The Dark Companion: Ghost Stories

These tales of twilight and borderlands depart from an oral tradition developed through the writings of Beckford, Mary Shelley, Le Fanu, and M.R. James. They are concerned with the life of the mind and imagination, fear and the supernatural, and they attest to the demands of the unconscious in the twenty-first century. The eleven stories incarnate shadow worlds where the past and present interpenetrate, where common life is touched by deeper, less pleasant purposes. They are set variously in Ireland, Scotland and England, and are permeated by a powerful sense of place: the empty moor, the garden at the edge of the wild, the abandoned railway, the enclosed privacy of an ancient college. Absorbing, haunting narratives, they are related with the skill and precision of a master storyteller. John Gaskin is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin.

"John Gaskin's stories are genuinely unsettling, and the reader leaves the collection with a pervasive sense of something other, of forces existing on the periphery of our reality." – Times Literary Supplement

Contents:

• Preface & Acknowledgments
• The Pit
• The Black Knight
• Cropsey's Hole
• Blaeweary
• Single to Burnfoot
• The Dark Companion
• Blindburn
• Vanitas Vanitatum
• The Dublin Epictetus
• Avernus
• Look Closely