Despite the exceedingly stringent societal expectations of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras, the fantastical, perverse, and altogether freakish found their place-often, upon a page. The terror genre intertwined readers’ most unconventional curiosities, in spite of, or rather, to spite, the constraints of the time. Writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edgar Allan Poe reanimated the grief and injustice in their own lives, while those like Bram Stoker and W. W. Jacobs resurrected folklore’s most formidable monsters.
Though the sixteen stories featured in this anthology are fictional, their themes of duality, oppression, instability-and, indeed, terror-are demonstrably true.
Originally published over a hundred years ago, the sixteen stories in this anthology represent some of the great classics of ghost and terror fiction. You’ll find works by M. E. Braddon, Amelia Edwards, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. W. Jacobs, M. R. James, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells. These British and American tales span eight decades of literary history, and they present a terrifying collection of ghosts, monsters, and monstrous men.