Supernatural Tales

 The link to the ezine is here .

  Here it is, large as life and twice as spooky! All-new fiction by a host of talents, mostly British but also including our first-ever contribution from Germany.  Here is the table of contents. You Roger Luckhurst     Braunhoffer’s Coaches Martin Ruf     Violet Rosanne Rabinowitz     Corpsed Matthew G. Rees     The Haunting of Ian Bland Lisa Pritchard     Hell Is James Everington     The Hands of Men Sam Dawson Click this link & it takes you to all available print-on-demand issues (It will also take you to EPUB versions)

Splendidly atsmopheric cover by John Coulthart ' Friends and Spectres is a companion volume to Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (2020), an anthology of ghost stories by authors who had been members of the Cambridge University Chit-Chat Club along with M. R. James. Here the associations with MRJ are less formal, but stronger and more enduring: for it is the bond of genuine friendship that ties these writers to him. 'The majority of pieces here were originally published under pseudonyms, and over half appeared first in amateur magazines or local newspapers. All deal with the supernatural, and several of the stories are themselves spectres—or more properly “revenants”, only now re-emerging into the light after decades of oblivion. There are rediscoveries here of “lost” tales by Arthur Reed Ropes, E. G. Swain, and the enigmatic “B.”' Thus spake the blurb! I greatly enjoyed Ghosts of the Chit-Cha t and am pleased to report that Robert Lloyd Parry has once more done a thorough job of sel...

This is the final part of a running review of  Lost Estates  by Mark Valentine (Swan River Press 2024) The final story in this splendidly produced volume is another deep drive into English folklore. A writer, accompanied by a photographer, goes to the region around the Wssh to research a book in a series on myths and legends. The topic he has chosen is the supposed loss of King John's treasure.  Now, like many people, I was taught that John's baggage train was simply caught by the tide and he lost a lot of precious metal and jewels etc. But as the story unfolds we find that things were not that simple. For a start, there's only one source for the lost treasure story. And a different contemporary account takes a very different line.  This novella allows the author to plunge into rival theories about not only John and his antics but the way in which the English - both scholar and commoner - have a proprietorial interest in myth and legend. The professional theories cor...

  This is part of a running review of  Lost Estates  by Mark Valentine (Swan River Press 2024) I used to count cats. Not all the time, you understand. Just in the morning when I walked to work. I had chosen to live just a short walk from the office - odd, I know, but then I am a strange chap. The point is that counting cats became a kind of ritual. The more moggies I saw on that walk, the better I felt the day would be. A no cat day would not be a good day. Six or seven, and we're cooking with gas. Or at least, that's how I remember it.  'The End of Alpha Street' is Mark Valentine's take on this tendency we humans have to invent personal rituals out of whole cloth. Or, in my case, a variable number of whole cats. A cat features in the story, as it happens. The narrator befriends the feline and its owner in the eponymous cul-de-sac. And in a way the story is a cul-de-sac, as an exploration of personal rituals leads the narrator to an old man and a collection of appar...

This is part of a running review of  Lost Estates  by Mark Valentine (Swan River Press 2024) The title story of the collection! And it begins in fine form. 'I was playing the trans-dimensional crumhorn when the man from the Treasury called.' As the plot develops, we learn about the unusual musical combo the narrator was once part of and the unusual link to the inventor of a perpetual motion machine.  The group is reassembled in response to the man from the Treasury. The latter is in search of an 'estate' that is in fact something altogether stranger and more significant. A musical performance turns into a very unusual gig, The theme of disappearance - accidental or deliberate - is central again. Did the perpetual motion machine work, but in an altogether unexpected fashion? A light story, this, but not a frivolous one. It reflects a not-uncommon ambition, to discover that our quirky little interest might have wider significance - that we are as important as the people w...

This is part of a running review of  Lost Estates  by Mark Valentine (Swan River Press 2024) Many years ago I submitted a tale about pub signs to Ro Pardoe of Ghosts & Scholars and was delighted when it was published. The story is due to reappear next year in a G&S anthology. I only wish that, when I created my supernatural conspiracy theory around the symbolism of pub names, I had had a tithe of Mark Valentine's knowledge of the topic. The central conceit of 'The Understanding of the Signs' is far more effective than mine. What if changing the name of an old tavern somehow unleashes some archetypical entity that dwells in that location? Could the Gray Horse and the Red Lion run amok? The climax of the story grants the protagonist a glimpse of a landscape shot through with mystical significance. He senses a 'baleful power' in the motion of 'shadow beasts', which does not bode well for modern Britain.  And now so many pubs are closing down. If only on...