Beasts with Five FingersStrange Tales of Disembodied Hands
He looked up at the picture rail, and there was the hand holding on to a hook with three fingers, and slowly scratching the head of the parrot with the fourth.
In 1919, W. F. Harvey published ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’, his quintessential tale of the disembodied hand with a murderous mind of its own, and its position as one of weird fiction’s true classics was cemented by the 1946 film adaptation. Seeking to trace the origins of the haunted hand story back into the nineteenth century, and to showcase its influence on writers of weird fiction from the 1920s to the modern day, horror expert Brian J. Showers presents a new collection of classics from the well-thumbed oeuvres of Sheridan Le Fanu and Guy de Maupassant through to miniature masterpieces from the hands of Jean Ray, Mark Valentine and many more.
Featuring ghostly hands, hands possessed by demons and unexplained hands where no hands should be, prepare to enter a world of nightmares run amok as the vice-grip of terror takes hold.
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Brian J. Showers
Brian J. Showers is originally from Madison, Wisconsin. He has lived in Dublin since 2001. Brian's first book, Literary Walking Tours of Gothic Dublin was published in 2006. He has written short stories, articles, interviews and reviews for many magazines including All Hallows, Supernatural Tales, Trailer Park of Terror, Dead Reckonings, Whispers & Shouts, Ghosts & Scholars, Le Fanu Studies, Machenalia and Rue Morgue.
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-three 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.
