Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites

There was no sleep for him that night; he fancied he had seen the stone - which, as you know, was a couple of fields away - as large as life, as if it were on watch outside his window.

The standing stones, stone circles, dolmens and burial sites of the British Isles still resonate with mystery of their primeval origins, enthralling our collective consciousness to this day. Rising up in the field of weird fiction, ancient stones and the rituals and dark forces they once witnessed have inspired a wicked branch of the genre by writers devoted to their eerie potential.

Gathered in tribute to these relics of a lost age - and their pagan legacy of blood - are fifteen stories of haunted henges, Druidic vengeance and solid rock alive with bloodlust, by authors including Algernon Blackwood, Lisa Tuttle, Arthur Machen and Nigel Kneale.

Katy Soar is a Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology at the University of Winchester. Her research interests are Greek archaeology, the resonance of archaeology in culture and the history and reception of archaeology itself. She is a frequent contributor to Hellebore magazine, and co-edited the anthology Strange Relics, published by Handheld Press in 2022.