Aaron Worth – författare

Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle...Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal body of tales of occult horror, spiritual and physical corruption, and malignant survivals from the primeval past which horrified and scandalised-late-Victorian readers. Machen's 'weird fiction' has influenced generations of storytellers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro-and it remains no less unsettling today.This new collection, which includes the complete novel The Three Impostors as well as such celebrated tales as The Great God Pan and The White People, constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of Machen yet to appear. In addition to the core late-Victorian horror classics, a selection of lesser-known prose poems and later tales helps to present a fuller picture of the development of Machen's weird vision. The edition's introduction and notes contextualise the life and work of this foundational figure in the history of horror.

Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle...Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal body of tales of occult horror, spiritual and physical corruption, and malignant survivals from the primeval past which horrified and scandalised-late-Victorian readers. Machen's 'weird fiction' has influenced generations of storytellers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro-and it remains no less unsettling today.This new collection, which includes the complete novel The Three Impostors as well as such celebrated tales as The Great God Pan and The White People, constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of Machen yet to appear. In addition to the core late-Victorian horror classics, a selection of lesser-known prose poems and later tales helps to present a fuller picture of the development of Machen's weird vision. The edition's introduction and notes contextualise the life and work of this foundational figure in the history of horror.

'Well, a corpse is a natural thing; but this was the dreadfullest sight I ever sid...'Sheridan Le Fanu is one of the indispensable figures in the history of Gothic and horror fiction-the most important such writer in English, certainly, between Poe and M. R. James. While a number of his sensation and mystery novels were popular with mid-Victorian readers, it was in shorter forms that he truly excelled, and most showed himself an innovator in the field of uncanny fiction. Tales such as 'Carmilla' and 'Green Tea' prompted M. R. James to remark, 'he succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer'. This landmark critical edition includes the original versions of all five stories later collected in the superb In a Glass Darkly, along with seven equally chilling tales spanning the length of Le Fanu's career, from 'Schalken the Painter', a pioneering story of the walking dead, to 'Laura Silver Bell', a haunting exploration of the dark side of fairy lore. Aaron Worth's introduction discusses the paranoid, claustrophobic world of Le Fanu's fiction as a counterpoint-one in its own way equally modern-to the cosmic horror tale as practiced by such writers as H. P. Lovecraft.

I entered the church...It struck me suddenly that all this crowd of men and women standing all round, these priests chanting and moving about the altar, were dead...Vernon Lee was a polymath whose copious writings include deeply learned studies of art, music, literature, and history, but also a small but exquisitely crafted group of Gothic tales, most of which first appeared in fin de siècle periodicals including the iconic Yellow Book. In these stories of obsession and possession, transgressive desire reaches out from the past -- through a haunting portrait, a murdered poet's lock of hair, the uncanny voice of a diabolical castrato -- dragging Lee's protagonists to their doom. Among those haunted by Lee's 'spurious ghosts' was Henry James, who praised her 'gruesome, graceful...ingenious tales, full of imagination'.This new edition includes Lee's landmark 1890 collection Hauntings complete, along with six additional tales and the 1880 essay 'Faustus and Helena', in which Lee probes the elusive nature of the supernatural as a 'vital...fluctuating...potent' force that resists definite representation. Aaron Worth's contextual introduction, drawing upon Lee's newly published letters, reassesses her place in the pantheon of the fantastic.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'See!...The woods are alive! Already the Great Ones are there, and the dance will soon begin! The salve is here! Anoint yourself and come!'One of the greatest writers of the strange and weird, Algernon Blackwood evolved from a teller of ghost stories to a pioneering master of such emergent fictional modes as cosmic horror and nature Gothic. In tales whose settings range from the eerie North Woods of Canada to the mysterious sands of the Egyptian desert, Blackwood blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman, living and dead, beckoning the reader into strange borderlands where alien forces lurk, waiting for the chance to break through into our world.This new selection of Blackwood's shorter fiction constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of his work to date. Included here are such undisputed classics as 'The Wendigo', 'The Willows', and 'Ancient Sorceries', as well as two superbly unsettling novellas, 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' and 'A Descent into Egypt', and ten other stories short and long, drawn from collections spanning Blackwood's long writing career. Aaron Worth's introduction and notes situate these tales in the context of Blackwood's own upbringing in an evangelical Victorian household, as well as in relation to such topics as late-imperial British history and the emergence of modern ecological thought.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'These stories have all had their origins in dreams... Terrifying enough to the dreamer... I hope that some readers will experience an agreeable shudder or two in the reading of them.'A malignant entity answers the call of an ancient curse on the coast of Brittany; a traveller's curiosity delivers him to an abominable Hallowe'en ritual; the curious new owner of a haunted mansion discovers something far worse than ghosts in the night.Randalls Round has long been revered by devotees of the weird tale. First published in 1929, its stories of ritualistic folk horror and M. R. James-inspired accounts of ancient forces terrorising humanity are thoroughly deserving of wider recognition. This collection includes a new introduction exploring Eleanor Scott's impact on weird and folk horror fiction, and two chilling stories by N. Dennett - speculated to be another of the author's pseudonyms

A mysterious news signal reports cosmic doom from an otherworldly location. X-ray evidence suggests the impossible truth that a sculptor is becoming one with his creation. A gramophone channels the venomous words of a churlish spirit and its cruel vengeance.The ground-breaking new technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered their users into a world of unfathomable miracles and fresh nightmares - a world in which pioneers of weird fiction gave expression to the anxieties at the heart of seemingly limitless communication and the capturing of images beyond the human eye. Tracing this fiction of speculation and fear from the motion photography of the 1890s to 1950s television, this new collection presents seventeen tales of haunted and uncanny media from a range of writers inspired by its ghastly potential, including Marjorie Bowen, H. Russell Wakefield, Mary Treadgold and J. B. Priestley.

"Come inside, my bonny witch-finder. Here is shelter for thee..."A tale of callous murder and deranged revenge rings out from fifteenth-century Italy. A witch-finder's great triumph is also the herald of his own doom in Civil War Britain. A prisoner's fate at the hands of the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Mexico leads to an encounter with the bestial and bizarre beneath the waves.Summoning eleven stories chosen for their uncanny portrayals of weird history, this collection presents a dark timeline of grim visions harking from plague-racked England to revolutionary France and culminating in the last gasps of the nineteenth century. Including stories by the greatest writers of history-turned-horrifying such as Marjorie Bowen, Frederick Cowles, Vernon Lee and the lost genius Vincent O'Sullivan, this volume is capped by two of Aaron Worth's own tales of Victorian macabre alongside a chiller evoking M. R. James by the adapter of his stories for radio, Sheila Hodgson.

From the fungus-webbed House of Usher to the maddening, fungus-like wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic tale of madness, and Ray Bradbury's account of insidious mushroom dispersal via the US postal system, weird fiction has harboured a thriving culture of fungal horrors throughout the past two centuries.With stories of mycological possession alongside dark, pulpy science fiction monstrous fruiting bodies run amok, this new anthology collects the classic with the lost and obscure to trace our fascination with a spore-infested branch of British and American fiction.

From the peaks of Eryri to dramatic coastlines, misty valleys and haunted mines, Wales is a land whose myth and folklore has long been reflected in a thriving storytelling tradition, with the dragons and sorcerers of the Mabinogion and Arthurian legend laying a path for later tales of the Tylwyth Teg, and the pitiless fair folk of Arthur Machen's fictional world.To show the breadth of the strange tales inspired by the Celtic history and local legends of Cymru, horror expert Aaron Worth presents an exciting new selection of Anglophone Welsh fiction, including folkloric retellings, classics of the early twentieth-century weird and chilling pieces by writers from beyond the country's borders. Featuring stories by Dylan Thomas, Christianna Brand, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Margiad Evans and many more, this collection welcomes you to the darker side of Cymru.