The Death Spancel and Others

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