Bunyips, boundary riders and bush-lurkers: just some of the horrors that populate these tales of the Antipodean uncanny.

The Australian weird tradition may be a short one, but it’s as varied and rich as anything you’ll find in the Old World. Many of these tales – from the likes of Marcus Clarke, Sophie Osmond, Ernest Favenc and Mary Fortune – are written by strangers in a new land. Traditional European elements of the weird tale appear in new forms or are moulded afresh to a harsh new environment – the haunted house is no longer a rambling manor, but an abandoned shanty or rundown homestead; the ancient wood, the lair of evils and creatures from folklore, becomes the oppressively hot, fly-infested bush; and the windswept moor is the empty, endless Australian outback with its blood-read sands and emaciated myall trees. The anthology also includes Aboriginal voices, providing a very different take on the landscape and its horrors.

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Expected release
October 2026 (British Library Publishing)
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Additional book details

Author

James Doig

James Doig grew up in Fremantle, Western Australia. He was educated at the University of Western Australia, and the University of Wales, Swansea, where he completed a PhD in medieval history. He has long been a devotee of horror fiction, and subscribes to the T.E.D. Klein view that interest in such things begins in the crib. He has published articles on obscure writers of supernatural and horror fiction such as R.R. Ryan, Keith Fleming, and R. Murray Gilchrist, and has edited a collection of shot stories by the Australian-born writer H.B. Marriot Watson for Ash-Tree Press. He has completed an anthology of early Australian supernatural…

Editor

James Doig

James Doig grew up in Fremantle, Western Australia. He was educated at the University of Western Australia, and the University of Wales, Swansea, where he completed a PhD in medieval history. He has long been a devotee…

Publisher

British Library Publishing

78 public books on Risingshadow use this publisher name.

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