Books published by Eibonvale Press

Through dreamscape wonderment, fetishism, guilt, loss and love, these twenty-one stories map both physical and internal environments. Hook's familiar themes of identity, memory, and the nature of reality thread multiple genres to form a dense cartographic exploration of the human condition.

These beautiful and heartfelt stories range widely in their themes, stretching from horror and almost classic ghost stories to lyrical flights of fantasy, gritty and painful realism and dark twisted imaginings - from subtle slipstream writing with only the faintest sense of the otherworldly to haunting and vivid space fiction and even light-hearted homages to the colourful and gleeful world of the pulps. Always unexpected, these stories remain completely bound together by their own universal aesthetic and a style filled with sadness and gentleness. And filled also by a sense of wonder, both at the places where Zelenyj's imagination can take you and at the familiar world that these stories frame so touchingly. This massive collection of 40 stories will remain as a companion for a long time to come.

A new collection from one of the most powerful voices in in slipstream and horror writing is a significant event. This collection of twenty two stories was one of the last that Joel Lane put together before his death in 2013. Frequently taking the form of urban fantasy, with his home city of Birmingham as their nucleus, these are intense and often painful stories that linger in the mind for a long time. This book also contains a substantial essay by Nina Allan examining Joel; Lane's 'Blue' trilogy of novels.

The lonely and the regretful and the downtrodden, the furious and the woeful and the damaged; all facing the futility of living in a world of malice, loss and loneliness; all desperately seeking salvation while forging through the miles of pain marking every step of the path to Paradise . . . A farmer sings a nightly funeral dirge, summoning something from far across the fields. A cavalry troop finds Heaven or Hell in the hills. A reporter witnesses the final inexplicable moments of a saucer suicide cult. A boy and his grandfather hear a message from an un-guessed world beneath their feet. A boxer faces his greatest nemesis during the strangest of storms. a platoon is faced with a terrible choice in the jungle. A garage band and their loyal fans disappear as part of the fulfillment of a prophecy. An outpost of Roman Legionnaires is terrorized by an ancient evil. Two alien children forge a unique pact with two Earth children. A strange door opens in the middle of a burning summer day. A seasoned detective interrogates a vengeful angel responsible for the haunting of an entire city. A bounty hunter accepts a mission to hunt another man's demon. A husband and wife receive a long-awaited message from the sky. A broken girl is bestowed a gift from the moon. A group of troubled misfits search for Heaven in a violent future. A brother and sister await the greatest fire the world will ever see... All these Songs For The Lost, and other ghosts, too...

The Senses. We've all got them and are using them constantly. Even the Pinball Wizard had a couple. What's that sound? Did you see that? Don't let that touch me. Smells delicious. The taste of heaven... As humans, we are constantly processing our responses to the sensory input. With this in mind, editor Allen Ashley has collected together 21 new stories that explore our relationship with our primary senses. What's it really like to be invisible? What can we do against sounds that kill? And what do you think is truly in that feely bag? These are stories from British and north American writers that will take you to the far reaches of the sensory world and beyond. You may not look at / hear / smell /taste / touch reality in quite the same way again.

Glaikit, mockit, droukit, drouthy, couthy, scunner, thrawn - the Scots language is rich with words too gallus not to glory in, dialect terms that deserve better than to be boxed away as precious oddities. Here we've collected some of the strangest writers of Scottish descent to bring these terms to life - that's Scottish by heritage or residence, adoption or initiation...

Trains occupy a special place in the human psyche. The twin threads of the rails forge ahead from place to place, the ultimate symbol of travel and connection and all the hopes, fantasies, fears, reasons, romance and excitement that come with that. The links between points, the bridges and tunnels, are always so much more profound than borders or walls. And yet you travel these links through a world that is isolated from normal life and unique to itself. The railways are so mundane and taken for granted, passing through the backs of your cities and towns, yet they are worlds that cannot be visited, cannot be known. Worlds that can only be glimpsed from blurred windows or from the far end of the platform. Hidden places. Private places. Places where the ordinary and the secret meet. This was the mood in which Rustblind and Silverbright came into being - a book of railway stories that aimed to look far beyond what you might expect from classic horror or sci-fi. Like any good journey, the scenery of this book is ever-changing. You will ride the rails of language and imagination through many and varied places - some almost unendurably disturbing, some bleak and miserable, some surreal and strange, some touching and moving, some absurd and comical, some exquisitely beautiful. This is a collection that ranges widely from the almost-familiar double-track line of slipstream fiction to the grungy metro of sci-fi and the dark and sparsely served branch line of pure horror, while the squawking locomotives of absurdism jostle with still stranger trains that ride to - other places.

Allen Ashley (The Elastic Book of Numbers, Subtle Edens, Catastrophia) returns to the anthology format with an ambitious themed collection of stories based on the idea that the world we live in is still something of an unknown planet, with spectacular encounters, adventures and mysteries still very much possible. The result is a collection of tales of urban decay and angst - jaunts to unexpected and unexplained kingdoms - holidays and excursions to strange and unnerving destinations. A familiar earth that's slightly skewed - or maybe never was. This is a collection of journeys of the imagination from some of the best authors in modern Slipstream, SF, Fantasy and Horror.

A girl born with a number for a name, destined to become a new messiah - a seagull who becomes a household pet and national celebrity - flashing patterns of light as a key to your darkest fears - an impoverished family with a murderous secret. In these fourteen stories of this his first collection, Jeff Gardiner shows a startling range of styles and imagination, from visceral horror to lyrical literary prose. Keen psychological insight is allied to a shrewd knowledge of ancient myth and mysticism. Gardiner's recurring interest is in religion and spirituality and the strange traces these almost outlawed strangers have left on modern urban life. His characters are often dangerous and unreasonable, their actions unpredictable, a far cry from the rational universe we like to think we share. Look again at your world and let Gardiner show the glimpses you've been missing of the doors that beckon you to other ways of seeing. The ominous, the luminous... the numinous.

Who is Feather? The wandering girl - the running girl. Fragmentary, oblique, a damaged product of innocence lost, on the run from a deprived childhood and eccentric domineering father. Passing from remote beaches and salt marshes covered with samphire and grey sky to more human wildernesses in London and Ljubljana - always on the move and always making encounters. Always touching people with her own magic. Always unable to engage emotionally with all the lives she passes through - hurt, maybe, but always just moving on. In these nine stories and novellas, David Rix weaves an enigmatic web of fictions at the shifting intersections of Slipstream, Horror and Science Fiction. Feather lurks at the edges of some of these tales and erupts from the centre of others, but her presence and personality haunt them all, like an eerie melody played on an underwater violin. Perhaps Feather is a symbol of something fundamentally human, an avatar for the collision of our common humanity with the insanely alien environment of the modern world. But ultimately, Feather is also the muse of David Rix himself, and in sharing her with him, you will come to savour the very act of questioning, and discover that strange world where mystery and innocence meet what we see as normal.

Bloody War. Always on the news, from somewhere around the world. War seems to be something humanity just cannot get out of its system. And yet, for most of us here in the UK, war is little more than a spectacle where we sit comfortably, tut-tutting over horrors taking place in far off and unknown lands, before returning to our grumbles about the spending cuts or immigration or whatever else it is that sets you off. That's as far as it goes, save maybe for memories and stories of the dark days of WWII. But just suppose that all-out war was to come to Great Britain again? War where fire and death rain down from the skies again and where cities are reduced to corpse-strewn rubble? War against the ghosts of an unknown assailant and where patriotic media-induced insanity takes over our entire consciousness. Just remember how the Falklands War gave us a "Gotcha!" as the Belgrano sank, or how Gulf War Two hung upon a certain dodgy weapons dossier, before you get too comfy on your sofa. This dark, bloody and very British apocalyptic novel explores just this idea, and with terrifying plausibility. Simultaneously a thrilling page-turner and a tough and painful read filled with horrifically recognizable imagery and characters, this book paints a picture of England at war with an unknown assailant and the dark and dirty depths that lurk behind that. But this is no mere rehash of WWII madness. This war is modern - contemporary. War in the age of stealth fighter drones and advanced surveillance technology. War in the age of media paranoia and modern conspiracy theory. Imagine George Orwell's 1984 updated for 2011, with the focus on family, character and relationships rather than political ideology, and you might have the measure of Bloody War. This book, like our society, is one where politics has become an opaque and distant game, and where most people can see no further than their own living rooms. If we are not careful then the price for such false comfort, Terry Grimwood seems to suggest, may one day be terrible indeed.