Category:
Fiction
£20.00
The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital is Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?
Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings. But this other, magical London must remain a secret: if Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks bizarre and disastrous repercussions, such as his body being turned inside out (or worse).
So begins a journey delving deep into the city's occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers – some from legend, some all too real, and all with plans of their own. Soon Dennis finds himself at the centre of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons forever.
£29.99
Paperback edition
With additional contributions from
Mike Ashley, Peter Bell, Gina Collia, John Howard, Marcelle Mapsby,
Jim Rockhill, Brian J. Showers and Fran Weighell
Literary Hauntings identifies and describes the real-life locations that have inspired the best fictional ghost stories of Britain and Ireland. Notable examples are the Suffolk beach where M.R. James set his terrifying ‘ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” ’, and the ruins of the Scottish mansion featured in Margaret Oliphant’s classic ‘The Open Door’.
This comprehensive gazetteer, consisting of 267 entries by experts and exponents in the genre, identifies the building in Dublin that inspired Joseph Le Fanu’s story ‘The House by the Churchyard’, and the canals where Elizabeth Jane Howard’s eerie ‘Three Miles Up’ is set. Both classic and contemporary ghost stories are included.
Literary Hauntings is designed to help readers track down landscapes, monuments, cities, towns and villages that have haunted writers of ghost stories for at least the last two hundred years. The gazetteer is also a celebration of the insight and craft that goes into writing a really good ghost story, a genre that is still sometimes overlooked today.
£9.99
£25.00