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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

Peter Yearsley, who beautifully narrated Nesbit’s 1893 collection, Grim Tales for LibriVox, described the book’s contents in the following manner: “A collection of gentle stories that draw us into that hidden world where fear is just around the next corner, and where loving hands can touch across the boundaries of death.” None of those tales better matches his lovely description than “Uncle Abraham’s Romance.” This ghost story is the sort that one might most enjoy reading on

Heavily Puritan East Anglia was the hot bed of England’s witch trials, peaking in the mid-1640s with the three year reign of terror of Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed “Witchfinder General” – a travelling fraud who made rounds throughout the region, acting as a paranormal detective and interrogator, using light torture methods, mainly sleep deprivation, pricking, and water dunking, to get confessions (although the more sensational use of the rack, breast-rippers, and red-

Last November I received a delightful and thought-provoking email from a reader (thanks again for writing, Paul!) who had a question...

None of Le Fanu’s stories compare in influence, popularity, or acclaim to his chef d’oeuvre, “Carmilla.” I say chef d’oeuvre, though I...

One of the most recurring themes in M. R. James is the idea that the comforts of the present were afforded by the horrors of the past. Fey, fusty, middle-class men of leisure are able to pour their time into their pet hobbies because their ancestors waged war with the powers of political corruption and spiritual evil. In a sense, the road to their lives of ease and petty passions was paved with the broken bones and spilled blood of millions of their hardscrabble forefathers.

Dear Friends, As many of you know, 2023 has been the ten-year anniversary of Oldstyle Tales Press, a project I started planning in grad...

We are continuing to celebrate Oldstyle Tales’ 10th anniversary during the month of November by highlighting neglected Victorian supernatural tales from our very first publication, The Best Victorian Ghost Stories, which was first released on Halloween, 2013. And we have news! Due to the warm response which you've given this series, we will be releasing an expanded, ten-year anniversary, third edition of this anthology, complete with updated commentary and four new ghost stor

We are continuing to celebrate Oldstyle Tales’ 10th anniversary during the month of November by highlighting rarely commented upon tales from our very first publication, The Best Victorian Ghost Stories, which was first released on Halloween, 2013. This week’s episode is Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s relentless, feminist revenge fantasy, “The Cold Embrace…” The typical ghost story in Victorian Britain followed this formula: a misdeed is done, often secretly, and the truth is not e

When I’ve agreed to take on a new book to review, I often remark how the novel or collection in question must have been written by a...

In honor of Oldstyle Tales’ 10th anniversary, for the month of November we will be highlighting rarely commented upon tales from our very first publication, The Best Victorian Ghost Stories, which was first released on Halloween, 2013. As this was our first book, the commentary on these stories was much shorter and less detailed (I was still trying to find my voice and wasn’t quite sure how “much” was too much or not enough), but I hope that I was still successful in fleshing

In this third and final entry in our Over the Garden Wall trilogy, we’ll be taking a deep look into the holiday which the series is built around. As such – fair warning – it is also my long overdue love letter to Hallowe'en. To begin with, let’s acknowledge that there is absolutely no intrinsic reason why this story had to take place on Hallowe’en – it was a deeply intentional choice on McHale’s part, and should be considered deeply important. Other times of year could be j

Our previous post – the first in this series – took an expansive look at Over the Garden Wall’s visual, musical, and literary influences,...

Although Oldstyle Tales primarily focuses on the elegant horrors found in classic literature, today we'll be grafting a 21st century...

Throughout his oeuvre, Jacobs frequently produced stories about people who are drawn towards ethically dubious decisions, irrevocably side against their better judgment, and are left stranded in a harsh and hostile dimension of karmic punishment. A genuinely grave tale, “The Three Sisters” follows the tradition of “Jerry Bundler” and “The Toll-House” by juxtaposing feigned hauntings with horrific outcomes. The story follows a favorite theme of Jacobs: aspirational avarice and

One of Lovecraft’s perennial – and most famous – sources of horror was the sea. Like so many of his predecessors and influences, he viewed it as both an alien realm of misanthropic threats, and a handy symbol for the vile muck of the human unconscious. He is specifically indebted to Edgar Allan Poe and William Hope Hodgson for the following story – one which is arguably his first great story. Poe defined the nautical horror story in two tales (“MS. Found in a Bottle” and “Int

“A School Story” ranks among James’ vaguely-defined puzzlers, and – like so many of his puzzlers, including “Two Doctors” and “An Evening’s Entertainment” – it has had mixed reception. Every now and then, especially as he grew older, James seemed to delight in writing an inscrutable tale that may have laid out all of its cards, or may be holding some back: perhaps we knew all we needed to know, or perhaps the story was hiding a few clues as to its true meaning. These stories

Cryptic, opaque, and disturbing, the first salvo in Irving’s “Stories by a Nervous Gentleman” is also, sadly, one of his most underappreciated and maligned masterpieces. The story is regularly derided for its seemingly anticlimactic ending and has been called everything from a waggish Gothic farce to an artless literary miscarriage. The first time I read “Tales of a Traveller,” however, none of the stories left me as chilled as the first – it seemed pregnant with hidden meani