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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...

Blackwood commonly utilizes psychological vulnerability to evoke high terror – usually by putting his young, male protagonists in either morally dehumanizing urban slums or the physically punishing wastes of wilderness. But this story achieves its goal not through a kind of place, but through a kind of person: a rapacious woman-killer whose inexplicable attention to one young clerk on his defense team immediately raises questions about gender and masculinity. Its protagonist,

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 incorporated many of its place names and fictional deities in his “King in Yellow” mythos (along with some from Bierce’s pastoral parable, “Haïta the Shepherd”), Hastur, Hali, and Carcosa would become infamous in the world of horror, finding additional notice in the works of H. P. Lovecraft (who refers to them in many stories, especially “The Wh

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 nights ago I had a strange dream of a strange city—a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills. There was not a soul in this vast region of stone-paved streets and marble walls and columns, and the numerous statues in the public places were of strange bearded men in robes the like whereo

Lovecraft was a famous admirer of cats. In his essay “Cats and Dogs,” he explains his predilection in the following terms: “Between dogs and cats my degree of choice is so great that it would never occur to me to compare the two. I have no active dislike for dogs … but for the cat I have entertained a particular respect and affection ever since the earliest days of my infancy. In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and b

In my estimation, "Ultor De Lacy" is one of the most accomplished, enigmatic, and viscerally terrifying pieces of short fiction that Le Fanu ever penned. It belongs in the upper echelon of his supernatural tales, easily standing alongside the haunting ambiguities of "Schalken the Painter" and the psychological unease of "Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street." Yet it is with no small frustration that I’ve discovered how little critical attention this remarkable story has rec

Like its eponymous hermit, “The Terrible Old Man” may be slight, but it packs a stunning wallop – especially for an early Lovecraft story. Leslie S. Klinger notes that it is “the shortest of any of Lovecraft’s significant stories,” and Ruthanna Emrys lauds it as “a remarkable thing: a succinct Lovecraft story. It’s a piece of minimalist brushwork, with most of the narrative suggested by negative space.” Despite its short stature – weighing in at a mere 1,142 words – it is uni