Preoccupied with death, and repressed in many areas of their lives, Victorians seem to have found an emotional outlet in ghost stories, eerie tales, and a fascination with the macabre. Writers of the era fed this appetite with a continuing feast of stories steeped in terror and the supernatural.
This unique collection gathers together 21 of these Victorian-era spine-tinglers, but unlike most anthologies, which feature the same tired tales, this volume contains 21 outstanding, but neglected stories from that time period. The product of painstaking research in libraries, antique bookshops, and other out-of-the-way archives, these rare gems include the title story, a black comedy by Ambrose Bierce; "The Ship that Saw a Ghost," a tale of seafaring mystery by Frank Norris; "The Tomb," Guy de Maupassant's grotesque account of one man's incurable longing for his deceased lover; Richard Marsh's unsettling tale of "The Haunted Chair," and 17 more.
Compelling tales by such lesser-known writers as Dorothea Gerard, J. Keighley Snowden, Robert Barr, and Georgina C. Clark round out this collection of carefully chosen, hard-to-find narratives, sure to delight the most discerning reader of Victorian tales of terror and the supernatural.