Bøger udgivet af Eibonvale Press

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.

In this, his extraordinary debut novel, Jet McDonald has created a heady brew of volatile cocktail ingredients. Madcap surreal hu-mour blends with vicious parody of the world of work, the vanity of "Creative" types, the torments of unrequited love, animal cruelty and the excesses of consumer society. Words and sentences undergo some kind of alchemy under McDonald's reckless stewardship, he whips them up into little frenzies like performing pooches and makes them jump through the burning hoops of our open mouths and frazzled brains. Not so much a breath of fresh air as a snort of something industrial, read this book and become initiated into a rebellion of the mind that will leave you inspired and laughing with exhilaration.

In the city of Sylvow, brother and sister Claudia and Leo Vestra made a childhood promise to each other: he would look after the plants and she would look after the animals. Unlike most promises, both of these were kept - each in their own way. Claudia is now a vet - looking after pampered pets or putting down strays and leading a mundane life in the city. Leo, on the other hand, disenchanted with modern urban life, has abruptly abandoned his wife and disappeared into the surrounding forest, his only contact with the outside world being a sequence of dramatic and prophetic letters - increasingly convinced that a semi-sentient natural world is preparing to rebel against its human irritants. Nature is a strange thing - although we have done an amazing job of cataloguing and observing it, we still know very little about it. Nature always surprises - and always changes, especially under an external influence such as humanity's devastating effect on the environment. This book follows its cast of characters through a spectacular clash between everyday life and life on the evolutionary scale - as society dissolves and is stripped away under the onslaught of surreal environmental disaster. Douglas Thompson has dug deep into the inevitable guilt that we all feel, as a culture/species, for the disastrous state of civilization and its effect on both ourselves and the world around us - in the process touching on elements as diverse as literary surrealism, philosophical tract, horror, disaster novel and visionary science fiction.

In this, his extraordinary debut novel, Jet McDonald has created a heady brew of volatile cocktail ingredients. Madcap surreal hu-mour blends with vicious parody of the world of work, the vanity of "Creative" types, the torments of unrequited love, animal cruelty and the excesses of consumer society. Words and sentences undergo some kind of alchemy under McDonald's reckless stewardship, he whips them up into little frenzies like performing pooches and makes them jump through the burning hoops of our open mouths and frazzled brains. Not so much a breath of fresh air as a snort of something industrial, read this book and become initiated into a rebellion of the mind that will leave you inspired and laughing with exhilaration.

"If every tale told in a tavern is a tall story, then what happens when the entire universe becomes a tavern? It means that every story ever told is tall and therefore untrue, and this includes the true tales. They are all lies. But a lie is a concept only possible because it can be contrasted with truth: without its opposite concept it makes no sense at all. This implies one of two unlikely things, (a) the universe is not really a tavern, (b) there are other universes beyond this one where true stories exist. If you ever learn which is the correct answer to this riddle please let me know." 60 linked stories, 60 illustrations, 18 years in the making - this is probably Rhys Hughes' most important book to date.

Eibonvale Press came into being in the winter of 2005 in a tiny Slovenian mountain town at the hands of David Rix, who sat down one day and decided "Today I am going to make a book." The fact that he knew a lot about books but nothing at all about the book world somehow failed to make that dream flicker away like most dreams and the slow crescendo of Eibonvale Press continued from there and is still continuing. That quiet and lonely winter in the Slovenian mountains still doesn't seem so far away as the press continues its search for the bizarre, the unclassifiable and the strange in new writing, in the process working with some of the best writers in the UK and elsewhere. Now, this new book provides a chance to look back a bit and define Eibonvale Press as an entity. Blind Swimmer collects together 11 stories, most never before published, by all the writers who have made up or will soon make up the Eibonvale Press family. The result is a book that is as varied as the press itself. Creativity in Isolation was the theme we set, and the results are as varied as the writers themselves. Different takes on what creativity is, what isolation is and whom we are talking to as we tell our tales in the wilderness. The stories stretch from classically tinged horror to urban strangeness to experimental fiction and surrealism. From short stories to full length novellas. From the wilderness of Britain and Sweden to the equal wilderness of the American urban landscape. Blind Swimmer is a unique and spectacular journey through the flip-side of contemporary writing. The book has a forward by Joel Lane and an introductory essay by David Rix.

This book is the fifth original fiction collection from one of the true eccentrics of modern British writing - stories that blend erudite skill and a startling emotional intensity, classical elegance and unexpected experimentation, sophisticated miserablism and innocent beauty. A fairy tale as dark as they come amid a shattering clash of two opposing and poisoned personalities. A Meyrink-tinged dream of atavism and Italy that awakens the dreamer to philosophy and fate. A quiet and perfectly observed journey through the far reaches of Japan. Myth-working fantasy haunted by the motley ghosts of Lord Dunsany and Matsuo Bashô, and by the imps of postmodernism. A vision of the afterlife where heaven and hell are entwined in torturous symbiosis. The sinister Black Dog folklore re-imagined as a cosmology of thanatophobia. For all the diversity of styles in evidence, they are united by the author's distinctive voice - a window into a crepuscular human world torn between magic and reality, earth and infinity.

Oz - One of the most famous literary images to cross over into the dark streets of the real world . . . Oz - The symbol for all things other. Over the rainbow. At the far end of the yellow brick road. In the shadowy parts of the brain. Where the witches and the wizards and the flying monkeys are . . . Oz - something that transcends childhood, adulthood, here, there, inside, outside, the mind, reality . . . Oz - the soil and fertilizer that Gerard Houarner uses to grow three substantial stories. Three amazing studies of how the mind, the imaginary and the real interact. And how they can blur and become fused.

In this book, the first collection from London writer Nina Allan, the full range of her styles is evident. Often using only the tiniest hints of the unusual or otherworldly to colour her narratives, these stories are rooted squarely in both the meticulously observed modern world and the traditions of British Macabre and Slipstream writing. They are subtle and elegantly crafted, leading us to question our own identities and take a second look at places we thought we knew. From the quiet and melancholy mystery of Terminus to the fractured modern reality of The Vicar with Seven Rigs to the fragile and almost classical beauty and eeriness of the title novella, A Thread of Truth - many of these stories have never been seen in print before and I am delighted to present them to you here.

Welsh writer Rhys Hughes regards this as his favourite book, and with good reason. It is one of the funniest and most intelligent books from the lighter side of macabre writing I have ever seen. It clamours with a cast of pirates, floppy-wristed welsh bards, explorers and inventors, imps, squonks, moving public houses, M R Jamesian revenants, M R Jamesian punctuation, blueberry pies, trousers, noses, clocks, carrots . . . I cant list them all here, there isn't room. Like all the best books, this quirky and surreal collection is hard to classify, but it lies in that region where the macabre and eerie worlds of classic horror and fantasy become a basis for something else - for a dark and original sense of humour filled with unexpected cross-references, homages, satires and black comedy. What makes this collection remarkable is not just the delightfully murky and skewed tales themselves, but the complex and ingenious way they all lock together and interrelate. I was going to say 'tessellate' but if this is a tessellation then it is filled with impossible-sided polygons, non-Euclidean three-dimensional geometry, unexpurgated curves and cracks from which blueberry-scented steam emerges with a screaming hiss. But what is without doubt is that 'The Smell of Telescopes' is a magnificent book and a cornerstone of the rather oddly shaped corner of literature that it occupies. Since the first edition went out of print, the unavailability of this book has been a great crime of literature. And Eibonvale Press is, as always, dedicated to the righting of the world's more substantial wrongs.