The Dark Companion - John Gaskin

These tales of twilight and borderlands depart from an oral tradition developed through the writings of William Beckford, Mary Shelley, Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James and others. 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.