With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies.Father Brown, one of the most quirkily genial and lovable characters to emerge from English detective fiction, first made his appearance in The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911. That first collection of stories established G.K. Chesterton's kindly cleric in the front rank of eccentric sleuths.This complete collection contains all the favourite Father Brown stories, showing a quiet wit and compassion that has ende...

Selected and with an Introduction by David Stuart Davies.This gripping set of tales by the master storyteller Arthur Conan Doyle is bound to thrill and unnerve you. In these twilight excursions, Doyle's vivid imagination for the strange, the grotesque and the frightening is given full rein.We move from the mysteries of Egypt and the strange powers granted by The Ring of Thoth to the isolated ghostlands of the Arctic in The Captain of the Polest...

With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies.'I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with horror which at all times assails me yet'.With its strange, imaginative blend of horror, science fiction, romance and lyrical prose, Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow is a classic masterpiece of weird fiction. This series of vaguely connected stories is linked by the presence of a monstrous and suppressed book which brings fright, madne...

**“An extraordinary recovery of a lost world.”—Peter Brown, author of The World of Late AntiquityFrom the world-leading expert on the Maya, a monumental history of a flourishing civilization across three millennia**The Four Heavens brings to life the cultural and visual splendor of the ancient Maya, drawing on the oldest indigenous texts of the Americas and the latest archaeological discoveries to present an entirely new history of this spectacular civiliz...

M.R. James is probably the finest ghost-story writer England has ever produced. These tales are not only classics of their genre, but are also superb examples of beautifully-paced understatement, convincing background and chilling terror.As well as the preface, there is a fascinating tail-piece by M.R. James, ‘Stories I Have Tried To Write’, which accompanies these thirty tales. Among them are ‘Casting the Runes’, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll come to you, My Lad’, ‘The Tractate Middoth’, ...

With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies.Oliver Onions is unique in the realms of ghost story writers in that his tales are so far ranging in their background and substance that they are not easily categorised. His stories are powerfully charged explorations of psychical violence, their effects heightened by detailed character studies graced with a powerful poetic elegance. In simple terms Oliver Onions goes for the cerebral rather than the jugular. However, mak...

Introduced by Mark Valentine.The greatest French detective in his most fiendish case. Even if Hercule Poirot had been born a Frenchman, not a Belgian, he would have to take second place in detection to Joseph Rouletabille, the brilliant young sleuth created by Gaston Leroux.Here, in his first and most baffling case, the eighteen year old reporter astounds readers with his audacity and ingenuity. Who could have tried to murder Mademoiselle Stangerson, beauti...

Selected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury.Late in the eighteenth century authors began to write ‘Gothic’ stories as a way of putting literature back in touch with the irrational, the supernatural and the bizarre, which had been neglected in the ‘Age of Reason’.This superb new collection brings together stories from the earliest decades of Gothic writing with later 19th and early 20th century tales fr...

'Nothing is so improbable as what is true'Of all the writers of ghost and horror stories, Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most colourful. He was a dark, cynical and pessimistic soul who had a grim vision of fate and the unfairness of life, which he channelled into his fiction. And in his death, or rather his disappearance, he created a mystery as strange and unresolved as any that he penned himself. But more of that later.Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in a log cabin on 21st...

‘And behind him, like a misshapen black frog, bounded the Thing, its redtongue lolling out of its gash of a mouth, its diminutive blubbery lipsdrawn back in a murderous snarl…’Let Henry S. Whitehead take you into the mysterious and macabre world ofvoodoo where beasts invade the mind of man and where lives of theliving are racked by the spirits of the dead. In this collection of rareand out of print stories you will encounter the curses of the...

Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are holidaying on the English coast when they discover a corpse on the beach… which then disappears. They can get little help from the nearby village, populated by strange and unfriendly characters. Then the corpse suddenly reappears in their cottage and they are attacked by persons unknown. Watson comes to, and discovers that months have passed, and Holmes is not the man he remembers. What has happened to his friend? Does it have something to do with a de...

Vampires, those dark children of the night, who rise from their coffins to suck the blood of the living, continue to hold a strange fascination and dread. In this unique collection of vampire stories you will find some of the earliest depictions of these fearful creatures as in John Polidori's 'The Vampyre' and James Malcolm Rymer's 'Varney, the Vampyre', a tale which held readers in thrall when it was first published in the mid-nineteenth century.As well as these rare stories and ...