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Jacobs was never one for a conventional ghost story. His horror tales are often marked by unexpected irony, chicanery, and twists. His...

Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on W. W. Jacobs is unmistakable and surfaces repeatedly throughout Jacobs’ body of work. Poe’s tales such as...

Jacobs’ penultimate horror tale belongs firmly to the esteemed tradition of the nervous homicide —a genre in which he had already shown a...

In a genre long haunted by glittering immortals and emotionally tormented antiheroes, The Last Breath Before Death  feels like a jolt...

W. F. Harvey's "August Heat" is a compact yet chilling entry in the tradition of Edwardian supernatural fiction, notable for its uncanny...

"Laura Silver Bell" artfully fuses the folkloric DNA of two of Le Fanu’s most haunting stories: "The Child that Went with the Fairies"...

Le Fanu’s ghost stories—like “Schalken the Painter”, “Green Tea,” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle”—are often seen as distinct from his...

Excerpted from one of Le Fanu’s most renowned novels, The House by the Churchyard , the following two episodes relate a series of strange...

“Ghost Stories of Chapelizod” is one of several small cameo collections of ghost legends that Le Fanu published during his life. The...

“A Drunkard’s Dream” is a phenomenal if unorthodox place to start a survey of Le Fanu’s supernatural tales, not only because it is among...

It was incumbent upon most Victorian supernaturalists to – sooner or later – create an occult detective who merged the qualities of Poe’s...

Dyson, a recurring character in Arthur Machen’s stories such as The Shining Pyramid  and The Red Hand , stands as an unusual and...

Written just after the apex of his astonishingly popular “The Bowmen” – at a time when it was now being passionately cited as a true...

Dear Reader, Last night I was pleased to get an email from the editors at Feedspot.com informing me that Oldstyle Tales’ Classic Horror...

Haunted portraits are a time-honored Gothic trope used for a variety of reasons: sometimes they suggest the continued ramifications of...

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