These tales of twilight and borderlands depart from an oral tradition (written to be read aloud at small gatherings or on the radio) developed through the eighteenth and nineteenth-century writings of William Beckford, Mary Shelley, Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R James and others, and now skillfully realized by John Gaskin. They describe the life of the mind and imagination, fear and the supernatural, and attest to the perrenial need for and recognition of the unconscious in the twenty-first century. The twelve original stories range from the murderous to the macabre, and the whimsical to the worrying. Written in the classical mould of ghost stories, they occupy shadow worlds where the past and present interpenetrate, describing the common world 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 story-teller.

John Gaskin's stories are genuinely unsettling, and the reader leaves the collection with a pervasive sense of something other, of forces existing on the periphery of our reality.

JOHN GASKIN is an Oxford undergraduate and Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, where he was sometime Junior Dean and Professor of Philosophy. Antiquary, family man, gardener, hill-walker and versifier, his writings on religion, the Epicureans, and the great sceptic David Hume, are internationally known. He lives in England.