Speculative Fiction Junkie

The handful of tales that make up this collection are ghost stories in the traditional vein set in the Rathmines neighborhood of Dublin. They are told in a conversational tone by a narrator who seems to be taking a leisurely stroll from Dublin and progressing south, telling stories about the places he passes on his way.

After reading the first two stories in this collection, I wasn't quite sure that I was going to like this book all that much because these first two feel totally conventional upon first reading. In the first, "The Bleeding Horse," we learn about the lingering ghostly presence of a horse that died around the time of the English Civil War in an inn that was subsequently named for the singular event. In the second, "Oil on Canvas," events suggest that the presence of a painter who died in a nursing home also lingers. While interesting to a degree, my immediate reaction to these two stories was that they didn't say much other than: "there's a ghost!"

Everything started to change with "Favourite No. 7 Omnibus," the story of an accident on a bridge that sent an omnibus and its passengers to the bottom of a river. Here for the first time the real tenor of what Mr. Showers is doing becomes apparent and we are given a story that is both rich in historical detail and frightening at the same time.

A subsequent tale, "Quis Separabit," is even better. It is the story of the Blackberry Fair, a local fair regrettably situated in such a way that it obstructs an old road traditionally used for funerals and, it is rumored, traversed by the souls of the dead. There's a reason, we learn, that both vendors and visitors are not allowed to remain in the fair after dusk.

The capstone of this collection, and my favorite by far, is "Father Corrigan's Diary," which is the lengthiest story in The Bleeding Horse. For years the eponymous man of the cloth's diary has bored helpless Irish students for whom it has been assigned reading. In this story, though, we are allowed to read its final pages, pages that did not make it into the published version because of the light they shed on the man's decline and the fantastic allegations he makes in them.

By the time one finishes reading The Bleeding Horse it's clear that the book is not so much a collection of separate tales as it is a single story; the story of a place still haunted and shaped by the traces of those who made their mark on it in the past. I don't think I've ever read a collection of stories that imparts a greater sense of history than this one does. Everything in the Rathmines portrayed by Mr. Showers is infused with the past as though it were an organic force with a will of its own. Past events find their way into paintings, people, junk, buildings, even the very ground. It is history turned almost literally into paint, flesh, and stone.

When the supernatural element takes center stage in what are already great, four dimensional stories, the result is that Rathmines becomes far richer than some of the most intricate fictional worlds, a place where the veils of time and reality are removed but the setting nonetheless manages to maintain its anchor in the real world. Put differently, Mr. Showers manages to expand reality rather than show the reader an alternate reality, with the result that the reader is left with a sense of awe at the possibilities that abound in a world that often feels mundane.

The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories was first published in 2008 by Mercier Press, which is, according to its website, Ireland's oldest independent publishing house. I have to confess that I wish they would have used some higher quality paper in this book.