The Death Spancel and Others

Katharine Tynan

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Limited Edition
$50.00

Cover image by Brian Coldrick

  • “Come to me, a lonely ghost, / Out of the night and rain.” – “The Ghost”

    Katharine Tynan is not a name immediately associated with the supernatural. However, like many other writers of the early twentieth century, she made numerous forays into literature of the ghostly and macabre, and throughout her career produced verse and prose that conveys a remarkable variety of eerie themes, moods, and narrative forms.

    From her early, elegiac stories, inspired by legends from the West of Ireland, to pulpier efforts featuring grave-robbers and ravenous rats, Tynan displays an eye for weird detail, compelling atmosphere, and a talent for rendering a broad palette of uncanny effects.

    The Death Spancel and Others is the first collection to showcase Tynan’s tales of supernatural events, prophecies, curses, apparitions, and a pervasive sense of the ghastly.

    Contents

    Introduction by Peter Bell
    The First Wife
    The Dead Mother
    The Sea’s Dead
    The Dead Tryst
    The Death Spancel
    The Death-Watch
    The Ghosts
    A Bride from the Dead
    Miss Mary
    The Ghost
    A Sentence of Death
    The Dead Coach
    The Body Snatching
    The Spancel of Death
    The Dream House
    The Call
    A Night in the Cathedral
    The Little Ghost
    The Picture on the Wall
    The Fields of My Childhood
    Sweet Singer from Over the Sea
    Ghost Story of a Novelist
    Dunsany
    Sources
    Acknowledgement

Katharine Tynan (1859-1931) was born in Dublin and raised at Whitehall, the family home in Clondalkin. Her literary salon there attracted notables such as W. B. Yeats, with whom she formed a lifelong friendship. Tynan became a prolific writer, authoring more than a hundred novels in addition to memoirs and numerous volumes of poetry. Her works deal with feminism, Catholicism, and nationalism — Yeats declared of her early collection Shamrocks (1887) that “in finding her nationality, she has also found herself”.

Limited hardcover

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Publisher Swan River Press