Jack Fennell’s latest anthology, Your Own Dark Shadow, is subtitled “A Selection of Lost Irish Horror Stories.” Fennell has compiled two previous anthologies of Irish genre stories: one of Science Fiction, A Brilliant Void (2018), and one of Fantasy, It Rose Up (2021). Both of these, like Your Own Dark Shadow, are published by the small but mighty publisher Tramp Press, home of Mike McCormack (Solar Bones [2016]) and Doireann Ní Ghríofa (A Ghost in the Throat [2020]) among other contemporary Irish literary luminaries. Unlike Fennell’s previous anthologies, however, Your Own Dark Shadow makes no suggestion that the genre it represents is itself lost, displaced, submerged, or forgotten down the back of the sofa. Irish horror writing, after all, gave us Bram Stoker, and he gave us Dracula (1897). This alone qualifies Irish writing as one of the most significant threads in horror’s bloodstained tapestry, before one even mentions Stoker’s second-greatest hit, The Lair of the White Wyrm (1911), or Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Fennell acknowledges this in his introduction: “Unlike other projects,” he notes, “the challenge with this anthology wasn’t that the material was lacking: quite the opposite, in fact […] Ireland is smothered in macabre stories” (p. ix).
The anthologizing of the “lost” that Fennell ably performs here is, therefore, not the promotion of a lost genre, but the rediscovery of lost stories of that genre; not so much a quest for sunken treasure as the careful selection and polishing of hidden gems. These particular gems reflect any light that touches them with a pale, ghostly internal flame. Put together, they illuminate just over a century of fears and hauntings, stretching from William Carleton’s “The Lianhan Shee” from 1834, to Tomás Bairéad’s “The Third Woman” from 1940. Fennell himself has translated two of the stories from their original Irish: “The Third Woman,” initially published in Bairéad’s Irish-language collection Cruithneacht agus Ceannabháin (1940), and Michéal mac Liammóir’s 1923 story “Aonghus Ó Cruadhlaoich.” Including these new translations from the Irish is a fine decision which gives Your Own Dark Shadow a greater claim to representativeness (if not, given its “hidden gems” nature, comprehensiveness) than a purely English-language anthology of a bilingual nation could command.
From its outset to its end, a striking number of this volume’s selected tales are stories of storytellers. Frame narratives abound, as do characters who are themselves raconteurs, unreliably and idiosyncratically passing on the story of another’s spooky misfortune. Some of the stories comment on this explicitly, as in Anna Maria Hall’s “The Dark Lady” from 1866, which opens with a playful disclaimer from the ghost story’s teller. “People find it easy enough to laugh at ‘spirit-stories’ in broad daylight, when the sunbeams dance upon the grass,” she writes, intimating that we will find it altogether harder to scoff at her spirit-stories once daylight has fled, and the shadows encroach. In mac Liammóir’s “Aonghus Ó Cruadhlaoich,” this tendency towards storytelling-stories is linked not just to horror—the fear-inducing atmosphere of ghost stories and campfires perhaps requires no elaboration—but also to Irishness.
Mac Liammóir’s first-person narrator opens with a disquisition on Irish storytelling, which he connects to the country’s rural nature: “Outside of the big cities,” he asks rhetorically, “what would people do if they weren’t fond of storytelling?” (p. 159). This story itself becomes a story of stories, not in a clever metafictional fashion, but with arrow-straight solemnity. The narrator attends a Christmas gathering at the house of his friend, the titular Aonghus, and after they have eaten and drank, the company sinks happily into a session of sleepy storytelling by the fire. “As the stories were being told, and the room grew increasingly dark,” the narrator describes with near-audible relish at the Gothicness of it all, “it was clear to me that there was a feeling in the atmosphere that I had not noticed before” (p. 165). The guests carry on chatting, and storytelling, and inevitably our narrator starts to wonder whether there might be more truth than fiction to the gathering sense of evil in the darkness that settles around them. Eventually, after a night spent tormented by visions of his Aleister Crowley-like host, the narrator confronts Aonghus about his occult obsessions. This story’s final line, dripping with disgust yet still veiled in ambiguity, is one of the volume’s finest moments of taunting Gothic irresolution. The explanation that could reveal all—be it quotidian or sublime—hovers still, hauntingly, just out of reach.
While Your Own Dark Shadow is expertly curated, the quality of the stories themselves is inevitably variable. The collection is chronologically ordered, and much of the good stuff is packed towards the latter half of the book. However, the very first story is the highlight of the first half. This is an 1834 tale by William Carleton called “The Lianhan Shee,” a fairy creature here configured as a sort of parasitic and capricious spirit, which attaches itself to a host, and is capable of exacting wrathful vengeance or delivering sudden wealth as it pleases (Fennell’s notes carefully correct the spelling to “leannán sidhe” [italics Fennell’s]). Drawing on Irish folklore more closely, if not carefully, than many of the Stokeresque Gothic romance tales which follow, Carleton’s story is a wandering rural horror about a lapsed priest, madness, and “the most dreadful suicide that ever was committed by man” (p. 36).
In the lengthy opening scene, a farmer’s wife named Mary Sullivan meets a mysterious woman suspected of carrying a Lianhan Shee. Mary’s cautious but acquisitive perspective is richly drawn, and it is fascinating to follow her careful navigation of an encounter with fairy folk through verbal blessings and safeguards. Fennell’s endnotes state that Carleton became known for his “stereotypical images of Irish country people as uneducated, superstitious alcoholics” (pp. 211-12), but if such denigration is Carleton’s intention here, his command of the context unwittingly overwhelms it—Mary comes across as shrewd and strategic, and her superstitions entirely justified. Following Mary’s encounter with the afflicted woman, the lapsed priest, Father Philip, is summoned to confront the suspected Lianhan Shee; in full view of the village, she reveals herself as no spirit at all, but Margaret, a woman whom Father Philip has wronged. Her affliction is not supernatural, but medical: since Philip mistreated her, she has suffered from a “wild malady which banishes me from society” (p. 31). The story then veers into a misty surrealism. Philip takes Margaret home, and then leaves his house, wanders through a field and a glen, goes insane, hallucinates seeing Margaret again, and escapes the ghastly situation for all by opening his veins and walking into his own fireplace, to burn himself alive. It’s a grisly opening number, low on clarity but high on gore and folkloric spite, which the next few stories struggle to live up to.
In the remainder of the nineteenth-century stories which open the collection, big houses, often with are-they-or-aren’t-they-haunted guestrooms, abound. Long before we get to Aonghus’s pile in Co. Clare, there is Kilkea Castle in “Dhirro Dheerlha” (1836) by “the pseudonymous J. H. K.,” the one writer about whom Fennell offers no supplementary information. There is also a Swiss nobleman’s castle in Hall’s “The Dark Lady,” and Aughagree Chapel in “The Death Spancel” by Katharine Tynan (1896). This story, which also gives us our third higher-class protagonist in a row, typifies how this run of tales is difficult to get into. This particular upper-class twit—“a devil-may-care, sporting squire, with the sins of his class to his account” (p. 66)—has fallen in love with a lower-class girl named Mauryeen, a fortnight before his wedding to the virtuous Lady Eva. Dark Mauryeen, it transpires, has put a spell on him, which is presumably a bad thing, although it’s hard to see how anyone in the story would be any happier if she hadn’t. The prose is overwrought without play or musicality, and Tynan’s narration is like listening to a melodramatic friend trying to put on a spoOOoky voice while telling ghost stories.
Thankfully, just one story later, we get May Crommelin’s deeply silly but utterly self-convinced “The Lamparagua” (1897), and it is here that Your Own Dark Shadow starts to take off. While the earlier tales are fine examples of their type for the historically curious reader, it is towards the turn of the century that a shiver of delight really enters the mix, and one can start to read for pure entertainment.
Fun is, undoubtedly, vital to the ghost-story genre of written horror. The most chilling stories of this type are not the doomiest; those compel the reader to put the book down sooner. By contrast, the best horror stories make you want to shriek, in fear and in pleasure. “The Lamparagua” fulfils this brief. It is set further from Irish shores than any other story in the book: we are not in a crumbling west-coast castle, here, but among the pampas of Chile, where the Scotsman Jock Ramsay (yep) and his local guide Pedro (yep) have taken their stereotypical names and a couple of horses on a journey to find a silver mine. What transpires can only be described with a fistful of exclamation marks and a sprinkle of ellipses. Their horse is attacked! By a hideous tree-monster! Which is… The Lamparagua! They scramble away, but the tree can move! They get to safety, but Ramsay is afflicted with a fever, and wakes to find that Pedro has run off to get help at some point (but not before muttering “caramba!” in italics [p. 80]) … and the monster has in the meantime returned! Ramsay can only crawl from the Lamparagua’s rustling advance, “its roots moving forward like giant knotty suckers that gripped and held fast” (p. 83)!
What will he do?! “Don’t turn faint like a schoolgirl seeing a snake” (p. 82), Ramsay tells himself, making sure that the story adds condescending sexism to its other prejudices, and he summons his nerve to light some dry grass on fire. But will this work? It does not! “For the last time one chance was left—one match!” writes Crommelin, as desperate as the rest of us to find out what happens next (p. 85). And then … ! Ramsay has in his pocket the last letter his mother ever wrote, a letter which has not been previously mentioned but is now of paramount importance to our hero’s chances! He sets it alight and the Lamparagua’s advance is delayed enough for good old Pedro to return with the cavalry! We cut to Jock Ramsay, a few days later, sitting in a chair with a lovely cold drink and telling a nice old man called Mr Campbell all about … The Lamparagua!
For all that this is nonsense, and frequently offensive to twenty-first-century sensibilities, it is great fun altogether, and written with real verve. With this flourish, “The Lamparagua”(!) ushers in the strongest section of the book. Crommelin’s story and Mildred Darby’s neatly crafted big house story “The House of Horror” (1908)—which contains, among other virtues, a kind, deft portrait of a friendly fox terrier—were rough contemporaries of Stoker and Wilde. But then the anthology’s purple patch extends beyond the fin de siècle, and many of the best tales of all arrive clustered in the early twentieth century, contemporaneous not with Dracula and Dorian Gray but with Yeats’s poetry, Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and the creation, via the Easter Rising of 1916, of the Irish Free State itself in 1922. Clotilde Graves’s “A Vanished Hand” (1914) satirizes the breathlessly ornamental prose of the Gothic Romance with steady craft, genuine humour, and—yes—a sense of fun. Clotilde herself sounds like fun, too, or at least a great character: Fennell’s endnotes observe that “despite her fervent Catholicism, she presented herself in an unconventional manner for her time, cutting her hair short, smoking in public and wearing masculine clothes” (p. 213). Graves’s story is followed by Henry de Vere Stacpoole’s “The Middle Bedroom” (1918), a moving-into-a-new-house horror that treads close to cod-Irish stereotyping, but redeems itself into a jauntily enjoyable explained Gothic of the Scooby-Doo variety, featuring a down-to-earth police sergeant in whose company it is a pleasure to spend a couple of pages. To some extent, these twentieth-century stories are laughing at their antique predecessors (with Darby’s “House of Horror” falling somewhere in between the two), but they also bring something new, beyond simple pastiche. They are more jolly, and more snarky—but not necessarily any less scary.
Reading past de Vere Stacpoole brings us back to “Aonghus O Cruadhlaoich,” described at length above, and then the collection is wrapped up by Eimar O’Duffy’s “My Friend Trenchard” (1936) and Tomás Bairéad’s “The Third Woman” (1940). O’Duffy echoes Graves’s dry humour through his narrator, Billy, who tells his tale of exotic beasts and occult ceremonies gone wrong with stiff-upper-lip public-school wittering. “I don’t know why it is, but an Englishman who is afraid of no mortal foe does experience qualms at the notion of a manifestation of the supernatural,” blethers Billy, in po-faced polysyllables (p. 193). By the end of “My Friend Trenchard” we need almost as many exclamation marks as we did for the Lamparagua(!), but O’Duffy is an abler writer, and “Trenchard” has genuine literary merit alongside its potboiling plot. O’Duffy begins with a full five pages simply outlining the character of Trenchard from Billy’s deeply insecure perspective, and although starved of event, it’s an enthralling portrait to read.
Finally, Bairéad’s “The Third Woman” is the second of Fennell’s own translations from the original Irish. Unfortunately, it’s a slightly duff note to end on. Bairéad’s pacing is all over the place, and the story of two young women with a broken-down car, who are forced to take shelter in a nearby house, never really raises its hackles. But some hidden gems are always going to gleam brighter than others, and in a way the inconsistency of the stories adds to the sense of Your Own Dark Shadow as a treasure trove of curiosities. Some are a little ill-formed, but others are wonderfully idiosyncratic, and the dividing line between these two qualities is vague and subjective—some of the stories that I have asserted to be inferior will be another reader’s favourites, and vice versa. What is certain is the value of this collection, which will please a wide range of potential readers. It will offer something to the horror geek wondering how the Irish short story, beyond the big names, might fit into the picture of nineteeth- and twentieth-century horror writing, and something else to the Irish literature scholar keeping a weather eye on genre fiction in Ireland’s constantly astonishing literary canon, and it will offer something else again to the reader (and their Christmas-present buyer) who enjoys a good scare and an occasional malevolent spirit. Each type of reader will enjoy picking their own favourites from the haunted and haunting selection that this anthology provides.