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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

Le Fanu’s ghost stories—like “Schalken the Painter”, “Green Tea,” and “Mr. Justice Harbottle”—are often seen as distinct from his folk-inspired tales, which draw heavily on traditional Irish legends. Unlike many of these folk stories that simply retell old myths with only a subtle Le Fanu twist, “The Child That Went With the Fairies” stands apart by blending a classic Irish myth—the changeling—with the unique, unsettling originality that defines Le Fanu’s best work. The chang

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 stories are typically dressed up versions of genuine Irish lore, all of which are polished in a particularly Lefanuvian manner – that crepuscular, twilit queasiness that have made “The Familiar,” “Schalken the Painter,” and “Green Tea” famous. The following excerpt from that collection effortlessly reminds one of “The Drunkard’s Dream,” yet with

“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 his earliest works, but also due to its representative nature: while not considered one of the true greats, it nonetheless splendidly illustrates Le Fanu’s shadowy cosmic vision. The tale picks up several themes which are now considered central to its author’s oeuvre: the cruelty of fate, the certainty of punishment, the fundamental wickedne

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 was incumbent upon most Victorian supernaturalists to – sooner or later – create an occult detective who merged the qualities of Poe’s Dupin, Doyle’s Holmes, and Goethe’s Faust. Bohemian, charismatic, and ludicrously well-read in metaphysics, these dashing mavericks approached ghosts, elementals, and Lovecraftian terrors with the same hutzpah with which Sherlock Holmes handled bank heists and purloined documents. Blackwood had his “John Silence, Physician Extraordinary”, S

Dyson, a recurring character in Arthur Machen’s stories such as The Shining Pyramid and The Red Hand, stands as an unusual and reflective figure among the ranks of literary occult detectives. Unlike more pragmatic sleuths like Sherlock Holmes, Dyson is not driven by logic or forensic deduction, but by a deep fascination with the uncanny, the symbolic, and the hidden patterns beneath ordinary reality. He approaches mysteries not as puzzles to be solved but as portals to metaph

Written just after the apex of his astonishingly popular “The Bowmen” – at a time when it was now being passionately cited as a true story – “Out of the Earth” is a sinister transition away from the former story’s cheerful optimism. In August 1914, the British Army had its first encounter with the Germans at Mons – a battle that ended in an orderly retreat after a valiant effort at holding back the German military machine. The following month, Machen published “The Bowmen” –

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

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

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 W. W. Jacobs with its emphasis on atmosphere and Nesbit’s muscular self-discipline. As such, it remains one of the most beautifully written of Nesbit’s entire oeuvre, an impressionistic prose poem percolating with suggestion and mood. Indeed, I would argue that – along with “The Shadow,” “The Violet Car,” and “In the Dark” – “The House of S

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 “The Call of Cthulhu.” All three stories explore the concept of an inscrutable, submarine civilization, and are themselves inscrutable in what they hint at, never fully pulling back the curtain. The most perplexing of these, however, is “The Temple.” Without the benefit of a framing device – like the many used in “Cthulhu” – it represents an i