Haunters at the Hearth: Eerie Tales for Christmas Nights
“But something odd does happen here at Christmas time. When I first heard the story, I thought it was an old wives’ tale, but—well, these old houses—you hear strange things—” He lifted his shoulders and stared into the fire…
From the troves of the British Library collections comes a new volume for Christmas nights—when the boundary between the mundane and the unearthly is ever so thin—ushering in a new throng of revenants, demons, spectres and shades drawn to the glow of the hearth.
Included within are eighteen classic stories ranging from 1864 to 1974, with vintage Victorian chillers nestled alongside unsettling modern pieces from L. P. Hartley and Mildred Clingerman; lost tales from rare anthologies and periodicals; weird episodes from unexpected authors such as Winston Graham and D. H. Lawrence; stories simmering with a twisted humour from Elizabeth Bowen and Celia Fremlin and many more haunting seasonal treats.
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Tanya Kirk
Tanya Kirk is the Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900 at the British Library and is currently the leading expert on 300 years of the Library’s printed collections. She has curated five major exhibitions on topics including Gothic fiction, Shakespeare in performance, the British landscape in literature and most recently Harry Potter: A History of Magic. She has edited two themed collections of ghost stories, The Haunted Library (2016) and Spirits of the Season (2018).
British Library Tales of the Weird
The British Library Tales of the Weird series revives and unearths classic strange fiction from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the form of novels, single-author collections and thematic anthologies, complete with new introductions and fascinating notes by expert editors.
British Library Tales of the Weird consists of seventy-one books and series is set to expand with the upcoming release of one more book. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
