Holy GhostsClassic Tales of the Ecclesiastical Uncanny
“I confess I have a particular dislike to remain in a church after dusk; it recalls to my mind the most painful story I ever heard.”
A festering evil lurks in the grotesque carvings of a cathedral’s hallowed inner sanctum; sheltering in an Alpine chapel, a young libertine confronts his eerie monastic doppelgänger; locked in a Spanish cathedral, a honeymooning couple bears witness to a fatal procession.
Churches and other sacred sites have inspired writers of the weird and uncanny for centuries as spaces in which death and the afterlife are within touching distance – where ghosts, demons and possessed effigies remain to haunt the living. Through eleven stories published between 1851 and 1935, this new anthology revives a throng of undying spirits from a host of unsung and classic authors including Elizabeth Gaskell, M. R. James, John Wyndham, and Edith Wharton.
Fiona Snailham
Dr Fiona Snailham is a full-time Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Greenwich.
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-two books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
