Reggie Chamberlain-King

A beautifully designed modern day penny dreadful. This issue is guaranteed to slip you a bit of the weird, the uncomfortable, the creepy, topped up with a garnish of terror. Nine short stories designed to raise the hair on the back of your neck, twist your perspective and leave you with a funny feeling in your gut. In Warren Benedetto's 'Uncle Pumpkin's Tongue', a seemingly innocent fairground ride turns into something revoltingly sinister. In Paul Buchanan's thoroughly disturbing tale, 'The Bynum Girl', a community anticipates the release of one of its most terrifying members: a girl who once tormented them all. JP Relph's mind bending story, 'Delirus', tells of a doll, kept out of sight in the basement of a house gathering dust. She is discovered by a little girl who becomes quite taken with her. But what the little dolly harbours inside will make your skin crawl... Reggie Chamberlain-King's, 'Living With It', is a deeply troubling story of a mother unravelling in her domestic surroundings. Has she really just committed the most unmotherly act? Where is her son, really? Rory Say's thought provoking story, 'The Other Door', tells of a boy who keeps finding a door in strange places, but one that he cannot ever open. In Mark Blayney's, eerie story, 'Coin, Mirror, Manoeuvre', a man lives alone in the woods surrounded by his memories of an unrecognisable past - familiar, yet, unfamiliar. Something utterly life-changing has happened, but what? And which version of events is correct... ? 'The Catafalque' by Victoria Dowd is a spine-chilling story of a couple who convert a disused chapel, novel indeed, but is it ever a good idea to use a catafalque as a dining table? In Eve Chancellor's story inspired by true events, 'The Resurrection Man', a corpse-hauler delivering freshly dead bodies receives a visit from someone unexpected prompting a series of disturbing events. It is 1916 in Neil A. Wilson's, 'In the Bleak Midwinter', and an invalid soldier is convalescing in Marsham Hall after a mustard gas attack. He should be improving but the nightmares keep leaking in, getting worse, almost as though something is tormenting him on purpose...

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. Contributors: Jo Baker, Jan Carson, Reggie Chamberlain-King, Aislínn Clarke, Emma Devlin, Moyra Donaldson, Michelle Gallen, Carlo Gébler, John Patrick Higgins, Ian McDonald, Gerard McKeown, Bernie McGill, Ian Sansom, Sam Thompson