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Back There in the Grass: The Horror Tales of Irvin S. Cobb and Gouverneur Morris

$20.00

The Classics of Gothic Horror Series
Edited by S. T. Joshi
287 pp
Paperback: ISBN 9781614982920
Cover art by Aeron Alfrey
Cover design by Daniel V. Sauer

“Cobb’s sensitive portrayal of the people and landscape of his native state, and Morris’s intense focus on the emotions of people enmeshed in tormenting circumstances, both work well in their weird work, and it is no accident that it is that work that largely causes them to be remembered today.”—From S. T. Joshi’s Introduction

This volume contains the weird stories of two leading American short story writers of the early 20th century, Irvin S. Cobb (1876–1944) and Gouverneur Morris (1876–1953). Both are known for a single weird tale, “Fishhead” and “Back There in the Grass,” respectively; but both produced several additional weird specimens in their variegated short story collections, ranging from grim tales of psychological suspense (“The Gallowsmith”) to tales of Nietzschean supermen (“The Bride’s Dead”). This volume constitutes the first time that their weird work has been collected.

Table of Contents

Introduction, by S. T. Joshi

Irvin S. Cobb
The Belled Buzzard
Fishhead
The Gallowsmith
Darkness
Snake Doctor
The Second Coming of a First Husband
The Unbroken Chain
Faith, Hope and Charity

Gouverneur Morris
The Crocodile
The Footprint
The Execution
The Bride’s Dead
Back There in the Grass
Derrick’s Return

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.