SUPERNATURAL SHORT STORIES

Classic literary writers such as Ambrose Bierce and Guy de Maupassant found an outlet for their imagination in their terrifying tales. Here is a superb collection from several leading purveyors of supernatural horror, legends of vampires, werewolves and unruly spirits, from early gothic writers to modern pulp enthusiasts like Clifford Ball and M. P. Shiel. English writers like John William Polidori (1795-1821), the physician who wrote The Vampyre, and William H. G. Kingston (1814-1880), were pioneers of supernatural fiction, while others chose to master the ghost story. E. F. Benson was a part-time archaeologist, and M. R. James a medieval historian at King's College Cambridge. James would read his ghost stories aloud to his friends and students at Christmastime. Other contributors in this collection include Francis Marion Crawford, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Arthur Machen and Bram Stoker. We are taken along moonlit roads, an empty house, casting the runes to werewolf howls and the legend of Portugal. A creepy bedtime bedside collection, 382pp in handsome hardback.