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.

The vampire is one of the great enemies of humanity, a nightmarish figure who feeds on the living in order to sustain themselves. Born from ancient folklore, writers in the 19th century gave form to the vampire as we know it today. Still haunting our subconscious in the 20th century, a new wave of writers continued to develop the imagery and traditions of the vampire—and the vampire continued to evolve. From John Polidori’s iconic short story "The Vampyre" and tales of parasitic female companions to experimental and freshly thrilling takes by Robert Bloch, Angela Carter, and Anne Rice, this new collection sets out to present the enrapturing range of the vampire story and our undying fascination with the monster at its heart.

Her cheeks were pale, and her eyes had the wild and stolid glare which Rodolph had observed when she awakened from the slumber of the grave; she quitted the castle, and after gazing around her, as if uncertain which way to go, she proceeded towards the village. In the mid 1800s, the inexpensive publications known as penny bloods were all the rage in Britain. Spinning tales of high Gothic drama, violence and monstrosity, this literary phenomenon was significant for its depictions of dangerous and transgressive women which inspired such milestone Gothic works as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla . Collecting ten tales from classic – and truly obscure – penny publications and featuring newly edited text and insights from Dr Dittmer’s research, this new volume revives a company of witches, femme fatales, vampire mistresses and deadly criminals to enthrall a new generation of readers.

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.

May Day Eve, Walpurgis Night and Midsummer Eve – or the Summer Solstice. Tales of these fated days and nights, and their riotous rituals and feasts, have rung down the centuries, and yet in today’s world those that observe their ancient ways are few. Setting out on a mission to re-weird this lost stretch of the ritual year, Johnny Mains returns with a collection of tales of the bizarre, the beastly and the brutal to welcome the summer and raise the cry: Wyrd is Icumen in!