The following is excerpted from our introduction to our new anthology, Irish Gothic: Tales and Novels by Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Others — available exclusively here!
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