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The very best of Le Fanu’s supernatural fiction, including such classics as: ‘Schalken the Painter’, ‘Squire Toby's Will’, ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’, ‘The Familiar’, ‘Green Tea’, ‘Madam Crowl’s Ghost’ and ‘The Murdered Cousin’, introduced by genre expert Michael Cox.‘Sheridan Le Fanu,’ wrote S.M. Ellis in 1916, ‘retains his own special place and fame as the Master of Horror and the Mysterious.’Today, Le Fanu’s reputation is as high as ever amongst connoisseurs of supernatural and mystery fiction and well deserves the enthusiastic praise lavished on him by some of the most accomplished ghost fiction writers of the twentieth century – including E.F. Benson and M.R. James.Born in 1814, the son of an Anglo-Irish Protestant clergyman, Le Fanu single-handedly created a new kind of fictional ghost story. Gone are the sheeted spooks rattling rusty chains and the peripatetic headless ladies that infest Gothic fiction. In their place Le Fanu created formidably real supernatural presences that emerge from within, as well as invade from without.Le Fanu was the first writer to explore seriously the psychological dimensions of the ghost story; at the same time he was adept at invoking the physical presence of supernatural malevolence. The world in which his characters move is a hostile one, his stories surrounded by an infinity of outer darkness. Private anguish undoubtedly underlies these public fictions.And yet Le Fanu’s stories – be they of ghosts or tales of mystery – are also of the good old-fashioned type, best enjoyed in the sort of setting he himself described – ‘the old-fashioned parlour fire-side and its listening circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of leafless boughs . . .’

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From the Queen of Crime, the first time all of her spookiest and most macabre stories have been collected in one volume.‘From behind the curtains there still sounded the terrible high long-drawn scream – such a scream as Raoul had never heard. It died away with a horrible kind of gurgle. Then there came the thud of a body falling…’For lovers of the supernatural and the macabre comes this collection of ghostly and chilling tales from Agatha Christie. Acknowledged the world over as the undisputed Queen of Crime, in fact she dabbled in her early writing career with mysteries of a more unearthly kind – stories featuring fantastic psychic visions, spectres looming in the shadows, encounters with deities, eerie messages from the Other Side, even a man who switches bodies with a cat…This haunting compendium gathers together all of Christie’s spookiest and most macabre short stories, some featuring her timeless detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Finally together in one volume, it shines a light on the darker side of Agatha Christie, one that she herself relished, identifying ten of them as ‘my own favourite stories written soon after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, some before that’.• Contains 20 stories: The Last Séance • In a Glass Darkly • The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb • SOS • The Fourth Man • The Idol House of Astarte • The Gipsy • Philomel Cottage • The Dream • The Lamp • Wireless • The Mystery of the Blue Jar • The Blue Geranium • The Wife of the Kenite • The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael • The Call of Wings • The Red Signal • The Flock of Geryon • The Dressmaker’s Doll • The Hound of Death‘Reading a perfectly plotted Agatha Christie is like crunching into a perfect apple: pure, crisp, absolute satisfaction.’ TANA FRENCH

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