The gifts are unwrapped, the feast has been consumed and the fire is well fed – but the ghosts are still hungry. Welcome to the second new collection of dark Christmas stories in the Tales of the Weird series, ushering in a fresh host of nightmarish phantoms and otherworldly intruders bent on joining or ruining the most wonderful time of the year. Featuring classic tales alongside rare pieces from the sleeping periodicals and literary magazines of the Library collection, it’s time to open the door and let the real festivities begin.

Unlike the Gothic, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted, and the ghostly, early weird fiction tends to probe, instead, the very boundaries of reality, exploring the laws and limits of time, space, and matter. This new collection assembles a range of tales from the late 19th and early 20th century that showcase weird fiction’s unique preoccupation with physics, mathematics, and mathematicians. From tales of the fifth dimension and higher space, to impossible mathematics and mirror worlds, these stories draw attention to one of the genre’s founding inspirations—the quest to explore what "reality" means, where its limits lie, and how we cope when we near the answers.

A cradle rocking itself in a dusty chamber; an echoing giggle from somewhere upstairs; the feeling of a small hand in yours in the wilderness of a misty moor... From the haunting children of The Shining and The Grudge to Neil Gaiman's Coraline, the ghostly youth is still one of the most recognized and feared tropes of horror fiction and film. In this spine-tingling new collection Jen Baker gathers the most chilling tales of hauntings by children, expertly paired with snippets of the folklore and urban legends which inspired them. Truly lost stories return for the first time since their original publication along with nail-biting encounters from masters of the ghost story such as Elizabeth Gaskell, M. R. James and Frances Hodgson Burnett.

A mariner inherits a skull that screams incessantly along with the roar of the sea; a phantom hare stalks the moors to deliver justice for a crime long dead; a man witnesses a murder in the Cornish woods, only to wonder whether it was he himself who committed the crime. Offering a bounty of lost or forgotten strange and Gothic tales set in Cornwall, Cornish Horrors explores the rich folklore and traditions of the county in a journey through mines, local mythology, shipwrecks, seascapes, and the coming of the railway and tourism. With tales by horror luminaries such as Bram Stoker, Poe, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, this edition also features a host of underappreciated writers such as F. Tennyson Jesse, Robert Hawker and Clara Venn.

Eleanor Scott has vanished into almost as much obscurity as her 1929 collection of ghost stories, which has been described as ‘rare but superlative’, and which figures highly on the wants lists of many ghost story collectors. The nine tales in the collection were all inspired by dreams, and in her foreword the author hopes that they will have lost none of their terror in the translation from dream to story. She need not have worried: this is one of the best and most chilling collections of ghost stories ever written. Introduced by Richard Dalby, with a cover illustration by Douglas Walters, and four photographs of the elusive author. Contents: Introduction by Richard Dalby; ‘Randalls Round’; ‘The Twelve Apostles’; ‘Celui-là’; ‘The Room’; ‘The Cure’; ‘The Tree’; ‘At Simmel Acres Farm’; ‘"Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?"’; ‘The Old Lady’.

Another festive edition to the Tales of the Weird series, following on from Spirits of the Season and Chill Tidings. A unique selection ranging from the spooky haunted houses of Victorian Christmastime to experimental twentieth-century horrors. It offers a truly international scope of stories, from the pine forests of Canada to the peaks of the Alps. Like any other boy I expected ghost stories at Christmas, that was the time for them. What I had not expected, and now feared, was that such things should actually become real. Strange things happen on the dark wintry nights of December. Welcome to a new collection of haunting Christmas tales, ranging from traditional Victorian chillers to weird and uncanny episodes by twentieth-century horror masters including Daphne du Maurier and Robert Aickman. Lurking in the blizzard are menacing cat spirits, vengeful trees, malignant forces on the mountainside and a skater skirting the line between the mortal and spiritual realms. Wrap up warm – and prepare for the longest nights of all.

A mysterious radio signal reports cosmic doom from an otherworldly location. Photography and X-ray evidence suggests there may be some truth to a sculptor’s claim that he has created a god. A spectral projection sows terror amid the flickering light of the cinema. From the whispering wires of the telegraph and ghostly images of the daguerreotype to the disembodied voices of the phonograph and radio, the new technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave their users miraculous new powers – and new nightmares. After all, if Graham Bell’s magical device could connect us with loved ones a half a world away, what was to stop it from reaching out and touching the dead – or something worse? Tracing this fiction of fear from the 1890s to the 1950s, this new collection brings together the best tales of haunted or uncanny media from classic – and unjustly neglected – writers of the supernatural.

The sea that night sang rather than chanted; all along the far-running shore a rising tide dropped thick foam, and the waves, white-crested, came steadily in with the swing of a deliberate purpose. From foreboding cliffs and lonely lighthouses to rumbling shingles and silted estuaries, the coasts of the British Isles have stoked the imaginations of storytellers for millennia, lending a rich literary significance to these spaces between land and sea. For those who choose to explore these shores, generations of ghosts, sea-spirits, fairies and tentacled monsters come and go with the tide. This new collection of fifteen short stories, six folk tales and four poems ranging from 1789 to 1933 offers a chilling literary tour of the coasts of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man, including haunting pieces by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Bram Stoker and Charlotte Riddell.

From the ringing of a disconnected bell to footsteps in the halls of an abandoned house and the whisper of an unexplained voice in the ear, uncanny sounds are often the heralds of danger and terror in Gothic and supernatural fiction. Yet, when examining the range of stories which best manipulate our aural sense it is clear that there is more room to explore how significant sound is to our experience of fear. This new collection presents tales in which ghosts interact with the corporeal world through noise, bodiless voices wander through the ether, and the objects whose sounds we trust, like the telephone, betray us. Featuring obscure pieces alongside some of the pioneers of the weird including B M Croker, Algernon Blackwood, H D Everett and Sheridan Le Fanu.

"But something odd does happen here at Christmas time. When I first heard the story, I thought it was an old wives' tale, but-well, these old houses-you hear strange things-" He lifted his shoulders and stared into the fire..." From the troves of the British Library collections comes a new volume for Christmas nights-when the boundary between the mundane and the unearthly is ever so thin-ushering in a new throng of revenants, demons, spectres and shades drawn to the glow of the hearth. Included within are eighteen classic stories ranging from 1864 to 1974, with vintage Victorian chillers nestled alongside unsettling modern pieces from L. P. Hartley and Mildred Clingerman; lost tales from rare anthologies and periodicals; weird episodes from unexpected authors such as Winston Graham and D. H. Lawrence; stories simmering with a twisted humour from Elizabeth Bowen and Celia Fremlin and many more haunting seasonal treats.

At that moment, in a flash that came like a shifting of her eyes, the world she looked at suffered a change... It was the same world, flat field for flat field and hill for hill; but radiant, vibrant, and, as it were, infinitely transparent. Tales of eternal damnation, love, sexuality, death and supernatural talents form the core of May Sinclair’s essential and groundbreaking oeuvre. Literary and still thrilling today, her stories explore the strangeness at the heart of human experience and relationships, where the mundane and the everyday meets lurking, otherworldly weirdness. Including the contents of the classic collections Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor and Other Stories (1931), this new volume also features two rare strange tales from a third, lesser-known book which explore further facets of Sinclair’s fascination with the uncanny.

Motionless now and in absolute silence, she awaited her doom, the moments growing to hours, to years, to ages; and still those devilish eyes maintained their watch. Ambrose Bierce was one of America’s leading writers of the nineteenth century, seen by contemporaries as a successor to Edgar Allan Poe with an authentic grasp of horror based on his experiences fighting for the Union in the American Civil War. Despite his contributions to the genre of supernatural and weird tales, today his name remains unknown to many readers. This new collection presents over thirty of Bierce’s most terrifying and unusual stories, from essential classics such as ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ and ‘The Eyes of the Panther’ to the writer’s lesser-known series recounting macabre local legends of haunted houses, mysterious disappearances and chilling encounters with the dead.

With a stiff measure of the supernatural, a dram of melodrama and a chaser of the cautionary kind, tales of drink and drunkenness can be found in a well- stocked cabinet of Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction, reflecting an anxiety about the impact of alcohol and intoxicants in society, as well as an acknowledgment of their influence on humans’ perception of reality. Featuring drink-fuelled classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ alongside obscurities from periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine, this new collection offers a (somewhat poisoned) chalice of dark and stormy short fiction, brimming with the weird, the grotesque, the entertaining and the outlandish.

He spoke of a new kind of terremauvaise, of strange regions, connected, indeed, with definite geographical limits upon the earth, yet somehow apart from them and beyond them. A youth comes to a literal fork in his road where all three paths contrive to end in the same violent fate; a beleaguered man finds his neuroses oddly mirrored in a dark parallel world co-existing with our own; Kaiser Wilhelm II, rather than abdicate, leads the High Seas Fleet on one last voyage. Treading the path of that which never existed (in our reality, at least) and the otherworlds bordering our own version of Earth, this new collection brings together tales of strange parallel destinies, unexplored forks in humanity’s history, twisted pocket dimensions and forays into unsettling regions of Dark Fantasy.

A prophecy threatens a volcanic upheaval for a star-crossed pair. A forbidden rite binds a dark arts dabbler to a phantom bride. A barstool chancer invites a devilish retribution on the dance floor. Beckoning from this tome are twelve tales of dark romance and undying passions hailing from 1832 to 2022, marrying bewitching classics by Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins and Angela Carter with twisting modern pieces by Nalo Hopkinson, Tracy Fahey and V. Castro—alongside the classic Gothic novella of sapphic vampire romance Carmilla. Indulging in the strangest eddies of literary love, this new anthology bids you enter a doom-laden yet irresistibly seductive corner of the Weird.

As mannequins, automata, effigies and dummies, dolls have haunted our imagination since ancient times, invoked throughout the years in literature and film as quintessential symbols of the uncanny. In this collection of fourteen tales harking from 1817 to 2022, Elizabeth Dearnley presents a sinister troupe of unsettling playthings from the minds of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter, Agatha Christie, Robert Aickman, Camilla Grudova and many more. Including possessed puppets, artificial suitors and figures that blur the lines between human and doll, fresh nightmares await when the doors of the dolls’ house swing open and its denizens come out to play.

A seaside honeymoon holiday is plagued by the mystery of bells which never stop ringing – and that which answers the call. Druidic rites and modernity spells disaster at a Norfolk golf course. An ancient relic found on the Suffolk coast summons a nightmarish entity to its discoverer. A land of mind-stretching expanses, wide, yawning skies and the disorientating landscapes of the tidal fens, East Anglia has inspired a wide range of writers in the field of weird and uncanny fiction. This new collection includes a wealth of tales from the past 130 years set in Norfolk, Essex, Suffolk and Cambridge by a host of authors including ghost tale luminaries M. R. James, Robert Aickman, E. F. Benson and Marjorie Bowen, alongside bright lights of modern weird writing. Insightful introduction and notes from Norfolk-based award-winning author Edward Parnell.

A remarkable blood-soaked stranger upends the lives of two Lake District ramblers; a lonely tavern offers its guests something much more disturbing than a post-walk pint; a night hike on the Fens takes a terrifying turn when the fog rolls in. From the darkly humorous to the chillingly sinister, tales of the haunted trail are as old as time. We have always travelled on foot and our worst fears have often accompanied us. Whether walking for pleasure or necessity, the ramblers of these classic stories trip across unseen boundaries, plotting routes towards the numinous, the uncanny and the plain evil. Featuring fourteen pieces from an intrepid band of writers including Robert Aickman, Charlotte Riddell, M. R. James and many more, this new anthology is a haunting trail mate, guiding you into the wild unknown.

The fabric of Dorothy K. Haynes' weird fiction is truly the stuff of nightmares, where horrors cruel and mundane are interwoven with threads of dark fairy folklore and twisted witchcraft to deliver heady supernatural thrills. In this new collection, Haynes expert Craig Lamont presents the essential classics of her strange storytelling alongside rarities from obscure anthologies and magazines - and several stories exhumed from the family archive which have never been published before. Featuring illustrations by Mervyn Peake from the Library's collections, this volume knits the irresistible pull of Haynes' unique brand of the uncanny with a rare opportunity to discover new material from one of the great weavers of Scottish horror.

Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long who used the pseudonyms Marjorie Bowen and Joseph Shearing, was a British author who wrote historical romances, supernatural horror stories, popular history and biography. Her total output numbers over 150 volumes with the bulk of her work under the 'Bowen' pseudonym. She also wrote under the names Joseph Shearing, George R. Preedy, John Winch, Robert Paye and Margaret Campbell. After The Viper of Milan (1906), she produced a steady stream of writings until the day of her death. Bowen's work under her own name was primarily historical novels. Bowen crafted a trilogy of historical novels about King William III. The novels are I Will Maintain (1910), Defender of the Faith (1911), and God and the King (1911). The 1909 novel Black Magic is a Gothic horror novel about a medieval witch." Bowen also wrote non-fiction history books aimed at a popular readership. Under the pseudonym "Joseph Shearing", Bowen wrote several mystery novels inspired by true-life crimes. For instance, For Her to See (1947, AKA So Evil My Love) is a fictionalised version of the Charles Bravo murder. The Shearing novels were especially popular in the United States, Moss Rose, The Golden Violet and Forget-Me-Not achieving both critical and commercial success, being championed by reviewers such as Phil Stong. Until the late 1940s, the true identity of Shearing was not known to the general public, and some speculated it was the pseudonym of F. Tennyson Jesse. Under the "George R. Preedy" pseudonym, she wrote two non-supernatural horror novels, Dr. Chaos and The Devil Snar'd. Her last, posthumous, novel was The Man with the Scales (1954); it is about a man obsessed with revenge, and contains supernatural elements reminiscent of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Many of these stories were published as Berkley Medallion Books. Several of her books were adapted as films. Bowen's supernatural short fiction was gathered in three The Last Bouquet (1933), The Bishop of Hell, (1949) (featuring an introduction by Michael Sadleir) and the posthumous Kecksies, edited for Arkham House in the late 1940s, but not actually published until 1976.

Through the electric silence of the séance, a terrible, hurtling force draws near. A play with the planchette invites a diabolical visitor to Radley Manor. A medium’s summoning of a lost child pitches them into mortal peril. In this haunting new collection, Emily Vincent presents fourteen chilling classics and lost gems of séance fiction which evoke the most thrilling and thought-provoking aspects of the popular Victorian movement of spiritualism. Featuring tales by practising mediums, sceptics and ghost-seekers including Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Florence Marryat and F. Scott Fitzgerald, this volume is a suffusion of spectral frights and satirical skewerings, destined to linger with the reader long after the door to the séance has closed.

Springing forth from the heyday of Weird Tales magazine and its contemporaries comes a new anthology of fifteen uncanny tales—classics and rarities penned by the women writers whose weird imaginings defined the pulp era. Featuring an introduction and biographical notes by veteran editor Mike Ashley, this collection offers ghostly thrills, shapeshifting horrors and monstrous coming-of-age narratives from Weird Tales stalwarts such as Mary Elizabeth Counselman alongside more surprising authors such as Lucy M. Montgomery. This new selection also includes a 1990s classic by Tanith Lee, the queen of Weird Tales magazine’s revival era, and a recently rediscovered gem of mythical horror by Evangeline Walton.

"I hear from Mrs Barlow, who is a good gossip, that your mother and your sister are both ill. You must, then, have very little company." "Very little human company," she replied. On a moonlit night, a man dressed as the Devil arrives at the door of the ill-omened Holcot Grange the hereditary owner of the manor which has been uninhabited for two generations, he has come to escape his past and proceeds to reclaim his seat. But the tenants are not passive to his new tenure. As he is enthralled by the aura of one of the current denizens, the otherworldly Julia Roseingrave, a sultry romance begins to bubble, overlooked always by the shadow of conflict and the spectre of death. A deliciously atmospheric novella blending witchcraft and superstition with the Gothic trappings of a cursed love, this edition will also be complete with a number of companion short stories by Marjorie Bowen.

A goddess incarnate drives her worshipper to a glorious destruction in 1880s Italy. Archaeologists in 1940s Persia discover a maddening secret in Tiamat’s tomb. In 1990s Britain, an avowed sceptic is lured into a bloody initiation to the cult of Mithras. Ancient tales of mythical gods and monsters are embedded deep in the world’s cultures, and as weird fiction developed, a haunting sub-genre emerged in which these eternal beings – and their power to wreak havoc and enthral mortals – remained alive in sacred ruins, cursed relics and the hushed whispers of their followers. Delving into the rich lore of Greek, British, Norse and Egyptian myth and through lost pantheons from Carthage to Mesoamerica, Katy Soar has unearthed fourteen strange stories of beasts and deities tyrannizing the modern world. Offering classics and rare finds by Stephen Baxter, John Wyndham, Flavia Richardson and more, this collection also includes notes on the mythical figures of each tale.

Occult or psychic detective tales have been chilling readers for almost as long as there have been ghost stories. This beguiling subgenre follows specialists in occult lore – often with years of arcane training – investigating strange supernatural occurrences and pitting their wits against the bizarre and inexplicable. With tales featuring the most prominent psychic detectives such as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, the Ghost Finder and Algernon Blackwood’s Dr. Silence, this new collection also includes rare and never\-before\-reprinted cases investigated by the likes of Flaxman Low, Cosmo Thor, Aylmer Vance and Mesmer Milann.