The Unwelcome
Widely regarded as Seignolle’s masterpiece, The Unwelcome take the reader to the rural Sologne region of a hundred years ago, when night was terrifying and a lingering scent of witchcraft was just as acceptable to the people in its hamlets as any modern scientific advances. Against this eerie backdrop, sixteen-year-old Jeanne is out of control – burning hayricks and playing jealous lovers off against each other with terrible consequences – but can she really be blamed for her behaviour when a sense of evil seems to linger around her family like morning mist over the cursed local marsh?
The answer lies in a discovery made by her father, Moarc’h, a generation before, when he dug the ceramic head of a pagan statue from a plough furrow and installed it at the family farm. Dreadful things happened then; just as dreadful things are happening now. And as the ghosts of the past both literally and figuratively descend on the descendants of Moarc’h, the horrors that seem to swirl around Jeanne become impossible to ignore.
Originally released in 1948 now published as part of the British Library Tales of the Weird series.
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Claude Seignolle
Claude Seignolle, 1917–2018, was a French author, he studied folklore and archaeology before turning to fiction
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-six books and series is set to expand with the upcoming release of four more books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
