Twenty-six years ago, I had a low-key obsession with Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study B). Part urban guide, part detective story, part film noir, this audio walk guided participants from London’s Whitechapel Library through the streets and alleys of Spitalfields and Brick Lane, ostensibly in search of a woman who had vanished. I took the walk many times. Over a couple of years, it began to feel like chasing a ghost; while some of the landmarks referred to changed or closed (Whitechapel Library for one), the walk remained the same. The past, Cardiff seemed to be telling listeners, can do more than leave an impression on the present: sometimes it forcibly breaks through.
In Brian J Showers’s The Bleeding Horse and Other Stories, history and the contemporary collide, interrupt and tease each other. Drawing on supernatural literature, historical incident and folklore, Showers’s psychogeography approach means he experiences Dublin in different ways, reading streets, houses and places of business in terms of their past and their present. He is faithful to the idea of the ghost story and its reliance on place, yet simultaneously acknowledges the need to break free of traditional narrative constructions.
The title story tracks the pre-Norman highway that runs like a shadow from South Great George’s Street towards Camden Street and the Bleeding Horse pub (which also features in Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1845 thriller The Cock and Anchor). Showers’s enjoyably self-deprecating style is such that he gives a detailed account of the troubled past of the area, then wonders if the reader is tired of the history lesson.
[ Sheridan Le Fanu’s haunting legacyOpens in new window ]
While some of these stories have been published before, this new edition collects his Rathmines tales alongside other pieces. Quis Separabit, my favourite in the collection, contains a clue to Showers’s motivations. This story is set at the Blackberry Fair market in Rathmines (closed since 2002). In it, the narrator – Showers himself – wryly notes: “Personally I prefer fictional ghost stories to ‘true’ ones. True hauntings tend to leave me feeling unsatisfied and are often narratively mundane.”
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These stories, a confidently imaginative blend of fact and fiction, leave the reader feeling unsettled and uncertain. Where are the dead, Showers asks: are they gone from us forever ... or might they yet return?
