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An elegant, poetic, and unnerving haunted-house-story, “The House of Silence” evokes the best works of Lord Dunsany, Edgar Allan Poe, and...

Written in 1920, “The Temple” is as obvious a reworking of the themes in “Dagon” as it is a quaint predecessor of the grand visions of...

Despite their insistence on remaining “flat-footed on the ground” of objective materialism, the particularly inexpressible, Gothic ethos...

Automobiles quickly became yet another one of Doyle’s pet hobbies when they began to increase in speed and power, and in 1911 he was...

The following tale is one of the first to reveal Doyle’s taste for crime fiction, but it is a case far better suited for William Hope...

We've finally made it to the end! In this final installment of our Very Best Classic Ghost Stories series, we are – to quote Bob Ross – just going to have a little fun. I’ll be the first to admit that I am out of my depth as a consumer of postwar horror, but I certainly don't disparage it, and have a long list of beloved stories which are younger than my parents. So, in short, I certainly don’t claim this list to be definitive – but every single story listed here is a dear

In the third part of our four-part series on the best ghost stories in Western literature, we will be focusing on a uniquely dark and experimental era in the history of supernatural fiction. It is also – quite undeservedly – particularly overlooked and glossed over when compared to the Victorian, Edwardian, and Postmodern periods. While some of its luminaries (particularly the later work of M. R. James and Edith Wharton and the stories of Wakefield, Benson, de la Mare, and On

In the second part of our four-part series on the best ghost stories in Western literature, we zero in on a single, excessively prolific period of some thirteen or so years: the elegant Edwardian Era. Defining this tiny, micro-age can be challenging: the obvious  range, by literal  definition, directly parallels the brief reign of the avuncular Edward VII – just the sort of fashionable, clubbable peace-loving, aristocratic playboy associated with a romping Wodehouse farce – f

Since I started Oldstyle Tales Press in 2013, we have handled a wide range of speculative fiction sub-genres from the 19th and early 20th centuries: science fiction, murder mysteries, body horror, weird tales, cosmic horror, Jamesian ghost stories, premonition narratives, psychological terror, peril thrillers, and eco-horror among many others. From the beginning, however, our heart has always belonged to classic ghost stories. In this series we will be looking at three period

Longtime readers will know that my all-time favorite story, in any genre, is Washington Irving’s  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Not only...

Although fictional, the four stories in this creepy anthology of spook tales read like the kinds of veridical, Fortean reports which may...

Recently I was delighted to be invited to review two fascinating books in a white-knuckle lycanthropic series – the perfect way to start...

If you have ever read “The Eyes of the Panther,” you know that there is little that I can say about it without giving away Bierce’s...

Excerpted from our anthology The Outsider, The Rats in the Walls, and More Tales of Ghouls, Gods, and Graveyards: The Subterranean Weird...

Blackwood commonly utilizes psychological vulnerability to evoke high terror – usually by putting his young, male protagonists in either...

Expanding on the themes introduced in “Dagon,” and presaging the fleshed-out Deep Ones of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “The Doom That...

Bierce would probably be shocked at the massive mileage that the following story has yielded for his legacy. When Robert W. Chambers...

Like so many of his shorter stories, “Polaris” was inspired by one of Lovecraft’s dreams. In a letter to a friend, he claimed: “Several...

Lovecraft was a famous admirer of cats. In his essay “Cats and Dogs,” he explains his predilection in the following terms: “Between dogs...

In my estimation, "Ultor De Lacy" is one of the most accomplished, enigmatic, and viscerally terrifying pieces of short fiction that Le...

Like its eponymous hermit, “The Terrible Old Man” may be slight, but it packs a stunning wallop – especially for an early Lovecraft...

Peter Yearsley, who beautifully narrated Nesbit’s 1893 collection, Grim Tales for LibriVox, described the book’s contents in the...

Heavily Puritan East Anglia was the hot bed of England’s witch trials, peaking in the mid-1640s with the three year reign of terror of...

Last November I received a delightful and thought-provoking email from a reader (thanks again for writing, Paul!) who had a question...