Out of the Past: Tales of Haunting History

＂Come inside, my bonny witch-finder. Here is shelter for thee...＂

A tale of callous murder and deranged revenge rings out from fifteenth century Italy. A witch-finder’s great triumph is also the herald of his own doom in sixteenth-century Britain. A prisoner’s fate at the hands of the Inquisition in seventeenth-century Mexico leads to an encounter with the bestial and bizarre beneath the waves.

Readers and writers have been fascinated with the past long before the term ’historical fiction’ became recognized as its own genre of writing. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tellers of strange tales saw the weird potential in setting stories within the realms of previous centuries, and the chance to evoke terrors throughout time.

Summoning eleven stories chosen for their uncanny portrayals of weird history, this collection presents a dark timeline of grim visions harking from plague-racked England to revolutionary France and culminating in the last gasps of the nineteenth century.

Including stories by the greatest writers of history-turned-horrifying such as Marjorie Bowen, Frederick Cowles, Vernon Lee and the lost genius Vincent O’Sullivan, this volume is capped by two of Aaron Worth’s own tales of Victorian macabre alongside a chiller evoking M. R. James by the adapter of his stories for radio, Sheila Hodgson.

Aaron Worth is professor of Rhetoric at Boston University. He introduced and edited the Tales of the Weird anthologies Randalls Round and The Night Wire, and was the author of Imperial Media, a study of how advances in media and technology shaped the British literary imagination in the late nineteenth century.