The Skeleton Key (1919) was the first detective novel published by Collins, ushering in the Golden Age, the Crime Club, and 100 years of remarkable crime fiction that would follow. A body is discovered after a shooting party in the grounds of a country house in Hampshire. The police are called in, and a clever young detective, Sergeant Ridgway, begins to unravel a much more complicated and brutal case of murder than was first suspected. But has he met his match with Le Sage, a chess-playing Baron, who is convinced that the answers lie not in Hampshire but in Paris? After 20 years of writing in various genres, The Skeleton Key was Bernard Capes' crowning achievement, as he died shortly after completing the book. Introduced by Hugh Lamb, whose anthology The Black Reaper resurrected Capes' reputation as one of the best horror writers of his generation, the book also includes its original tribute to Capes by G. K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown mysteries.

For the first time in one volume, the best stories of one of America's most popular classic authors of the supernatural. Robert William Chambers' The King in Yellow (1895) has long been recognised as a landmark work in the field of the macabre, and has been described as the most important work of American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns. Despite the book's success, its author was to return only rarely to the genre during the remainder of a writing career which spanned four decades. When Chambers did return to the supernatural, however, he displayed all the imagination and skill which distinguished The King in Yellow. He created the enigmatic and seemingly omniscient Westrel Keen, the 'Tracer of Lost Persons', and chronicled the strange adventures of an eminent naturalist who scours the earth for 'extinct' animals - and usually finds them. One of his greatest creations, perhaps, was 1920's The Slayer of Souls, which features a monstrous conspiracy to take over the world: a conspiracy which can only be stopped by supernatural forces. For the first time in a single volume, Hugh Lamb has selected the best of the author's supernatural tales, together with an introduction which provides further information about the author who was, in his heyday, called 'the most popular writer in America'.

A collection of rare horror stories that will thrill fans of classic writers such as M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and E. F. Benson. Jerome K. Jerome's reputation as a humorist, renowned for his comic novel Three Men in a Boat, has thrown into undeserved obscurity his fine efforts in the ghost story genre. Three Men in the Dark collects Jerome's major horror stories, together with a selection from two of his friends with whom he founded the magazines The Idler and Today - the journalist Robert Barr and the humorist Barry Pain. Like Jerome, their stories of terror and the supernatural have been overlooked for many years. Edited and introduced by veteran anthologist Hugh Lamb, this new edition includes as an extra bonus the long-lost novelette, 'The Mystery of Black Rock Creek'. Written in five parts by Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain, Eden Phillpotts, E. F. Benson and Bram Stoker's brother-in-law Frank Frankfort Moore, it rounds off one of the most unusual and entertaining anthologies of the macabre of recent years.

A collection of rare horror stories that will thrill fans of classic writers such as M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and E. F. Benson. Bernard Capes was celebrated as one of the most prolific authors of the late Victorian period, producing dozens of short stories, articles, and more than forty novels across multiple genres, culminating in the first original crime novel published by Collins, The Skeleton Key. His greatest acclaim, however, came from penning some of the most terrifying ghost stories of the era. Yet following his death in 1918 his work all but slipped into oblivion until the 1980s, when veteran anthologist Hugh Lamb first collected Capes's tales of terror as The Black Reaper. Every story bears the stamp of Capes's fertile and deeply pessimistic imagination, from werewolf priests and haunted typewriters to marble hands that come to life and plague-stricken villagers haunted by a scythe-wielding ghost. Now expanded with eleven further stories, a revised introduction and a new foreword by Capes's grandson, Ian Burns, this classic collection will thrill horror fans and restore Capes's reputation as one of the best writers in the horror genre.

A collection of rare ghosts and horror stories by the brothers of one of the finest writers of the genre, E. F. Benson. The Benson brothers - Arthur Christopher, Edward Frederic and Robert Hugh - were one of the most extraordinary and prolific literary families, between them writing more than 150 books. Arthur alone left four million words of diary, although his most lasting legacy is the words to Elgar's Land of Hope and Glory, while Fred is acknowledged as one of the finest writers of Edwardian supernatural fiction: the name E. F. Benson is mentioned in the same breath as other greats such as M. R. James and H. R. Wakefield. In fact, all three brothers wrote ghost stories, although the work of Arthur and Hugh in this field has long been overshadowed by their brother's success. Now the best supernatural tales of A. C. and R. H. Benson have been gathered into one volume by anthologist Hugh Lamb, whose introduction examines the lives and writings of these two complex and fascinating men. Originally published between 1903 and 1927, the stories include A. C. Benson's masterful 'Basil Netherby' and 'The Uttermost Farthing', and an intriguing article by R. H. Benson about real-life haunted houses.

A collection of sci-fi horror stories from Howard Jones, Kurt Newton, and others.