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Edwardian writers of speculative fiction found a pet topic in reincarnation. Whether through progressive, linear cycles of rebirth, supernatural possession, or visions of past lives, the concept of a long-dead personality finding a foot-hold in the present – allowing them to voice their undying passions – was a recurring theme of the age. This concept haunted the oeuvre of almost every notable literati of the ‘aughts and ‘teens, including Oliver Onions (“Io,” “The Rosewood Do

Obviously influenced by Poe’s “House of Usher,” “Beyond the Wall” doesn’t carry nearly the same weight but cannot be denied its status as a classic American ghost story. What it does share are Gothic atmospherics, a delightfully campy protagonist (both are eccentric blue-bloods living in isolation in gloomy quarters), and a relationship with a frail woman whose decent into the tomb doesn’t put an end to their correspondence. While Poe’s antihero refused his sister and silentl

The classic Victorian ghost story almost always operated as a supernatural vehicle for restorative justice – an unfathomable circumstance where an act of villainy was so unnatural and vile that the natural order itself was broken by proximity, allowing the spirits of the dead, or other supernatural machinery, to rectify the deed on the mortal side of things. While this may sound simplistic and decidedly un-frightening (in our culture ghosts almost never fight on the side of g

Starting in the Autumn of 2024, I began an ambitious project: returning to every anthology in my catalogue and relaunching each one as a fully restored, expanded, and comprehensively annotated edition. Many of the earlier volumes were originally produced while I was balancing publishing alongside a full-time teaching career, which meant making difficult choices about where to devote my limited editorial time. In order to continue releasing several books each year, I generally

Stripped of Maupassant's confident disdain for society, “Night in Paris: A Nightmare” features, like “Who Knows?,” a protagonist who gets what he wants and pays the price for it. Disgusted by the bustle of daytime, this Parisian delights in the black cover of nightfall, eschewing the company of men for the solitude of darkness. It is a wish fulfillment with a surreal, unsettling consequence. Like “Who Knows?,” “Nightmare” prefigures the works of the Latin American magical rea

The motif of the homicidal jurist has long fascinated writers: the concept of corruption feasting from the protective seat of power. J. Sheridan Le Fanu wrote two such tales (the second a reworked prequel to the first), “Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle,” both of which detail supernatural events surrounding a sadistic judge. Bram Stoker famously revamped “Aungier Street” in “The Judge’s House,” while M. R. James featured a damned justice in “

As syphilis steadily gnawed at his mind, Maupassant’s writing increasingly mused on the nature of sanity, often wandering into bizarre, proto-Freudian wonderlands. “Am I Insane?” can be read as a simple story of bitter mistrust between a sadistic woman and her masochistic male “plaything,” but it can also be viewed as a study of masculine insecurity and sexual frustration in the face of female desire and autoeroticism. Regardless of one’s ultimate reading, the story is a high

“Horla” is not a real French word. While it has sometimes been postulated—especially by English-speaking readers—as a nonsensical product of Maupassant’s deteriorating mind, French readers will readily recognize its suggestive construction: hors là, roughly “out there,” “outside,” or “the one who is out there.” No English equivalent quite captures the strange little word Maupassant invented; possibilities such as “The Outhere” or “The Elsewhereling” convey something of its me

Most scholarship concurs that “Who Knows?” was the last story de Maupassant wrote before syphilitic psychosis overtook his mind. This is both understandable—considering its material—and baffling—considering its firm mastery of prose. A true masterpiece and one of his greatest weird tales, “Who Knows?” is also the most Poe-esque of all his tales, combined with a notable dash of Fitz-James O'Brien's marvelous fantasy (cf. “The Lost Room” and “The Wondersmith”). It pits a sensit

In much of Guy de Maupassant’s fiction, terror emerges from the familiar: a house, a marriage, a conversation, a walk through an ordinary street. “The Inn” takes him somewhere considerably more remote. Published in 1890, the story belongs to a long European tradition of Alpine literature, in which the mountains were imagined not merely as picturesque landscapes but as places of danger, isolation, and strange psychological power. By the nineteenth century, the Alps had become

Dear Reader, I'm happy to share that, for a third year in a row, our Classic Horror Blog has been ranked number 2 internationally in the Horror Story Blog category by Feedspot. We also cracked the top 100 Horror Blogs (of any stripe) at 89. For reference, Feedspot is an RSS Reader that lets you subscribe to blogs, news sites, and any website you want to keep up with. They rank blogs and podcasts through a mix of editorial curation founded on credibility, quality, relevance, l

Blackwoodian and Biercean in its treatment of Fear (compare to Blackwood’s “Sand” and Bierce’s “The Suitable Surroundings”), this tale delves ably into a conversation about the nature of the unknown, the terrifying, and the very psychology of fear. Like the oft-anthologized “Thurnley Abbey” by Perceval Landon, this story begins on the deck of a ship bound for a foreign land, placing its characters on a threshold between the familiar world they have left behind and the unfamil

We have another first in reviews today! Just as I've recently reviewed our first horror-adjacent album, so today we're breaking down a ghoulish game—and it's one that's sure to give you a thrill. Demon City: The Ultimate Horror RPG is a striking tabletop achievement, capturing a unique blend of urban decay, raw chaos, and surreal modern squalor. For players seeking a game steeped in true-crime inspiration, back-alley grittiness, and psychological horror, this system offers an

The Great Ghost Story – serious and artistic literary treatment of stories about the spirits the dead returning to interact with the living – has traditionally been the province of the English-speaking world, particularly among writers of the British Isles. As a fine and powerful literary form it came to maturity in the hands of the Romantics during the Napoleonic Wars before being handed off to the writers of weird fiction during the Great Depression. From the turn of the 19

Written in 1875, eight years before “The Hand,” “The Flayed Hand” is a less artful, though perhaps more enigmatic treatment of the same theme—a simple horror story with little to say beyond providing a chill. Like “The Hand,” it features a cavalier young man who acquires a black, shriveled hand with yellow nails, and its conclusion, while hardly endowed with the same irony or subtext as its later descendant, is similarly macabre. Both stories, at heart, ponder the concept tha

There is always a danger in writing a new story around Edgar Allan Poe. His name carries such a distinctive atmosphere that it is easy to reduce him to a handful of familiar images: a raven, a dark room, a mysterious death, a beautiful but doomed woman, and perhaps a conveniently sinister-looking black cat. A story can sprinkle these ingredients liberally over its pages without having much to do with Poe himself. Diana Peterfreund's Ellen Poe: The Forgotten Lore takes a consi

One of Maupassant’s most anthologized horror stories – and among his most overly Gothic – “The White Wolf” was written in late 1882 – the year his health first began to visibly decline. The syphilis he had contracted in his early twenties began causing chronic migraines and severe eye strain. He spent significant time during the year seeking hydrotherapy treatments and rest at various spas to cope with the pain, and subsequently began to grow familiar with the growing conflic

It is perhaps fitting that we commence a survey of de Maupassant’s macabre fiction with a story that deftly interweaves his chief thematic concerns: the infidelity of mankind, the bipolarity of human character, and the instability of reason and sanity. “Was It a Dream?” is an excellent example of de Maupassant’s cynical fixation with mistrust and deceit—particularly, as we shall see, in his treatment of women. Women are depicted as fickle, malicious, inconstant, and diabolica

Certainly one of de Maupassant’s greatest horror masterpieces, “On the River” prefigures a variety of river-set tales of terror, like Blackwood’s “The Willows” and Cobb’s “Fish-head.” Consisting of a wide poetic palette, “On the River” identifies riverscapes as places of hidden horror and subtle fear—deceptive sources of spiritual punishment. Like Blackwood, de Maupassant suggests that the river is a lonely and menacing setting, a landscape redolent with danger and brooding a

If Fitz-James O’Brien earned the distinction of the Celtic Poe, then de Maupassant is surely the Gallic Poe. “He?” is a manic marriage of elements from Poe’s doppelgänger epic, “William Wilson,” and O’Brien’s “What Was It?” The French were tremendously influenced by Poe—his writings were cherished by Baudelaire, whose translations of the American spawned a ravenous following among French bohemians and cynics. As H. P. Lovecraft noted, O’Brien—Poe’s Irish disciple—was notably

Starting in the Autumn of 2024, I began an ambitious project: returning to every anthology in my catalogue and relaunching each one as a fully restored, expanded, and comprehensively annotated edition. Many of the earlier volumes were originally produced while I was balancing publishing alongside a full-time teaching career, which meant making difficult choices about where to devote my limited editorial time. In order to continue releasing several books each year, I generally

Throughout his career Hodgson had a taste for mystery. His very first story – “The Goddess of Death” – was not unlike The Hound of the Baskervilles: something of an Arthur Conan Doyle pastiche involving a sham haunting that is exposed Scooby-Doo-style. Later he wrote “The Terror of the Water Tank” about a series of ghostly strangulations that are ultimately deduced to be caused by a mutated serpent crawling out of a neglected cistern, constricting its victims before slitherin

Long before the Bermuda Triangle entered popular folklore, there was another region of the Atlantic whose reputation inspired equal measures of curiosity and dread. Unlike the tempests of Cape Horn or the ice-choked waters of the Arctic, the Sargasso Sea owed its sinister reputation not to violence but to stillness. Mariners spoke of an uncanny expanse where the winds faltered, the waves subsided, and the sea itself seemed to fall into an unnatural slumber. Across its astonis

William Hope Hodgson is remembered today chiefly as one of the great architects of cosmic horror. Readers encounter him through the apocalyptic immensities of The House on the Borderland, the uncanny terrors of the Sargasso Sea stories, or the melancholy grandeur of The Night Land. Yet throughout his career another fascination repeatedly surfaced alongside his cosmic visions: the mystery story. Long before he invented Thomas Carnacki, Hodgson displayed an almost compulsive de