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The Black Dreams: Strange Stories from Northern Ireland
I don’t recall if I saw my first gunman in my childhood nightmares or on my childhood streets. There were plenty in both and they looked very much like each other.
So begins Reggie Chamberlain-King’s introduction to The Black Dreams, a thrilling and compelling collection of specially commissioned stories that explore the emotional geography of growing up and living in Northern Ireland.
The fourteen stories gathered here criss-cross coast, border and city as they map a ‘strange� territory of in-between states and unstable realities in which understanding is unreliable. Obsessions, death and rebirth, violence, sexuality, retribution and apocalypse are all part of the rich fabric of The Black Dreams.
Bringing together some of Northern Ireland’s finest writers, along with some of the best new talents, The Black Dreams celebrates and extends the rich tradition of the weird, surreal and dream-like in Northern Irish writing. It is also a powerful act of imagining and storytelling � a vibrant, vivid and exhilarating exploration of a world we cannot, or choose not, to see.
So begins Reggie Chamberlain-King’s introduction to The Black Dreams, a thrilling and compelling collection of specially commissioned stories that explore the emotional geography of growing up and living in Northern Ireland.
The fourteen stories gathered here criss-cross coast, border and city as they map a ‘strange� territory of in-between states and unstable realities in which understanding is unreliable. Obsessions, death and rebirth, violence, sexuality, retribution and apocalypse are all part of the rich fabric of The Black Dreams.
Bringing together some of Northern Ireland’s finest writers, along with some of the best new talents, The Black Dreams celebrates and extends the rich tradition of the weird, surreal and dream-like in Northern Irish writing. It is also a powerful act of imagining and storytelling � a vibrant, vivid and exhilarating exploration of a world we cannot, or choose not, to see.
193 pages, ebook
Published October 4, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 1, 2022
An absolutely excellent collection of short fiction from Northern Ireland.
I love that the editor of this anthology eschews the labels of magical realism or even horror for these stories, but chooses instead to simply call them "strange".
And they were all strange..and beautiful and disturbing and visceral.
A must read for any fellow appreciates of modern strange fiction.
I love that the editor of this anthology eschews the labels of magical realism or even horror for these stories, but chooses instead to simply call them "strange".
And they were all strange..and beautiful and disturbing and visceral.
A must read for any fellow appreciates of modern strange fiction.
July 15, 2022
This is not a horror anthology, although some of the stories do have a paranormal (or maybe-paranormal) element. According to editor Reggie Chamberlain-King:
In his book Mark Fisher defines the former as "the presence of that which does not belong" and the latter as "failure of absence or a failure of presence" that is "fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here?" He further explains that the eerie is associated with conjecture and suspense and "a sense of alterity" that suggests the enigma is something beyond conventional human knowledge or experience. I think eerie best describes the collective mood of The Black Dreams. Even blatantly fantastical elements, like the mysterious door in Jo Baker's "Original Features" and the unexplained apocalypse in Sam Thompson's "Silent Valley," are left cryptic and vague, with no resolution to ground them in well-known spec-fic tropes, such as a locale found to be haunted by the victim of an unsolved murder or the expected cults and cosmic entities of most Lovecraftian horror. Other stories in the collection, such as "The Leaving Place" by Jan Carson, lack anything overtly paranormal but carry a palpable sense of something in the background, even if it's ultimately tied only to human emotional subjectivity.
Overall a solid anthology, and well worth a read for anyone interested in strange tales off the beaten path.
(To answer your unasked question, only a couple of the stories specifically address the Troubles, although others may be interpreted as inspired by them.)
The landscapes of their tales [is] a familiar one. A feeling of unease permeates the text. An expectation. But the expected thing is absent or an unexpected thing is present. There are forces you choose not to see, or can't, but they are perpetually in motion. There is secret knowledge, a hidden order of men or monsters at work beneath the surface: they are under the rules of fairyland; they are as real as dreams . . . They mapped out the emotional, if not the actual, geography of growing up and living here.He goes on to dismiss easy categorizations of fairy tale (too moral), ghost story (there are rarely any ghosts or related phenomena), or weird fiction. Chamberlain-King finds the traditional "weirdness" of Lovecraft, Machen et al too "weighty" or obvious: "These stories are light - like a mist - they cloud your vision."
In his book Mark Fisher defines the former as "the presence of that which does not belong" and the latter as "failure of absence or a failure of presence" that is "fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here?" He further explains that the eerie is associated with conjecture and suspense and "a sense of alterity" that suggests the enigma is something beyond conventional human knowledge or experience. I think eerie best describes the collective mood of The Black Dreams. Even blatantly fantastical elements, like the mysterious door in Jo Baker's "Original Features" and the unexplained apocalypse in Sam Thompson's "Silent Valley," are left cryptic and vague, with no resolution to ground them in well-known spec-fic tropes, such as a locale found to be haunted by the victim of an unsolved murder or the expected cults and cosmic entities of most Lovecraftian horror. Other stories in the collection, such as "The Leaving Place" by Jan Carson, lack anything overtly paranormal but carry a palpable sense of something in the background, even if it's ultimately tied only to human emotional subjectivity.
Overall a solid anthology, and well worth a read for anyone interested in strange tales off the beaten path.
(To answer your unasked question, only a couple of the stories specifically address the Troubles, although others may be interpreted as inspired by them.)
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