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Last autumn, 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 reserved detailed

The theme of public attention and appearance runs like a bright thread through nearly all of Oscar Wilde’s plays and stories. In The Importance of Being Earnest, it is far more important to be “Ernest” than to be earnest, because the name itself carries an aura of desirability: the illusion is more powerful than the reality. Throughout Wilde’s fiction, reality and illusion—truth and perception—exist in deliberate, often comic conflict. His characters care surprisingly little

Oscar Wilde was fascinated by the concept of duty—not by its nobility, but by its absurdity. He delighted in exposing the ridiculous extremes to which humans will go when they allow social or moral obligation to govern their lives. In his work, duty often becomes a source of comic tension, revealing how blindly adhering to socially constructed expectations can produce outcomes both absurd and unsettling. Wilde presents duty not as a moral compass but as a lens through which h

Last autumn, 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 reserved detailed

It’s 1982. The narrator, Steve Witowski (an alias), is a failed songwriter and fugitive, already trying to escape his past. One night he intervenes to save a woman named Victoria from a brutal assault by a seemingly unstoppable attacker. Rather than moving on, Steve becomes entangled with Victoria, who has just purchased a dilapidated church with a dark, haunting past. As Steve stays on to help with the renovation and the mysteries of the place, he discovers that Victoria--an

Last autumn, 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 reserved detailed

This post has been an extremely long time in coming. As I've mentioned in many previous articles, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is both my favorite story and the high-mark of my personal, literary expertise. Washington Irving has his own designated bookshelf in my living room (not including my collection of illustrated "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" editions), I was accepted into grad school based on the strength of a 20-page essay on Freudian subtexts in "Rip Van Winkle," and Irv

Even outside of supernatural fiction circles, “The Bottle Imp” is among Stevenson’s most celebrated short stories. Its reputation stands alongside other perennial classics of the short form—Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw,” Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker,” Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” London’s “To Build a Fire,” and O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” Like these tales, Stevenson’s story is remembered for its taut suspense, ironic reversals, and unforgettable emo

“Markheim” stands among Stevenson’s most psychologically intricate tales, fusing the moral unease of the Victorian conscience with the atmospheric precision of a ghost story. Written in the same creative period that produced Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it reveals Stevenson’s deep fascination with divided selves, hidden motives, and the possibility of moral regeneration. First published in the Pall Mall Christmas “Extra”, “Markheim” was intended for a seasonal audience expecting

Last autumn, 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 reserved detailed

This year, behind the scenes at Oldstyle Tales Press, we’ve been quietly undertaking one of the most ambitious projects in our publishing...

Henry James’ ghost stories are almost always elegant and stately, wrapped in psychological tension and emotional complexity, and bereft of any Gothic indulgences – blood, rotting flesh, “horribly thin” legs, eyeless sockets, the odors of the grave. The following story is remarkable in that it breaks from James’ more serious entries and offers a moment of ghoulish fun, while still holding horror at bay. The tale is, in fact, a comedy – part of one of the most underrated subgen

Just months before he wrote The Turn of the Screw, Henry James penned its literary predecessor, a short story called “The Way it Came,” later (and more tellingly) titled “The Friend of the Friends.” Bereft of any supernatural terror, it is nonetheless intensely unsettling – a story that enlists the hereafter as an instrument to highlight the power of emotions which are no less mysterious and spiritual in nature: mistrust, jealousy, lust, fantasy, idolization, and that multila

One of James’ favorite horror motifs was the object which had the power to influence the perception of its owner – literally. The subject of the following story, a mezzotint, was a type of engraving made on a copper plate that was renowned for its ability to capture the luminous effects of soft light; as such, it was often used to print replicas of nocturnal oil paintings. The subjects of mezzotints frequently blended ethereal beauty with a sense of the otherworldly: they hav

For fifteen years after “The Ghostly Rental” (1876), Henry James placed himself under a self-imposed moratorium on supernatural fiction. He avoided what he called “romances” and concentrated instead on refining his realist technique—the careful psychological nuance, social observation, and subtle moral shading that would become his hallmark. But in 1891 he returned to the ghostly mode with “Sir Edmund Orme,” and the decade that followed proved to be his most fertile period fo

Sonia Haft Greene was a widowed Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who had survived a childhood hounded by antisemitism, her father’s death, her mother’s immigration to New York, a violent marriage, the death of her three-month-old son, her husband’s suicide, and life as a working, single mother before she became romantically entangled with one Howard Philips Lovecraft – an unemployed, amateur sci-fi writer seven years her junior, living in his boyhood home with his two elderly aunts

Last autumn, 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 reserved detailed

Jacobs was never one for a conventional ghost story. His horror tales are often marked by unexpected irony, chicanery, and twists. His ghosts are often blatant posers, figments of imagination, metaphors, or hazy possibilities. Even in “The Well” there is always the chance that the dead man merely becomes entangled in Benson’s tether and that all the poor luck that led him into that horrible pit was supernatural guidance. The following is a very curious story about a real ghos

Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on W. W. Jacobs is unmistakable and surfaces repeatedly throughout Jacobs’ body of work. Poe’s tales such as Descent into the Maelstrom, The Oblong Box, MS. Found in a Bottle, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym left a discernible imprint on Jacobs’ nautical fiction. Like Poe, Jacobs deftly blends maritime jargon with sharp, often sardonic observations about human frailty, intellectual pride, vanity, and the ever-present shadow of fear. His sail

Jacobs’ penultimate horror tale belongs firmly to the esteemed tradition of the nervous homicide—a genre in which he had already shown a generous and skillful hand in works such as The Well, In the Library, and Three Sisters. It is no wonder he returned so often to this form: Jacobs possessed a rare, sharply attuned gift for portraying the psychological distress of a murderer, particularly the private erosion of composure that follows the act. Like its predecessors, this fi

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 restraint and psychological ambiguity. First published in Midnight House and Other Tales, the story belongs to a wave of early 20th-century weird fiction that emphasized atmosphere and suggestion over overt horror. Harvey, a Quaker and a doctor by training, was less prolific than his contemporaries, but his best stories—like "The Beast with

Last autumn, 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 reserved detailed

"Laura Silver Bell" artfully fuses the folkloric DNA of two of Le Fanu’s most haunting stories: "The Child that Went with the Fairies" and "Schalken the Painter." From the former, it inherits the structure and atmosphere of traditional Irish fairy lore—specifically tales of changelings, abductions, and the eerie disappearance of innocents at the hands of otherworldly forces. From the latter, it borrows the dark intensity of continental European legends, particularly those i