Hellebore: Issue 012 - The Storytelling Issue
The landscape of these isles is embedded with stories: of how the Devil and a race of giants became architects of hills, mountains, and caves; of a host of faeries glimpsed in twilight tales; of the outlaw hero who defiantly embodies the countercultural essence of England; of an innate magic emanating from the land itself.
Hellebore: Issue 011 - The Animal Issue
Hares that are witches in disguise, ravens with prophetic powers, sacrificial wrens representing the god-king. Animals are often included in folk horror narratives because of their symbolic traits, or because of the folk beliefs surrounding them.
Hellebore: Yuletide Hauntings
Spectral Roman armies wading across newly built motorways, grey ladies roaming the corridors of stately homes, phantom coaches driven by headless squires. Britain is a haunted land, with layers of history crawling between the shadows.
Hellebore: Issue 010 - The Darkness Issue
As Samhain heralds the darker half of the year, we descend into the domain of darkness to explore its associations with folklore, myth, and legend. In this issue we delve into the night as the domain of shadows—the time when demonic creatures prey on the living and people could easily become the Devil’s own.
Hellebore: Issue 009 - The Old Ways Issue
In our perceptions of landscapes we are not only informed by our senses, our knowledge, and our experience, but also by something ineffable—a link between our imagination, our inner life, and something that transcends us.
Hellebore: Issue 008 - The Unveiling Issue
The image of the veiled feminine figure— Isis, Artemis of Ephesus, Calypso— has haunted Western culture since Antiquity.
Hellebore: Issue 007 - The Ritual Issue
Mummers with ill intentions, sacrificial May Queens, ecstatic trances. Folk horror is consistently fascinated by the power of ritual. In this issue we question the subgenre’s distrust of communal expression while we celebrate communities and their power to re-enchant.
Hellebore: Issue 006 - The Summoning Issue
From the Witch of Endor to Aleister Crowley, from the Satanic feminism of the suffragette era through to the current occult revival, The Summoning Issue delves into the history of witchcraft, magic, and the occult to analyse the impulses behind acts of conjuration
Hellebore: Issue 005 - The Unearthing Issue
For the ancients, the subterranean world was the realm of the dead; in the Medieval era it became the abode of demons. With earth we cover our dead.
Hellebore: Issue 004 - The Yuletide Special
Midwinter. The shortest day, the symbolic death and rebirth of the Sun. It is a time of darkness, but also of hope and celebration.
Hellebore: Issue 003 - The Malefice Issue
Curses and hexes are a recurring trope in folk horror and occult fiction. They’re active forces, invisible and unstoppable, disrupting the social order and threatening the Establishment.
A Purple Thread
Even before his birth, the life of Oscar Wilde was one shaped by dark, otherworldly forces. From a childhood spent in the fabled lands of Tír na nÓg to his star-crossed romance with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s trajectory through the artistic and social worlds of his day seemed guided by strange fate, some of it prophesied in his most famous works, including Salomé and The Picture of Dorian Gray.