’s been more influential on me than horror. It wasn’t just Stephen King, even though he was the first horror writer I was a fan of and for years he was the most numerous author in my own library (eventually match, then eclipsed by Terry Goodkind).

Although I’m also a big fan of science fiction, nothing can come close to horror for me really. The first book I can remember buying with my own money was a hardback Penguin Book of Horror Stories, now out of print, in a shop in Tralee, Co Kerry, which no longer exists (stop calling me old).

Penguin Book of Horror Stories, edited by JA Cuddon

I go back to this maybe every 18 months or so. It holds such a prominent place in my formative years that I’m always convinced one of my favourite stories – about somebody who only discovers they’re living dead at the end when catching sight of themselves in a mirror – is in it, and yet it is not. I’ve never been able to trace the story, and as far as I know it was anonymous. My wife, incidentally, has suggested that it may have been a story I wanted to write but never did… so in all likelihood I will.

I had always aimed to be a fantasy fiction author. I fell head over heels for David and Leigh Eddings’ works while a teenager (the first one part of the Belgariad bought secondhand on a whim… I’ve only recently discovered the darkness in their past, see the comments). I loved, and still love, the world building aspects, the adventure, the ability to break rules with magic. And yet while I wrote the genesis of a couple of novels in my youth, they never completed themselves. I even did a whole preparatory study for a fantasy universe, a la the Eddings’ Rivan Codex, which was a bit of a goldmine in terms of trying to understand how to put something like that together.

As I returned to writing recently, I worked out some fantasy-inspired stories, including one that’s paused in around the 17,000-word mark. But it turns out I have more of a flair for horror, and that I can use that genre to explore everything I have an interest in. A story of mine was recently published on 2RulesofWriting, and explores the idea of a ghost being haunted by himself. Other stories examine being trapped by pain of the past, while others dip back into the fantasy mythos.

The Guardian recently published a piece (and it’s really a rather interesting article) referring to the “horror fiction renaissance”, stating that horror “went away” in the 1990s to be replaced by other genres. Peele is quoted from a book on black horror that he views the genre “as catharsis through entertainment”.

This is actually not a new statement, though it captures the essence of it, and I remember it coming up as a theme in film studies while at university: The idea that a group can, communally, experience intense fear and emotions in a safe space (the cinema) with a defined end. A bit like a rollercoaster, which often is a good analogy for a horror film.

I’m not convinced by the article’s thesis that horror really went away. I’m not saying it’s entirely wrong, but rather that the genre has tended to just been reimagined. It blends easily with dystopian fiction (which itself goes back to Wollstonecraft Shelley’s The Last Man at least), science fiction, thrillers, pastoral scenes, whatever takes your fancy. Perhaps it is better to say that it became less visible, or less to the forefront culturally. Asian cinema has been producing horrors successfully, often remade for Western audiences (eg, Ring, The Grudge), and there is a superb range of anime horrors too.

Certainly, it is cyclical, like pretty much every other genre. Every now and again something comes out that breaks the conventions and establishes a new orthodoxy. Think the 1978 Halloween that more or less created the slasher genre. Think also of the Scream series, which resurrected the slasher genre but in a smart, self-referential sort of way. But while both of those series ended up prolific, they spawned innumerable imitators and the quality became diluted, as it typically does in every cultural mass movement.

The ability to self publish, and publish digitally first, has definitely allowed a flowering of newer subgenres in the last few years, and from a more diverse range of backgrounds, and there’s even a dedicated Irish publisher of science fiction and horror, Temple Dark Books. The vibrancy of #bookstagram and #booktok are also allowing new reads to get out in front of eyeballs faster than usual, even if it’s possible to drown in the sheer amount social media content (but it’s not just book-related). I follow a couple of horror-focused accounts on Instagram and I could easily (and gleefully) bankrupt myself buying up their recommendations.

Who knows what the future will hold? More cycles of innovation and stagnation, no doubt, but there will be constant innovation bubbling along in the background. I look forward to doing a better job of keeping in touch with it.

Happy Halloween!

Fiction: What Gets Left Behind

(Originally published here)

It was a hard thing, being dead.

Watching the rise and fall of the seasons without the heat of the sun on your face or the chill of a winter storm. Seeing the world change in flashes and cutscenes but with time standing still. Growing attached to the people living in your house (he always thought of them as lodgers) only to find them suddenly grown or gone.

Most of all, Art just felt so very, very tired. Whenever he manifested, it was with a feeling of immense sadness, and with the basement door at his back. He could go anywhere in the house but not beyond the garden. He never went into the basement.

He didn’t think he’d be tired. Weren’t you supposed to sleep when you’re dead? Instead he found himself roaming at all hours, and after all these years he could still never get used to the sensation of knowing his feet were walking without being able to feel wood or carpet underneath him.

He’d love to just stub his toe. Or bang his head on a doorway. That would be amazing. Because he was dead, but didn’t feel dead.

If he concentrated hard enough, really put a lot of effort in, he could move things. More than once his frustrations had boiled into a blind rage and he had lost awareness for a few moments only to find he was standing in a room full of thrown furniture, or next to a chandelier that had been pulled from the ceiling. But he could never remember doing this, despite knowing that he had.

Those days tended to scare the lodgers. Some had walked around burning sage, or brought in priests to sprinkle holy water. That tended to sting for a long time, but he came back eventually, usually with the sense that something was incomplete. It was a very old house, though whether it was old when he was alive he couldn’t say. He could remember nothing from the Time Before.

He didn’t mean to scare people, most of the time. He felt he had been a good person when he was alive, and generally let people be themselves, but he could not abide the slightest injustice toward women.

Once, a very elegant couple and their two children had lived in his house. Avena was tall, with a carefree laugh that reminded him of somebody. She had some business that she ran from home.

Alexei was shorter, well-built, and worked outside the house. He sounded educated, but often reduced his wife to tears with demeaning vulgarity and cruel insults.

Then one evening in summer, he crashed a fist into her stomach. Once. Twice. A third time. As she collapsed, gasping for air as he draped himself on the leather couch, Art was overcome with a bitter flash of memory. It laid itself over the scene as if then and now existed at once. The oak and white furniture of now phased into heavier, darker cabinets and hard chairs. A man in a waistcoat, face crimson with rage (father?) standing over a woman (mother?) who was pleading for her life. “Please,” she said over and over again. “He’s yours, I swear it.”

“You’d say anything, though, wouldn’t ya? I married you when ya had nothing, nothing, took ya outta the gutter where I shoulda left you. And all the while ya’d betrayed me with him, a damned foreigner, like I’m not good enough for ya.”

He punctuated each sentence with a slap of his leather belt and the woman threw her hands up to protect her face. He leaned in close. “I’ll teach ya a lesson, and that little bastard of yours upstairs then.” Faster than Art thought possible, the man wrapped the belt around her throat. She kicked and slashed his face to ribbons but he was fierce and implacable.

With her last breath she reached out, toward Art, her eyes wider with panic. As she slumped to the floor the man stood up and looked where she had been reaching. “There ya are, ya little bastard. I’ll show you and all.”

The man, his face twisted with blind rage, thump thump thumped across the floorboards and swept the boy off the floor and held him before the brass mirror in the hallway. “Look at ya, ya little pup,” the man said in a frenzy, as he throttled a boy no more than twelve years old until his eyes bled. The room spun and Art found himself back where he had been, standing in a doorway watching the two newest lodgers.

He raised his hands in front of where his face should be. He had always fancied that his hands were large, callused and rough, the hands of a man. Now they were slight and bony, the hands of a child with a lot of growing ahead of him. The two visions of himself sat one on top of the other, with the deep sense that had to act, for the sake of the woman who must have been his mother, murdered just a few feet away.

Alexei got up and walked through Art. As Art turned around he saw the man briefly take on the hulking rage of his father before reverting to his normal, well-built shape. That morphing, and seeing his own hands transition from child to man to child again, put the kernel of an idea in Art’s mind, though he wasn’t sure he had the strength to accomplish it.

He crept toward where the woman had pulled herself up by using a side table for support. She could not have been much older than his mother, and though they looked nothing alike Art realised he knew this all along. Drawn by long dormant instinct, he tried to hold his hand out to her, but all that happened was the lamp on the table started to flicker and pulse. The woman saw it, and looked around her. “If somebody is there,” she whispered, “please help me.” She limped off toward the small room he knew she used as an office.

From upstairs came the sound of the shower, and Art’s half-idea blossomed into something fully formed. As he made his way up the stairs, each lightbulb he passed flickering for a moment or two, he wondered how he could feel so much older than a lad of twelve. Had it been the years of watching people come and go? Had he been an old soul even in youth? He knew there was an answer, could feel it rolling around the edges of his consciousness, but it was just out of reach.

No matter. He had a job to do now, and he intended to do it well.

Alexei came out of the shower and wrapped himself in a towel before going to the sink to brush his teeth. He slicked his hair back with his hand, then realised he couldn’t see himself in the steamed mirror, and Art knew his opportunity had arrived. He moved quickly behind Alexei, and as the man wiped the mirror clean Art came  forward.

Alexei wasn’t looking as he wiped the glass but then screamed in transfixed horror as he saw not his own face, but a dripping decayed mass of a thing, green in places with decay and mottled with neglect. It was a ruined mockery of a human being, mostly bleached white as if it hadn’t seen the sun in a generation. Its eyes were gouged out and its lower lip missing. The creature laughed at him, a rattling hollow laugh that Alexei could feel right down his breastbone.

“Look upon your sins,” the cadaver said. “Or next time you’ll be joining me in hell.”

Alexei screamed and screamed and screamed and when Avena came up eventually, having enjoyed hearing his terror for over an hour, his hair had gone bone white and he had slashed his eyeballs with his nails. She held him by the jaw, this once supremely confident brute now blinded and hoarse, and laughed. Not a malevolent laugh, but the relieved laugh of one who has had long prayed-for justice. “My guardian angel must have been looking out for me,” she said, mostly to herself as she tapped on her breastbone three times. “Thank you.”

Art, exhausted by concentrating so much on his apparition, faded out to the sound of her whispering “thank you, thank you, thank you”.

Do you dream when you’re dead, he found himself wondering in the void. Or are you remembering? He was not asleep, he could never truly sleep, but he was being overrun by emotions that felt almost ancient. It was like old muscles awakening after being long out of use. Flashes of faces, of darkness, of hands scratching in the dark and crawling through perpetual night. He felt the march of time, felt it flowing through him, and then past him. He saw new faces, families, felt their growth and traces of their memories. He saw lights turning on and off, heard soft steps on the landing, curtains rustling without wind.

When he became fully aware of himself, he was again standing with his back to the basement door. Yet things were different this time. It wasn’t just sadness that he felt. It was tempered now with resolve, determination. He was, he realised, ready to go down there – but he didn’t want to go alone.

Avena, he realised, was not in the house. He could sense her absence, but felt also that the place had not been lived in for some time. How much time has passed, he asked himself. And yet, as he drifted through silent rooms and past covered furniture, it had not changed much. He knew without remembering that he had been here many times since that night, but only as a shadow of himself. He also knew that he had been welcomed.

There was a jangle of keys and the front door opened stiffly. Two women came in confidently, as if it was a long familiar place. The bright winter sunlight obscured their faces until they shut the door behind them, and he found, happily, that one of the women was Avena. She was older, the passage of time marked in crows’ feet and silver streaks in her hair, but she was no less herself. She carried herself with the contentment of a life well lived. The other woman was shorter, with sandy rather than auburn hair, but the resemblance was remarkable. Her daughter, no doubt, and eventually he remembered her name had been Rebecca. No, Becky. She hated Rebecca.

The two took a few steps in and Avena held her hand up to stop Becky. “There,” she whispered, with the hint of a smile. “He’s here.”

“Are you sure you want to do this mom? I mean, it’s his house. It wouldn’t be fair to hurt him.”

“He did something incredible for me, once. He gave me my life back. I want to return the favour Becky. I’ve been waiting years, it’s why I’ve kept this place for so long and why I keep coming back. You know, you thought I was mad when I told you, but   then you felt him yourself, that time when your brother had a seizure in the bathtub.”

The daughter nodded. “I remember,” she said gently. “He said he went under and then something pulled him out of the water and just held him up.”

“So now we owe our guardian angel two favours. You know something has trapped him here. That’s what all the books say, isn’t it? Unfinished business? He deserves as much peace as anybody.”

“But we can’t force him out.”

“We won’t. We’ll just give him a way, if he wants it.”

Without thinking, Art made the crystals on a dusty Tiffany lamp jingle. “There!” said Avena. “He’s listening.”

“Can you tap something,” said Becky. “Once for no, twice for yes?”

With amusement, Art tapped twice on the sideboard.

“Do you want us to do something?” Two taps. He knew what he wanted, but how to tell them? They were looking at each other, trying to answer the same question. He moved down the hallway toward the kitchene, then tapped twice on the solid wood doorframe.

“Let’s follow him,” Avena whispered.

“I’m nervous,” said Becky. “What if…?”

“Don’t worry. If we were supposed to be scared of him we would have known that years ago.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” said Becky as they walked toward the back of the house. “I’m worried about scaring him.”

Art was confused, as if he should know what they were talking about but couldn’t call it to mind. Having brought them this far, he drifted to the basement door. But it was hard. Part of him absolutely did not want to go down there. The rest of him knew it was time. He tapped twice on the door. Avena and Becky exchanged another look, and Avena unlocked it.

The door swung out into pitch darkness, and Art was overcome with fear. There was pain in the darkness.

“Do you want to go on?” asked Becky. One tap… then a hesitant second. “Do you want us to come?” Two taps.

Avena flicked a switch but the ancient yellow bulb barely threw back the blackness. “I think I only came down here two or three times,” she told Becky. “I never liked it.”

Art had already begun down the stairs, almost cringingly slow as he fought a rising panic and despair. It was pressing on him from the air itself.

“You’re not alone,” said Avena, and he knew she was talking to him. “But it’s the only way we can find out how to help you be at peace.”

The light grew gently brighter, then changed colour, and Art felt himself abruptly shift between then and now. There was a thumping, raging charge down the stairs, right through him and the others. Though they couldn’t see anything, both shivered. The cruelly contorted man was dragging a barely conscious child down the stairs, not caring if his legs clattered and stumbled.

“You’re scum and you’ll stay here,” he roared at the child, before returning back up the stairs and turning the light out, locking the door behind him.

Art felt the sensations of scrabbling around on a dirt floor, inching one direction and then the other in the hope of finding something, anything. His legs weren’t working. It felt like it was going on for hours, before the door was flung open briefly and a heavy thing wrapped in carpet crashed down the steps, knocking the child over. The light lasted just long enough for him to see his mother’s dead face.

Snapshots and sensations washed over him. Lights flicking on and off to taunt him with his mother’s putrifying face while he ate scraps; the sound, not the sight but the sound of rats eating at her eyes and lips in the abyss despite his efforts to fight them off; the hands of a child growing steadily to be the hands of a man, worn and callused from attempts to climb the stairs and pry the door open until his strength grew almost to nothing. And every day, the corpse of his mother kept watch over him.

Sometimes his father, spoke to him; other times, out of guilt or boredom perhaps, he left the light on and threw Art books. But mostly there was just the dark, and silence, and starvation.

The flight through memories slowed, then stopped. His father was sitting by the end of the staircase. He had set a bright flashlight on the step next to him, the intense white casting shadows over every crag of his own decaying face. His great strength had turned to flab, and his breathing was loud and ragged. He had something wrapped in a thick tarpaulin at his feet. Art, having spent half a lifetime in the dark, could barely look in the man’s direction.

“There comes a time,” his father wheezed, “when all accounts … are settled.”

He was staring at the floor as Art lay a few feet away, weak and feverish. His legs had never truly recovered.

“I don’t have much time … left. Maybe your mother … cursed me. Maybe … I am your father … isn’t life a blast? But no more of that.”

“What do you mean?” Art was struggling to think, and was increasingly ill on the floor in the cold.

“I mean … no more of that.” And with a rush of speed belying his decrepit state, from the tarpaulin he dragged a hefty pickaxe, and crashed it down on Art’s stunned face.

Floating outside of themselves, now-Art sharing the space and feelings of then-Art, newly freed from his mortal shell. His father was digging a pit, pausing frequently to rest, and when it was deep enough he used the pickaxe to shove Art’s broken body into it, along with the carpet and what remained of Art’s mother. Art watched the man begin to fill it in and drifted up and out of himself, losing contact with the world and disappearing into the void … before appearing for the first time outside the basement door, ignorant of everything that had come before.

Now-Art walked down the steps, tapping as he went so Avena and Becky would follow. In the centre of the room was a rough, discoloured patch, wide and irregular. He slammed his foot down on it three times, they looked at one another, and then dug at the packed earth with their hands in a flurry.

It was nearly an hour before they found the first shreds of carpet, and another fifteen minutes before they uncovered the skull of a young man. Both of them heard a gasp of pure relief and a whispered “thank you”. And then, for the first time in the longest time, Art slept.