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After the Germans executed him in May of 1940, people only mentioned Lord Pyotr Pennypacker in hushed tones, as though he were a cursed man whose name they were afraid to invoke. As though they feared that by merely mentioning him they might bring his fate down upon themselves. But this had not always been the case.

All through the previous decade he had been talked of openly and with reverence among Viennese cafe society, legendary high and low for his quick smile and razor wit, his incomparable knowledge of the Russian Classics, his self-deprecating humor, most of all for his genteel manner. For how—and this part had gone largely unspoken—he reminded them of that beautiful world to which they all so dearly yearned to return, the world they had lost in the Great War. Or rather, the world they had killed.

In any case Pyotr Pennypacker had come to represent something far beyond himself. Something, to put it mildly, he had never intended to become.

It started out as a joke. A con, really, but who wants to fuss about the difference?

The mark was a wealthy American heiress who had settled in Paris to write her novel. About what, you ask? Women, in a general sense, though naturally one woman in particular: a poor widowed maid who falls in love with…well, and so on. She adored the Russians, Tolstoy and Turgenev above all, never poor old D—, much too grisly. So Lord Pyotr Pennypacker was invented to suit her entirely: an Oxford-educated English aristocrat, exiled son of Russian émigrés, penniless but passionate, preserver of the arts in a world gone loud with Bolsheviks and brown shirts. The heiress left Paris before he could be unleashed on her. Upon her, at least.

You see, His Lordship was in truth a semi-professional American confidence man named Wendell Peters, who had grown up on a ranch in California, failed as an actor and stage performer, fought in the Great War, and then never got around to leaving Europe. Pyotr was a character who demanded an audience, who symbolized something so deeply rooted and yet still somehow silent in his player’s heart that Peters had no choice but to let him loose.

And so Peters died and Pyotr’s life began. He first appeared in Paris in 1928, where he dazzled the local literati and got into a fist fight with Ernest Hemingway, then moved on to Luxembourg, Stockholm, and Berlin, which he left in a hurry. He traveled to Rome, mostly to see the Vatican, then along the Mediterranean, going as far as Antioch before turning back upon being warned by an Orthodox priest that the French authorities were planning to make an example of him—this being after he had slept with one of the local Imam’s wives, a very dear man, really, the priest assured Pyotr, but proud, quite proud.

This was when the old affliction—the nameless pain, the aching fear—began to gather over him again. He had thought—believed—hoped?—that being Pyotr would keep the horrid feeling at bay, as though the sadness that had haunted him for so many years were an external thing, a tormentor that wouldn’t recognize him, wouldn’t find him if he changed his name, affected an accent, erased who he really was.

As Pyotr and Alia, the Imam’s (ex?) wife, sailed out of Constantinople toward the Balkans across the Black Sea, he briefly considered heading north into Russia, which he had never actually visited. He discarded the notion outright, though not without regret, and he confessed as much to Alia. It was there on a clear midsummer’s evenfall, gazing beyond the dark edge of the sea as the light sank into the deep, that she reminded him of the borrowed verse that had first brought them together:

“You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?”

She told him that all he’d had to do was say those words aloud—not even to her directly, just to everyone else who had been there that day at Sister Miriam’s literary salon—for her to know exactly what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go, who she wanted to be.

“You should do yourself the same kindness,” she said, and pressed her lips gently to his cheek.

They parted ways in a Romanian port, and as they embraced for the last time she repeated the lines again: “You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl?” Then he traveled on alone by train.

On the eve of 1929, exhausted from his journey, Pyotr Pennypacker, who by now had all but forgotten his true name, arrived for the first time in Vienna, though Russia continued calling to him. In his dreams he saw himself flying over the black vastness of the sea, away from the world he couldn’t bear but felt safe in. He filled journals with imaginary trips to Moscow, where he got into imaginary scrapes with the local authorities and made love to imaginary women. And under the bed in his rented room he kept a suitcase, packed his first week in the city, which he opened only once a year, on New Year’s Eve, to take everything out and refold it along the same creases, like a bird arranging its wings for a flight it kept deciding against.

He talked endlessly, especially once the damn Germans came down on them, of getting the hell out of Vienna. Instead he spent the next two years lending an English lord’s stationery, an English lord’s signature, and an English lord’s bored, unquestionable manner to exit papers for anyone who needed them. Not one was ever for himself.

The Germans came for him in May of 1940 and found the suitcase under the bed, still packed, every shirt folded along its old creases.

Then they took him out and placed him against a wall.

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My mother is a giver of strange gifts. Recently she signed up my wife and me for a subscription to a series—delivered monthly!—of uncanny-looking glass babies about the size of your palm. Each is exactly identical apart from the color of its swaddle and sweater, and each comes inexplicably with an ornately typeset certificate of authenticity. Somehow, this is not the strangest thing she has given me.

But strange gifts are something of a family tradition.

Her own mother was an Irish American Catholic, from a family that had come over during the Famine and settled in Louisville, Kentucky. My only real memory of her is that she scared the hell out of me as a boy and that she was not one for talking; really, though, I think what I remember may simply have been a certain aloofness, which I have inherited from her. She wouldn’t live long enough to really know me—or know what she passed on to me, however indirectly—but I owe my Christ-haunted pagan heart to her. Or maybe it’s my fairy-haunted Catholic heart? I’m still not really sure which way it goes, and that’s part of the beauty of it. She drifted away from her faith in the end but held fast to her belief in God and the angels and in the kingship of Christ.

Some of that must have passed on to my mother. Staunchly anti-institutional pagan agnostic though she was, when I first came across an image of Jesus of Nazareth my mother pointed and told me softly, “That’s him, the Son of God.”

She may not have known it then, but those words were the strangest—and most wonderful—gift of all.

My mother was a teacher, and my education extended far beyond the public classrooms in which I spent most of the hours of my youth, and in which I rarely paid attention, instead watching the clocks tick on the walls and daydreaming about knights and soldiers and battles and dark-haired princesses. Outside of school she taught me the things that really mattered—about fairies and magic pools and dancing and the sacred act of creation. She invested much precious time and money we definitely couldn’t afford to spend on art and dance lessons and sketchbooks and writing tools and paint; she sensed at an early age that I was a creature of deep feeling and imagination and she did everything she could to foster that—sometimes maybe a little too much.

Then the day came, as it does for most creative young men, when I wanted to learn to play guitar and sing. On this occasion she bought me a book of Irish folk songs, and when I asked her why, she replied, “Because you’re Irish,” and that was all she said.

I learned every song in the book and then a few dozen more.

All of that to say, like countless other Irish Americans and people of Irish descent across the world, I am bewitched by an Irish past that may or may not have been, may or may not even rightfully be mine, but that grips my heart and imagination anyway.

And that grip is stronger than mere nostalgia. It is less a cute, kitschy longing for an imagined past than a kind of possession: a near-mania that sends you obsessively after ghosts and mysteries that refuse to stay buried and yet remain forever elusive, just beyond the reach of memory or understanding. Pursue them long enough and eventually you must accept reality on their terms, surrendering, if only for a moment, the modern insistence that the world be disenchanted, and allowing yourself to be haunted.

I suspect countless people scattered across the world could tell some version of the same story:

I have never been to Ireland. And yet its history, songs, myths, magics, fables, and ghost stories have shaped the way I see the world more deeply than even those of my own country. You simply see America differently when you know your ancestors survived the nativist Louisville riots of 1855.

More than that, though, the Spirit of Ireland is a vast, generous, endlessly compelling, and singularly stubborn shade if ever there was one. She is more than an inheritance, more than a culture, more than a mere identity, more than an island.

She is a ghost. And if she decides to haunt you—claim you as her own—you will never truly be rid of her, no matter how far you travel.

Postscript—being a note on this volume

The stories and novels in this volume have been selected and arranged to provide a particular experience of what I have hitherto described. We open with two short tales of horror, longing, and enchantment that really have no business being as funny as they are—“The Brown Man” by Gerald Griffin and “Leeam O’Rooney’s Burial” by Douglas Hyde.

We then move on to a world in which the sacred, mysterious, divine, occult, and terrible become strangely intertwined with daily life and one another—Charles Maturin’s “Leixlip Castle” and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s legendary novel The House by the Churchyard. Here the supernatural enters houses, families, histories, and minds. Places become possessed by what has happened within them, and the past refuses to remain safely past.

But in the end all things, even mysteries, begin to fade. In Rosa Mulholland’s “The Ghost at the Rath” and Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass—his only full-length novel set in his native Ireland—we see modernity press upon the old world. Roads are built, strangers arrive, explanations are offered, and mysteries that once required no defense begin to retreat.

In W. B. Yeats’s “The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows,” the older world is summoned back with fury. Then, at the end, we arrive—perhaps somewhat controversially—at James Joyce’s “The Dead.”

There are no fairies here, no ruined castles, no visible apparitions. None are necessary. The ghost has moved inward. The supernatural has nearly vanished, and still the dead refuse to leave us alone.

These movements are not meant as rigid scholarly categories, but rather as stages of a mood: ways of seeing what happens when an enchanted world collides with history and modernity.

In the beginning, the Otherworld exists beside us. Then it enters our houses. Then we cease to believe in it. Finally we discover that disbelief has done remarkably little to make it go away.

Disenchantment, after all, is not the same thing as exorcism.

Purchase IRISH GOTHIC at a discount below! Featuring two full-length novels and several short stories from Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and more.

Photo credit: Vincent M.A. Janssen

Women create life and men are forever striving after them, working tirelessly to produce whatever lesser miracles we can in order to make that life more beautiful. For Samantha, that means books. I would never have kept up the practice of writing without her, because I write to make books for her and our daughters, and to see her smile when she reads them—smile and then punch me in the arm before reading on, usually. More recently, however, I was able to give her something even more special—I resurrected her favorite dead poet.

It is no small thing to truly love a dead writer. I suspect we all have at least one, if not several—a voice from beyond the grave that nonetheless speaks through time into the daily meat grinder, shining a sliver of light into our grim, thoroughly modern lives. Say what you will about those of us enraptured by the Gothic, the macabre, the dark transcendent—we love our dead writers dearly.

She loves Letitia Landon, the brilliant but criminally under appreciated English poet of the Romantic period. Known by some as the ‘female Byron,’ Letitia Elizabeth Landon (or LEL as she is more commonly known) produced some of the finest, most innovative narrative poetry ever composed in the English language. She was an early pioneer of reclaiming the central role of women in myth, folklore, fairy tales, love poetry, and more, and did so with both sharp psychological insight and deep poetic feeling. In studying her at my wife’s behest, she quickly became my favorite poet as well (though I will always be partial to Byron—suck it, F. Scott).

The more I read of and learned about LEL the more convinced I was to publish a collection of her poems. Samantha had always mourned the fact that there really are no beautiful, commercial trade editions of LEL’s poetry, and, having just started Bell & Brier, I wanted to give her one. The book below is the result of that particular act of love and literary necromancy.

But resurrection is worthless if the dead are merely put on display. They must be allowed to speak again. So discover LEL for yourself—her passions, her longings, her dark loves and divine spark—and see whether, nearly two centuries later, she still speaks to you from beyond the grave.

—Cody

To his credit, Brandon used to reliably provide that experience for me. My disenchantment is no failure on his part but rather the result, I think, of a few separate threads coming together to strangle the fan I used to be. The most obvious one is that I’m old now—at least, too old to be entirely swept away. At 34 it’s simply impossible for me to experience a story the same way I did when I was in college. My blade has been blunted by too much real life. I believe in magic and mystery—in some ways even more than I used to—but lack the youthful optimism to see beyond its dangers.

Lately, if I read any SFF at all, it is of a distinctly darker, more Lovecraftian flavor, which while compelling in its own right can never offer the same sense of transcendent, romantic wonder of Epic Fantasy. To say nothing of the fact that now I am a professional, a husband, and a father of two beautifully wild werewolf princesses. I’m lucky if I get 30 minutes to doomscroll headlines, much less binge a 400,000 word novel.

Which leaves me at something of a crossroads. One leads to fairyland, the other to what I suppose passes for adulthood:

Cormac and Flannery. Donna Tartt. The occasional Literary Thriller. Penguin Classics paperbacks and Deluxe Edition hardcovers of Great Books, most of which I find insufferably dull, to be honest.

And the glittering spires and windswept plains and dark haunted forests awaiting me at the end of the other road? They are still there, unchanged yet always changing, hidden behind the veil of imagination and disbelief, where everything—every action, character, and feeling—is bigger than itself, represents something deeper, more ancient, something true in a way a cynical old codger like myself can never really believe.

I can’t see the way back from here, but I suppose there is always a chance that someday my path will lead me there.

—Cody

photo credit: Alex Moliski on Unsplash