The wind rattles a windowpane. The rain beats staccato on the glass. The candle flame flickers ominously. What was that? Was that long shadow always there? Did a floorboard groan or was it... something else? This collection of classic Gothic novellas will leave you with nightmares like you've never experienced before. Four of the most disturbing, chilling, and bizarre tales from the masters of horror. In William Fryer Harvey's "The Beast with Five Fingers," a disembodied hand returns from the grave to torment the living. Considered a classic ghost story, Harvey writes with a subtle and deceptive style. Infusing touches of dark humor into the ghastly narrative, Harvey skillfully keeps the reader just ahead of the protagonist. This creates a frightening tension as the plot builds because we see the danger while Eustace is utterly unaware. "The Beast with Five Fingers" is cinematic in its moments of climax, and it is no surprise that the concept of the spider-like crawling hand became a staple in horror films, most notably Warner’s 1945 feature of the same name. "The Listener" by Algernon Blackwood is a haunting, melancholy tale of a young man and a monster. Searching for affordable lodging, a gentleman of little means finds a place that is a bit too good to be true. In time, he begins experiencing strange and unexplained events, and he soon learns the monstrous being he is sharing space with in his new quarters. Inspired by the story of Rebecca Nurse during the Salem witch trials, Elizabeth Gaskell weaves a terrifying tale of hysteria, fear, and paranoia in the Puritan outpost of Massachusetts. Like Hawthorne's famous witch trial stories, Gaskell's story is a complex narrative of betrayal, lust, power, and religion run amok. "Lois the Witch" is a journey into the human mind, organized society, and the crossroads when it all goes terribly, terribly wrong. The final novella is Leonid Andreyev's controversial "Lazarus." Taking on the Biblical tale of Lazarus and his resurrection, Andreyev depicts not a joyous return, but a second life as a zombie. His flesh is rotted, and he seems to draw the life spirit from those he comes into contact with in his travels. This is not the "light and the resurrection" as promised, but a lonely, shunned existence; an existence that comes to a terrible end. Four terrifying tales from the masters of horror. The Gothic Masterpiece Series: The Beast with Five Fingers and Other Novellas of Terror is guaranteed to chill the blood. Sleep with the light on.
Author
William Fryer Harvey was an English writer of short stories, most notably in the macabre and horror genres. Among his best-known stories are "August Heat" and "The Beast with Five Fingers", described by horror historian Les Daniels as "minor masterpieces". Born into a wealthy Quaker family in Yorkshire, he attended the Quaker schools at Bootham in Yorkshire and at Leighton Park in Reading before going on to Balliol College, Oxford. He took a degree in medicine at Leeds. Ill health dogged him, however, and he devoted himself to personal projects such as his first book of short stories, Midnight House (1910). In World War I he initially joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, but later served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving.[4] Lung damage received during the rescue leading to the award troubled him for the rest of his life, but he continued to write both short stories and his cheerful and good-natured memoir We Were Seven. Harvey was a practicising Quaker. Before the war he had shown interest in adult education, on the staff of the Working Men's College, Fircroft, Selly Oak, Birmingham. He returned to Fircroft in 1920, becoming Warden, but by 1925 ill-health forced his retirement. In 1928 he published a second collection of short stories, The Beast with Five Fingers, and in 1933 he published a third, Moods and Tenses. He lived in Switzerland with his wife for much of this time, but nostalgia for his home country caused his return to England. He moved to Letchworth in 1935 and died there in 1937 at the age of 52. After a funeral service at the local Friends Meeting House Harvey was buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin in Old Letchworth. The release of the film The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), directed by Robert Florey and starring Peter Lorre, inspired by what was perhaps his most famous and praised short story, caused a resurgence of interest in Harvey's work. In 1951 a posthumous fourth collection of his stories, The Arm of Mrs Egan and Other Stories, appeared, including a set of twelve stories left in manuscript at the time of his death, headed "Twelve Strange Cases". In 2009 Wordsworth Editions printed an omnibus volume of Harvey's stories, titled The Beast with Five Fingers, in its Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series (ISBN 978-1-84022-179-4). The volume contains 45 stories and an introduction by David Stuart Davies. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.\_F....]
