Brian J. Showers' The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories Reviewed

Brian J. Showers has been known for awhile in the weird literary community as the main engine behind Swan River Press, an established publisher of macabre fiction and scholarship. How the managerial personalities behind weird presses will perform when they turn into fiction writers is always an important and often anxiety provoking question. Luckily, Showers, like Ray Russell of Tartarus Press, is a talented story weaver who can comfortably add weird author to his resume with the appearance of The Bleeding Horse: And Other Ghost Stories. This short story collection surgically attaches the traditional ghost story to the meta-fictional reality of Showers' native Rathmines, an archaic suburb of Dublin, Ireland.

In a slightly quaint, but enjoyable narrative style, Showers speaks to readers directly and invites them on a tour through his historical Dublin, a city he has studied extensively and warped to strange ends. The first two stories, "The Bleeding Horse" and "Oil on Canvas," are told in a fashion very clearly drawn from the folkloric ghost story. Sights, people, and events are meticulously footnoted in both tales, historical citations which set the scholarly tone of this work and only become more numerous in further pieces. "The Bleeding Horse" recounts the phantasmal presence of a wounded horse forever trapped in the horrors of England's Civil War as it rampages through a Rathmines pub. "Oil on Canvas" portrays a dead artist's frustrated, posthumous artworks. Both stories are soundly told and nicely atmospheric, but neither registers high on the weird Richter scale.

It is the collection's subsequent tales that really take the spotlight in a sudden ramp up that is as unexpected as it is unsettling. "Favorite No. 7 Omnibus" resurrects the colorful and eerie history surrounding a 19th century omnibus accident. This tale is the first sign that some dark force heavier than mere individual specters may be hanging over Rathmines. An omnibus accident's mysterious origins are posited from several interesting and terrible angles through the old records of the accursed individuals who were there. A black carriage and a monster are mentioned as possible culprits, and the latter horror becomes a component of Showers' engrossing interconnections in the subsequent story, "Meones' Beast." This tale, which is itself an authentic facsimile of old Ireland's monster slaying chronicles, carriers an extra bizarre meaning when considered in relation to the preceding story.

These nightmarish recurrences of symbols and objects through time are subtly wielded by Showers. Yet, once noticed, they make Rathmines' extended and hellish history very recognizable. "Quis Separabit" ties the curious disappearance of Ireland's Crown Jewels to an exceptionally violent and frightening presence at the Blackberry Fair. Showers' dubious marketplace is a natural venue for the sinister, and his ghost, when it finally makes its appearance, is an unusual and imaginative demon with Jamesian overtones.

At this point, note that these stories are being reviewed in the order they appear for a definite reason: each successive tale practically surpasses its predecessor by an entire order of magnitude. "Lavender and White Clover" seems to be story most strongly imbued with Sheridan Le Fanu's spirit, Showers' prime subject of study and inspiration in the weird field. He takes us to a new church's construction site in Rathmines, where a hideous discovery is made: a giant mummy whose lavender and white clover stuffed mouth suggests an attempt at barring vampiric power, or possibly an even worse hellish ability. However, this unnerving abomination is merely a prelude to the book's final and most adept tale, where its queer talismans again creep up.

"Father Corrigan's Diary" takes us into a local historical figure's final chapter through a series of diary entries. The story is well paced and exceptionally tense--an authentic descent into frightful chaos that does not fall into the cliches popularly associated with supernaturally corrupted Christian establishments. Showers' Corrigan is a sympathetic figure who meets a mystery he cannot begin to unravel as a chain of progressively more ominous events culminate in a brush with evil incarnate. As in other tales, the author gives urgency to his terrors by confining the story within a meta-fictional framework so populated with real places and historical asides that it seems like more than mere fiction. "Father Corrigan's Diary" is also a top example of what a modern ghost story in the luxurious tradition of the British Isles should look like. For Brian J. Showers, it is nothing less than a literary coup that places him next to only a handful of others (notably Reggie Oliver) this successful at giving new life to old ghosts.

The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories is, in the final analysis, a volume bristling with the dead. They haunt and threaten from the nearly forgotten corners of a phantasmal history that creeps into the psyche without regard to its veracity. Dublin's Rathmines seems too close for comfort, even if it is half a world away, after experiencing Showers' myths--damning legends that cannot help but raise fears about the shadows in one's own locales. However, this collection may have another unintended consequence: a sudden compulsion to seek out large quantities of lavender and white clover...just to be sure.

-Grim Blogger