Uncertainties

"Turn and face the strange." — David Bowie "It may be my own imagining, or perhaps the cumulative effect of reading the entire book over a couple of evenings, but the contents appeared to grow darker as the pages turned." – from the Foreword by John Connolly Uncertainties is an anthology of new writing—featuring contributions from Irish, British, and American authors — each exploring the idea 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, and when otherwise familiar landscapes become sinister and something decidedly less than certain . . . Contents "Foreword" John Connolly "The Faerie Ring" John Reppion "From the Archives of the Westmeath Examiner" Derek John "Wellaway" Martin Hayes "Last Love" John Kenny "On a Clear Day" Robert Neilson "A Letter from McHenry" Reggie Chamberlain-King "The Light at the Centre" Maura McHugh "Fran’s Nan’s Story" Sarah LeFanu "Flyblown" Timothy J. Jarvis "To the Eternal One" Mark Valentine "The Seance" Lynda E. Rucker "Biographical Notes" "Acknowledgements" Brian J. Showers has written short stories, articles, interviews, and reviews for magazines such as Rue Morgue, Supernatural Tales, Ghosts & Scholars, and Wormwood. His 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; and, with Gary W. Crawford and Jim Rockhill, he co-edited the Stoker Award-nominated Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu. The anthology Dreams of Shadow and Smoke, co-edited with Jim Rockhill, won the Ghost Story Award for best book in 2014. Showers also edits The Green Book, a journal devoted to Irish writers of the fantastic; and runs the Swan River Press, Ireland’s only publishing house dedicated to literature of the gothic, strange, and supernatural.