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POSTSCRIPTS Do you have a publication for which you wish to review The Swan River Press chapbooks? If so, please email with the name of the publication and your details for a gratis copy. The Snow Came Softly Down was conceived during the Yuletide atmosphere at the end of 2003 and written at the kitchen table in the first stark, cold weeks of the New Year. As with The Old Tailor & The Gaunt Man, I wanted to write something with a familiar feeling to it--a sort of bedtime story somewhere between, I hope, H.C. Andersen and Charles Dickens. While the story was formally conceived in 2003, its seed was planted in the winter of 2002 when I was still living in Sweden. On certain nights I found myself driving along the desolate country roads just outside of Stockholm. Stretching out in either direction were old growth forests that, for all I knew, might have extended forever into the cold night. I always wondered what would happen if I pulled over, abandoned the car, hopped the wooden fence and strayed into the boreal shadows? What terrible secrets would I learn there? And what would I do if confronted by the ancient things that rumble through the old Swedish forests? At times like these I understand why Swedes light candles and sing songs in the dead of night to celebrate Sankta Lucia and the traditional winter solstice. Other nutrients that contributed to the imaginative mulch were Ichabod Crane's terrified flight through the Headless Horseman's hollow, William Hope Hodgson's unearthly swine-things in The House on the Borderland--one of my favourite novels--and of course Wordsworth's poem "Lucy Gray", especially the second to the last stanza. Like the beginning of Wuthering Heights, I have always felt "Lucy Gray" has a vaguely supernatural element to it. No set of comments about this story is complete without a word on Duane Spurlock's fine illustrations and our first collaboration together. The theme of footprints in each illustration flawlessly reflects the story's desolate winter landscape, and the evidence of a one-time presence only serves to emphasise our isolation. The illustration on page eighteen remains one of my favourites to date. The original pen and ink, which you must see sometime, is framed and hangs in my house where the blazing and hateful eyes of the shadowy swine-things continue to give me chills. B.J.S. February 2007 Rathmines, Dublin

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