H. R. Wakefield – författare

'Come to-night', I heard the old man say, 'come to me to-night into the Wood of the Dead'.Join Weird Walk for a new journey into the ghostly and bizarre, striking out from the shelter of the inn for the places where the path begins to fade, from the sublime wilderness of mountains, coasts and ravines to forbidden, ancient tracts of woodland.Featuring disorientating classics from John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood alongside modern, thrilling (and sometimes violent) warnings to the intrepid from Lisa Tuttle and Dorothy K. Haynes, The Wayfarer's Weird leads you towards fae dangers, down lost tracks in time and deep into the liminal spaces of Britain and beyond.

H. R. Wakefield was one of the most popular ghost-story writers of the early 20th century. ''The Red Lodge'' is arguably his greatest tale, and a classic of the haunted house genre. Many of the earliest ghost stories and tales of hauntings, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

OLD MAN'S BEARD, H. R. Wakefield's second collection of ghost stories, was first published in 1929, and built on the success of the earlier THEY RETURN AT EVENING. The fifteen disturbing tales collected here are: 'Old Man's Beard', 'The Last to Leave', 'The Cairn', 'Present at the End', '"Look Up There!"', '"Written in Our Flesh"', 'Blind Man's Buff', 'A Coincidence at Hunton', 'Nurse's Tale', 'The Dune', 'Unrehearsed', 'A Jolly Surprise for Henri', 'The Red Hand', 'Surprise Item', 'A Case of Mistaken Identity'.

In 'Farewell to all Those', the introduction to his 1961 collection STRAYERS FROM SHEOL, H. R. Wakefield stated 'I've written my last ghost story', continuing with the bleak sentence 'I believe ghost story writing to be a dying art.' However, he concluded his introduction on a more cheerful note, urging readers not to be too sure that 'none of the old magic endures'; and the fourteen stories collected in the original edition of the book show Wakefield to have been still very much at the top of his form. Indeed, STRAYERS FROM SHEOL opens with one of the author's finest and most frightening tales, the classic 'The Triumph of Death'.

THE CLOCK STRIKES TWELVE was H. R. Wakefield's first collection of original supernatural fiction since 1929's OLD MAN'S BEARD, and was to be the last book the author had published in Britain during his lifetime. Originally consisting of fourteen stories, the book contained some of Wakefield's most memorable supernatural tales, such as 'Lucky's Hrove', 'From Outer Darkness', 'The First Sheaf', and 'Farewell Performance'.

The decomposing ghost of a murdered wife; the spectre of a dog, which answers to the most terrifying of whistles; evil in the tradition of M.R. James's 'Casting the Runes', as a lawyer seeks to avenge the death of a friend . . . These, and many more, are the ghosts which H.R. Wakefield set to haunt us in his first book of supernatural stories, a landmark collection since 1928.