Eyes of Terror and Other Dark Adventures

Introduction by Janis Dawson. Cover image by Brian Coldrick.

“I was in the dark and alone, yet not alone.”

Despite her wide contributions to genre literature, Irish author L. T. Meade is now remembered, if at all, for her girls’ school stories. However, in 1898 the Strand Magazine, famous for its fictions of crime, detection, and the uncanny, proclaimed Meade one of its most popular writers for her contributions to its signature fare. Her stories, widely published in popular fin de siècle magazines, included classic tales of the supernatural, but her specialty was medical or scientific mysteries featuring doctors, scientists, occult detectives, criminal women with weird powers, unusual medical interventions, fantastic scientific devices, murder, mesmerism, and manifestations of insanity. Eyes of Terror and Other Dark Adventures is the first collection to showcase the best of her pioneering strange fiction.

Contents:

"Introduction" by Janis Dawson
"Very Far West"
"The Panelled Bedroom"
"The Mystery of the Felwyn Tunnel"
"The Dead Hand"
"The Doom"
"The Woman with the Hood"
"Followed"
"The Man Who Disappeared"
"Eyes of Terror"
"How I Write My Books"
"Sources"
"Acknowledgements"

L. T. Meade (1844-1914) was born in Bandon, Co. Cork and started writing at an early age before establishing herself as one of the most prolific and bestselling authors of the day. In addition to her popular girls’ fiction, she also penned mystery stories, sensational fiction, romances, historical fiction, and adventure novels. Her notable works include A Master of Mysteries (1898), The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1899), and The Sorceress of the Strand (1903). She died in Oxford on 26 October 1914.

Janis Dawson received her doctorate in English literature from the University of Victoria (Canada). She has published articles on L. T. Meade, nineteenth-century women writers, Victorian girls’ books and magazines, and children’s literature. Her recent work includes a study of Irish girls in Meade’s school fiction. She is the editor of a critical edition of Meade’s popular crime series The Sorceress of the Strand published by Broadview Press (2016).