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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

Despite their insistence on remaining “flat-footed on the ground” of objective materialism, the particularly inexpressible, Gothic ethos of terror was never an alien element to the adventures of Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr John H. Watson. Early on, the unmanning threat of inarticulable fears haunted the duo in the byzantine conspiracies detailed in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four. Later it stalked them in such gaslit thrillers as “The Speckled Band,” “The Five Orange Pi

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 celebrated for his participation in an international car race wherein he and his wife piloted one of the cars to lead the British team in victory against the Germans (led by a Prussian crown prince, no less). But his enthusiasm was not without a healthy dose of caution – dearly gained from experience: one year after buying his first motorcar he

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

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

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

This year, I’ve begun 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, I’ve begun 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

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

This year, I’ve begun 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

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 have haunted your imagination as a youngster at the library (the likes of the "Mary Celeste," Flight 19, or the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall). Each ghost appears with a definite message to share -- a message stemming from the humanity's unquenchable, frustrating thirst for justice. Like his two more famous supernatural series “Some Haunted Hou

This year, I’ve begun 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

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...