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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

The modern concept of a vampire is only about two centuries old and some change. Aristocratic, posh, and stylish, we picture a vampire as a vision of seductive, masculine power bent over a sleeping woman, and greedily drinking blood from her ivory neck. During Hoffmann’s prime the vampire was considered more of a ghoul or cannibal: eating the flesh of the recently dead. What’s more, it was hardly well-dressed or suave, but wild and zombie-like: a stinking, fetid corpse with s

One of Hodgson’s most gruesome and revolting stories, “The Derelict” is a fascinating blend of science fiction, sea adventure, and grisly mystery—a tale that would have made H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells proud. All three regularly wrote speculative fiction inspired by the rapidly expanding body of scientific knowledge available at the turn of the twentieth century, preferring, at times, to derive their horrors from hypothetical discoveries rather than t

Master Humphrey’s Clock began as a periodical in 1840 and ran for twenty months, at which time its stories were collated into the novel of the same name. It featured the eponymous story-teller – a friend of Squire Pickwick’s – who shares his penchant for good tales, heartbreaking and hilarious, inspiring and infuriating alike. A kindly eccentric, he keeps his collection of yarns stored in the inside of an antique grandfather clock, and reads them to his raptured audience of l

“The Mask” begins with one of the most substantial artifacts that we have from The King in Yellow, a scene commonly referred to as “the unmasking.” This episode seems to have been largely influenced by the Edgar Allan Poe horror tale, “The Masque of the Red Death.” In this story, the aristocrats of a country plagued by the “red death” (a ghoulish amalgamation of the black plague, tuberculosis, cholera, and scarlet fever) lock themselves up in the prince’s castle numbed to the

Mood was Blackwood’s primary medium. He was a master of the slow-developing atmosphere which blooms in front of us like a black and white photo negative gradually warming to sepia, then glowing in glorious color. His writing – the best of it, at any rate – does not rely on horror. Rather, it finds its stride in building terror and psychological unease in the readers’ minds. Mood pervades his masterpieces, and while he augments them with touches of the macabre, his greatest st

Like his earlier short-story scrapbooks The Ways of Ghosts and Some Haunted Houses, the following anthology series is written in a particularly reporterly style which lends it to being taken as non-fiction. In fact, while the other two anthologies have only occasionally been mistaken as genuine reports on local supernatural accounts, Mysterious Disappearances has been so effective at creating the atmosphere of journalism that it has been extensively reprinted in many books on

One of M. R. James’ most beloved areas of research was in Scandinavian history and folklore. In “Count Magnus,” he underscores the fact...

Commonly rated among the top ten of James’ stories by his admirers, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” stands out as having many of the great tropes of what has come to be called a “Jamesian” tale: it follows a starchy English academic on an ill-fated holiday to a remote, backwards town (far from the Hobbit-esque comforts and required civility of Cambridge) where he is hopelessly drawn in by the allure of a sinister antique which brings with it a spectral guardian – eager to make h

NOTE: Each October I write a ghost story or weird tale for Hallowe'en and post it here. The following piece is 2022's "Ghost Story for...

I seem to keep running into delightful firsts this year when it comes to my reviews. Today’s first – just in time for Hallowe’en – is an...

“We had all begun to accept that things may never go back to normal. Civilization as we knew it was in the midst of a great turning. We...

Ebenezer Scrooge said it best when he begged the preceding question of Marley’s Ghost in A Christmas Carol. What, he wanted to know,...

A very warm hello to you, dear reader! In this post I'll be breaking the fourth wall a bit to chat with you about two exciting updates...

For M. R. James, who began his career as a writer of ghost stories by reading them to his friends at Christmas parties, his last great ghost story was written, fittingly, to be publicly read in front of a specific audience. It is a campfire legend, composed for a troop of Eton Boy Scouts who were camped on the rolling downs near Worbarrow Bay in Dorset, and was read to them on the evening of July 27th, 1927. In a letter he described the pitch which he was offered: "Tomorrow i

Over the past year I have been stunned by the consistent strength of the books authors have sent me to review: the last six or so books...

In a previous blog post, we specifically catalogued William Hope Hodgson’s best nautical horror stories – tales of haunted ships, sea monsters, ghost pirates, parasitic fungi, and were-sharks. In this post, we will focus on the very best of his famous occult detective: Carnacki the Ghost-finder. Throughout his career Hodgson had a taste for mystery. His very first story – “The Goddess of Death” – was not unlike “The Hound of the Baskervilles”: something of an Arthur Conan Doy

Repressed by Stevenson at his wife’s insistence, “The Waif Woman” – published posthumously (and only after Mrs. Stevenson’s death) is an adaptation of a ghost story told in chapters 50-55 of the Icelandic Erybyggja Saga. The story certainly is scandalous, even by Stevenson’s standards, and presents perhaps his most brutal indictment of material greed yet. The setting is Iceland at the turn of the first Millennium, circa 999 C.E., the date when Christianity was formally adopte

Like its thematic predecessor, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “A Descent into the Maelström” delves into themes of natural sublimity, seagoing adventure, philosophical horror, and irrational curiosity. Where “MS.” built its philosophy on a folkloric foundation of Flying Dutchman legends and hollow-earth theories, this tale is centered on the maritime legends of the Norway Maelström. Although the actual whirlpool is barely powerful enough to sink a yacht, Poe is more interested in p

To the majority of his readership – especially those in the United Kingdom – M. R. James will forever be inextricably linked to the...

As a devotee of Arthur Machen, Oliver Onions, Robert W. Chambers, Algernon Blackwood, and their ilk, I must confess to have a soft spot...

One of Machen’s most anthologized stories – and certainly his most gruesome – “The Novel of the White Powder” is an excerpt from The Three Imposters – a novel written in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson, but with the pure, burning mysticism that only Arthur Machen could bring to the slums, parks, and townhouses of fin de siècle London. The novel concerns three suspicious strangers – a woman and two men – who accost a pair of bohemian dandies, ostensibly in search of a nerv