Series: British Library Tales of the Weird

Woods play an important and recurring role in horror, fantasy, the gothic, and the weird. They are places where strange things happen, where you often can't see where you are or what is around you. Supernatural creatures thrive in the thickets. Trees reach into underworlds of earth, myth, and magic. Forests are full of ghosts. In this new collection, immerse...

The reputation of early-twentieth century British writer Algernon Blackwood currently resides with his two novellas, The Willows (1907) and The Wendigo (1910), and with good reason. They are perfectly crafted horror tales that convey feelings of mystical otherness; they hint at the possibility that there are forces which lie beyond the confines of our everyday understanding of the world and...

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...

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 woods near St. Ives, only to wonder whether it was he himself who committed the crime. Offering a bounty of lost or forgotten strange...

The discovery of a beautiful Stradivarius violin in a hidden cupboard at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, appears to be a stroke of good fortune for music student John Maltravers. But there is something sinister in the violin's history—something corrupt which threatens to re-emerge as the bewitched Maltravers plays and replays a devilish tune he is powerless to resist. First published in...

From the fungus-webbed House of Usher to the maddening, fungus-like wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic tale of madness, and Ray Bradbury's account of insidious mushroom dispersal via the US postal system, weird fiction has harboured a thriving culture of fungal horrors throughout the past two centuries. With stories of mycological possession alongside dark, pulpy science fiction, monstrous fruiting bodies...

As the storm booms out in the bay and the waves smash against the rocks, the masts of a cursed and spectral vessel are drawing near. As the mists roll over Bodmin Moor, the moonlight reveals a night alive with spirits. Welcoming a fresh roster of seaside spectres, tin-mine terrors and holiday haunters, this return to the bountiful fold of...

'Come to-night', I heard the old man say, 'come to me to-night into the Wood of the Dead'. Join Weird Walk for a new journey into the ghostly and bizarre, striking out from the shelter of the inn for the places where the path begins to fade, from the sublime wilderness of mountains, coasts, and ravines to forbidden, ancient tracts...

"The tiles of the hall floor were as pretty as ever, as cold as ever, and bore, as always on Christmas Eve, the trickling pattern of dark blood." The gifts are unwrapped, the feast has been consumed, and the fire is well fed, but the ghosts are still hungry. The ghosts are at the door. Welcome to a new collection...

In the wood, the grey stone rose from the grass, and she cried out and ran back in panicked terror. 'What a silly little girl,' the nurse had said. 'It's only the... stone.' Standing stones, stone circles, tumps, barrows, and ancient clearings still remain across the British Isles, and though their specific significance may be obscured by the passing of...

Crawling Horror 'Its long antennae waved inquiringly back and forth, its tiny eyes sparkled black with crimson points, and then it began to run. The Professor caught it in his hand as it toppled from the edge of the counter. It bit him.' A brush with a killer hornet upends a reverend's life. A moth wreaks a strange vengeance on...

The doll wasn't lying on the floor of the cage, but was standing against the padlocked door. And as the curtains parted it turned its face sharply towards me... 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...

Timothy followed, in his dream, and saw the ungainly, yet agile creature clamber in through the cat-flap... He could hear the flip-flop as it went up the stairs, and he woke himself, screaming, in a tangle of sheet and blanket. On Sunday night the dream was even worse. Through eighteen dark tales bubbling with the ghostly and the occult, Mike...

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...

Holy Ghosts presents a chilling narrative with the line, "I confess I have a particular dislike to remain in a church after dusk; it recalls to my mind the most painful story I ever heard." In these words, an unsettling atmosphere unfolds, inviting readers to explore the eerie tales contained within. A festering evil lurks in the grotesque carvings of...

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 wearied traveller dressed as the Devil calls at the mossy gates of Holcot Grange. Fleeing some bloody misadventure in London, the stranger claims...

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...

Fired up by the accounts of exploring parties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers of the weird and supernatural began to construct a literary Arctic and Antarctic in which terrors lay undiscovered in the ice and gateways to bizarre hidden worlds were waiting. From James Hogg's lurid North Pole narrative of life amongst polar bears in 'The Surpassing...

He spoke of a new kind of terre-mauvaise, of strange regions, connected, indeed, with definite geographical limits upon the earth, yet somehow apart from them and beyond them. A poet comes to a fork in the road where three parallel destinies orbit the same violent fate; a child's rebellious escapade to the city becomes a nightmare when the portal to...

Darkness now was around me and sound. I seemed to stand in the centre of some yelling planet, the row resembling the resounding of many thousands of cannon, punctuated by strange crashing. The violent peals of a disconnected bell in the night; a trudging footfall in the hush of an abandoned manor; the whisper of a deathly voice in the...

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...

The pipe music shrilled suddenly around her, seeming to come from the bushes at her very feet, and at the same moment the great beast slewed round and bore directly down upon her. In 1894, Arthur Machen's landmark novella The Great God Pan was published, sparking a resurgence of literary fascination with the figure of the pagan goat god. Tales...

All about us on the stairs was some of the most exquisite statuary I have ever seen... save for a few pieces carved in the form of some hideous beast, the like of which I have never seen on earth... The sunken continent of Atlantis has dwelt in the collective imagination of writers and artists for centuries; a bejewelled paradox...

A mysterious news signal reports cosmic doom from an otherworldly location. X-ray evidence suggests the impossible truth that a sculptor is becoming one with his creation. A gramophone channels the venomous words of a churlish spirit and its cruel vengeance. The ground-breaking new technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered their users into a world of unfathomable miracles and...

"All I can tell you is that I think it was pig's meat." "You mean you're not sure?" "One can never be sure." A brush with the mushroom devil whets the appetite. The meat at the werewolf's table is a dish to relish. Dessert with London's cannibal club may be the cherry on top. From fairy tales and folklore focused...

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...

Step right up to see the enchanted Ferris wheel whose magical gifts are to die for! Marvel at the man-eating menagerie and dreadful secrets of 'Satan's Circus'! Behold the nightmare waxworks of Mrs. Groby's Chamber of Horrors! Carnivals and sideshows are settings closely entwined with the history of horror cinema, but in the realms of literature, there is a strain...

John Travers has been hanged for the murder of his mother-in-law Helga, but to those who knew him something is amiss. Driven by justice and a sense of uncanny forces at work, John's friend Doctor Toogood recounts a haunting tale of love and jealousy under the fell influence of a shadowy and implacable evil. First published in 1927, this novel...

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...

'Two small green-silver spots, almost like small fragments of reflected moonlight, shone up at them, not more than three yards away. Then, as they watched, the two points moved, trailing after them a smear of black...'When the aspiring Canon Throcton is passed up for promotion to Dean of the Cathedral in favour of his rival Canon Simpkins, a faint knell...

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...

A meeting of lost souls in the care of a headless coachman. An obsession with eugenics descends into a cruel madness. In 1911, the British writer, feminist and literary salon hostess Violet Hunt published her groundbreaking first collection of uncanny stories, Tales of the Uneasy, exploring psychological and ghostly hauntings shot through with tragedy. Seeking to promote Hunt's achievements as...

During her lifetime, Violet Paget, who wrote as Vernon Lee, was referred to as 'the greatest of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction'. Yet today, she remains on the periphery of the genre. This collection of her uniquely weird short stories and dark fantasies proves why she was once considered among the best of the genre and why she...

I have stood on the dim shore beyond time and matter and seen it. It moves through strange curves and outrageous angles. Some day I shall travel in time and meet it face to face. Unlike nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted and the ghostly, early weird fiction probes the very boundaries of reality—the...

Suddenly, he tripped and fell his length over a prostrate body... he marvelled that so rough an impact should not have kicked a groan out of the drunkard... 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...

Between horror and fantasy lies a world in which the inexplicable remains unsolved and the rational mind is assailed by impossible questions. Welcome to the realm of Dark Fantasy, where safe answers are beyond reach and accounts of unanswerable dilemma find their home. Delving deep into the sub-genre, fiction expert Mike Ashley has gathered an unsettling mixture of twisted tales,...

Since Odysseus' curious crew first unleashed the bag of winds gifted to him by Aeolus, the God of Winds, literature has been awash with tales of bad or strange weather. From the flood myths of Babylon, the Mahabharata and the Bible, to twentieth-century psychological storms, this foray into troubled waters, malicious heat waves, vengeful winters, hurricanes and hailstones, offers the...

The first thing my dazed eyes fell upon was the mirror of black glass... She held it so that I might gaze into its depths. And there, with a cry of amazement and fear, I saw the shadow of the Basilisk. Through odysseys across dreamlike lands, Gothic love affairs haunted by the shadow of death, and uncanny episodes from the...

Something moved along upon the verge with a sliding, writhing motion, seeming like the body of a huge serpent...Drawn by horror's fearful traction, I moved to the verge of the parapet and looked down. Bristol, the early eighteenth century. On the run following a fatal accident at school, the orphan Will Harvell joins a voyage setting sail in search of...

There was a faint rustling sound, like some small silk thing blown in a gentle breeze. He sat up straight, stark and scared, and a small wooden voice spoke in the stillness."Pa-pa," it said, with a break between the syllables. From living dolls to spirits wandering in search of solace or vengeance, the ghostly youth is one of the most...

Out of the Past "Come inside, my bonny witch-finder. Here is shelter for thee..." A tale of callous murder and deranged revenge rings out from fifteenth-century Italy. A witch-finder's great triumph is also the herald of his own doom in Civil War Britain. A prisoner's fate at the hands of the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Mexico leads to an encounter with...

These stories have all had their origins in dreams... Terrifying enough to the dreamer... I hope that some readers will experience an agreeable shudder or two in the reading of them. A malignant entity answers the call of an ancient curse on the coast of Brittany; a traveller's curiosity delivers him to an abominable Hallowe'en ritual; the curious new owner...

Suddenly he began hastening hither and thither about the room. He moved the furniture with fierce jerks, turning ever to see the effect upon the shadow on the wall. Not a line of its terrible outlines wavered. The disquieting tales of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman explore a world of contrast, where the supernatural erupts out of authentically drawn portraits of...

You will hear loud raps, you will have your faces touched by cold, damp, unseen fingers. THINGS will be all around you, and a frightful white face will come out of nowhere and peer into yours! Through the electric silence of the séance, a terrible, hurtling force draws near. A play with the planchette invites a diabolical visitor to Radley...

A young girl whose love for her fiancé continues even after her death; a sinister old lady with claw-like hands who cares little for the qualities of her companions provided they are young and full of life; and a haunted mirror that foretells of approaching death for those who gaze into its depths. These are just some of the haunting...

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...

The wine looked a thick amber colour, powdered with gold. Lally thought of the doctor's story of the two men who had followed this woman to the forest and afterwards died miserably. Perhaps it was here that she had brought them. Following a scandal in the Duke's court, roguish officer Lally Duchene is dismissed to a new post at a...

I had been staying just within the shadow of the exit of the great rift. Now, without volition on my part, I drifted out of the semi-darkness and began to move slowly toward the House. Amidst the din of roaring water, in a chasm where a house once stood in an isolated corner of Ireland, a manuscript is discovered entitled...

The terrifying presence of a restless spirit on the top deck of a London bus; a possession at the bridge table on a cruise up the Nile; a nightmare encounter with druidic sacrifice in the innocuous setting of a terraced back garden... E. F. Benson's The Outcast pushes the boundaries of the ghost story tradition by exploring new, previously 'out...

The Platform Edge howls down the tunnels with a new collection showcasing the greatest stories of strange happenings on the tracks, many of which are republished here for the first time since their original departure. Waiting beyond the barrier are ghostly travelling companions bent on disturbing the commutes of the living. Experience a subway car disappearing into a different dimension...

"Where grow pines and firs amain, Under Stars, sans heat or rain, Chief of Hammand, 'ware thy Bane!" So goes the ancient rhyme of the Hammands, a family hounded for centuries by a ferocious beast whose visitations wreak death and disorder. Now, in the wake of the First World War, siblings Oliver and Swanhild are the last of the Hammands,...

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...

A splash of something huge resounds through the sea-fog. In the stillness of a dark room, some unspeakable evil is making its approach. This new selection offers the most chilling and unsettling of Hodgson's short fiction, from encounters with abominations at sea to fireside tales of otherworldly forces from his inventive occult detective character Carnacki, the ghost finder. A master...

"Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood. Let us go to sleep now." 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...

Aeons in the future, Earth's surface faces perpetual night after the failing of the Sun. Humanity is entrenched within the Last Redoubt, a colossal metal pyramid. Beyond the safety of its structure lurk countless unknowable threats.William Hope Hodgson's strange, visionary novel of humanity's struggle for survival in the eternal darkness of the future was first published in 1912, and is...

As he turned over its stiff and yellow pages, he noticed with pleasure the smell of corruption that had first repelled him in these decaying volumes, a smell, he now thought, of ancient and secret knowledge... Researchers prying into an obscure manuscript come face to face with its ghoulish guardian. A bookseller digging through an attic disturbs something far more...

Veteran anthology editor Mike Ashley returns with a collection of rare stories by women writers from the heyday of Weird Tales and its chilling pulp contemporaries. Featuring a riot of monsters, murderesses, and madness from a mixture of lesser-known writers and some surprises such as Lucy M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, this new selection also includes a...

A tangle of tales featuring perilous plants, scary sprouts, and frightening flowers.Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the "killer plant" trope in fiction, film, and video games.Before the Demogorgon of Stranger Things and the appearance of Mario's iconic foe the Piranha Plant, writers of the 19th...