Sheridan Le Fanu was lauded by contemporaries such as M. R. James for his innovations in the ghost story and mystery genres, and his mastery of conjuring atmosphere and driving stories to thrilling narrative crescendos. And yet, aside from some regularly anthologized short stories and novellas, much of the writer’s fiction remains unknown despite its quality. Aiming to firmly position Sheridan Le Fanu alongside other canonical horror writers published by the British Library, this anthology focuses on some of his lesser-known stories, exploring eight thoroughly Gothic tales of murderous families, dark castles, and ghosts whose business with the living remains unfinished.

I knew the site of the hut and the hill behind it up which I had rushed, and in the flickering glow the eyes of the rats still shone with a sort of phosphorescence. Beyond the genre-defining influence of Dracula, Bram Stoker was also a master of the short story form. This new collection of the author’s tales represents his diverse interests in the macabre and uncanny, ranging from the hallucinatory and dreamlike in ‘The Shadow Builder’ and ‘In the Valley of the Shadow’ to the more overtly horrifying in the mini- masterpieces of ‘The Judge’s House’ and ‘The Burial of the Rats’. Alongside acknowledged classics of the horror short story canon, this new volume also includes obscurities such as the darkly comic ‘Old A Mystery’ and the morbid fairy tale ‘The Castle of the King’ to reflect the full brilliance of the legendary writer.

At moonrise I lit the fire and cried out the wild little invocation that Neoineen and I had made – gave way to all the crazy anguish within me – chanted it loud enough for the hills to hear. Entwined in Ireland’s rich literary history is a vibrant vein of strange fiction, drawing upon a deep folkloric tradition in which unbound spirits, revenants from the grave and the aos sí fairy folk tread a path of disorder through the mortal world. Delving into this haunting realm, Uncanny Ireland unearths twenty short tales from the past two centuries, ranging from accounts of weird folklore and rare reimagined myths to classic ghost stories and modern spectral chillers. Featuring weird tales from Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Bowen, W. B. Yeats, Dorothy Macardle and many more, this collection invites you on a sinister yet satisfying journey into the otherworldly unknown.