W. F. Harvey’s complete weird stories, never before published in one collection, can now be yours with this brand-new edition specially optimised for Kindle. Give yourself a good old-fashioned fright with fifty-four tortured tales of horror, the occult and the subconscious mind, including all Harvey’s best-loved stories: ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’, ‘August Heat’, ‘The Ankardyne Pew’ and many more. William Fryer Harvey, master storyteller of the Edwardian era, plumbs the darker recesses of the human psyche. In place of the clanking ghosts and marauding monsters served up by so many of his contemporaries, Harvey offers more subtle and chilling horrors, such as the man who stumbles upon a tombstone bearing his own name, complete with his dates of birth and death already engraved. Nothing is ever quite as it seems in Harvey’s warped version of reality, and every story springs a surprise – often a very nasty one indeed. Harvey challenges and confounds the reader with a cast of twisted, malevolent and just plain weird characters who inhabit a shadowy parallel world of premonitions, obsessions, evil secrets and murderous plots. This Kindle edition has been carefully edited and formatted, and comes complete with an Introduction, an active Table of Contents and section markers to enable easy browsing and ensure a smooth, enjoyable reading experience. With a total length of 187,000 words, equivalent to over 500 paperback pages, this huge collection also offers outstanding value. Enjoy all these stories in full: The Beast with Five Fingers – The Ankardyne Pew – The Heart of the Fire – The Angel of Stone – Midnight House – The Dabblers – Unwinding – A Middle-Class Tragedy – Mrs Ormerod – Double Demon – The Tool – Ghosts and Jossers – The Clock – Peter Levisham – Pelly’s Gambit – Miss Cornelius – The Man Who Hated Aspidistras – Sambo – The Star – Across the Moors – Six to Six-Thirty – The Follower – August Heat – Sarah Bennet’s Possession – Miss Avenal – Last of the Race – Deaf and Dumb – The Fern – The Tortoise – Two and a Third – Blinds – The Desecrator – The Sleeping Major – The Educationalist – Dead of Night – The Double Eye – The Devil’s Bridge – Mishandled – The Habeas Corpus Club – Full Circle – The Long Road – After the Flower Show – The Lake – Chemist and Druggist – Euphemia Witchmaid – Ripe for Development – Atmospherics – The Vicar’s Web – Dark Horses – The Arm of Mrs Egan – Old Masters – No Body – Account Rendered – The Flying Out of Mrs Barnard Hollis. Also check out these other great Kindle titles in the same series: ‘The Lady Chillers’ – classic ghost and horror stories by women writers. ‘The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson’ – fifty-four spooky tales by an Edwardian master of the genre. ‘The Gap in the Curtain’ – John Buchan’s fascinating borderline science fiction story of predestiny and free will. 'The Greatest Ghost Stories of M. R. James and His Circle (1871-1928)' - 24 haunting tales from the golden age of supernatural short fiction.
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....]
