Weird Fiction

Welcome to the casebook of Dr John Silence, Physician Extraordinary. After a long and severe training – five years he was gone from the face of the earth, travelling who knows where – Silence returned to England as the greatest occult detective of the age. When he takes up an investigation, when he comes to the aid of some poor, frightened soul, you can be sure it will lead to the most strange and terrifying of circumstances: from pagan magic in remote France to battles with ancient Egyptian fire spirits, and from geometry defying alternate dimensions to the most macabre of haunted houses.

Some of the first works written by Algernon Blackwood – one of the twentieth century’s greatest ghost story writers – these John Silence tales are a visionary blend of horror, fantasy and science fiction, and remain today as some of pinnacle achievements of Weird Fiction.

Woken from sleep by an urgent request to attend to a new patient, Dr. John Vanaman is soon at the home of Jesse J. Robinson, a wealthy industrialist, struck gravely ill after a struggle with a burglar. The thief was after Robinson’s most prized possession, an item he obsessively guards: a mysterious green box, etched with a single line from an unknown language. Soon, Vanaman and Robinson's courageous neice, Leilah, are drawn into an odyssey, a voyage toward the box’s ancient, terrifying origin…

The greatest novel by one of the pioneering female voices in horror writing, Gertrude Barrows Bennett’s Claimed! is a masterful intertwining fantasy, philosophy, and terror.

A manuscript is found. Filled with small, precise writing and smelling of pit-water, it tells the story of an old recluse and his strange home – and it’s even stranger, jade-green double, seen by that old man on an otherworldly plain where gigantic gods and monsters roam. Soon his earthly abode is no less terrible than this strange vision, as swine-like creatures boil from a cavern beneath the ground and besiege it. But a still greater horror will face the recluse, one more awful than any creature that can be fought or killed.

The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson’s great masterpiece of cosmic fear, is an extraordinary novel that defied all accepted conventions of horror writing, forging in an instant a new, weird direction for the form.

Shot through with an unutterable sense of mystery, paranoia and dread, the King in Yellow is a linked collection of tales that swirl around a single motif: a terrible book that prompts an obsessive madness in all who look upon its pages. From a dystopian New York to the streets of Paris, these narratives offer glimpses and hints of impossible, terrifying revelations. Who is the King Yellow? What is the Yellow Sign? And where might be that ancient and famous city, Carcosa?

Combining expectation-defying horror with decadent description, The King in Yellow has proven to be one of the most durable and brilliant collections of Weird Fiction ever written, inspiring countless authors, from the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft to the fantasy world of George R.R. Martin.

‘A classic . . . a fantastic collection of short stories’ Guardian

Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, something happened, something... weird. In the dark halls of ivy-clad manors, in the ancient woodland escapes of New England, a generation of authors were inspired to radically reinterpret the horror and fantasy writing of the past. From the terrible plagues of Edgar Allan Poe to the religious terror of May Sinclair and on to the awful, tentacle-faced mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, this anthology celebrates the very best of this writing, a collection of brilliant tales that for generations have delighted and horrified.