The Strange Stories of John Buchan
To mark the 150th anniversary of Scottish author John Buchan’s birth, strange fiction expert James Machin presents a new selection of the writer’s best uncanny fiction, including stories from The Runagates Club. Though best known today as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, this new volume aims to foreground his contribution to the early weird tale, including some of his most classic stories alongside a number rescued from rare periodicals of the early twentieth century.
James Machin
James Machin is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, and an Associate Tutor at the Royal College of Art, where he teaches on the Critical and Historical Studies programme. He also teaches the MA and BA Victorian Literature units at the University of Bedfordshire. He is the author of Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. James is co-editor of Faunus, the Arthur Machen journal, and has recently co-edited Of Mud and Flame (Strange Attractor/MIT, 2019), a critical anthology of writing on cult 1970s television drama Penda’s Fen. Other recent publications include two essays in the Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic (2020). He also writes short fiction, with stories published most recently in The Shadow Booth, Weirdbook, and Supernatural Tales. A long-standing fan of Conan Doyle’s supernatural and detective fiction, James developed a keen interest in his medical fiction when working on a short postdoctoral research project for the Wellcome Trust in 2017, and is delighted to now be working on this new edition of The Stark Munro Letters for Edinburgh UP.
British Library Hardback Classics: Gilded Nightmares
Discover Gilded Nightmares, a hardback collection devoted to gothic and unsettling fiction. These British Library editions explore dark imagination and eerie storytelling through striking design. Created for readers who enjoy classic tales with a darker edge.
British Library Hardback Classics: Gilded Nightmares consists of 18 total books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.

