This volume presents the weird fiction of the British writer Thomas Burke (1886–1945), author of the scintillating horror collection Night-Pieces (1935). But Burke—celebrated for his evocative tales of London’s Chinatown, gathered in Limehouse Nights and other volumes—wrote other weird tales, scattered through his many other collections. One of the most distinctive is “Johnson Looked Back,” a tour de force of second-person narration. This volume constitutes the first occasion when Burke’s complete supernatural writing has been gathered in a single volume.
Table of Contents
Introduction, by S. T. Joshi
The Bird
The Tablets of the House of Li
The Bloomsbury Wonder
The Hands of Mr Ottermole
Desirable Villa
The Secret of Francesco Shedd
The Yellow Imps
Miracle in Suburbia
Yesterday Street
Funspot
Uncle Ezekiel’s Long Sight
The Horrible God
Father and Son
Johnson Looked Back
Two Gentlemen
The Black Courtyard
The Gracious Ghosts
Jack Wapping
One Hundred Pounds
The Man Who Lost His Head
Murder under the Crooked Spire
The Lonely Inn
The Watcher
Events at Wayless-Wagtail
The Hollow Man
The Golden Gong
Bibliography
The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, supernatural horror has been a slender but provocative contribution to Western literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the “titans” of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.
This product was added to our catalog on Friday 04 May, 2018.
