Hugh Lamb – författare

For the first time in one volume, the best stories of one of America’s most popular classic authors of the supernatural.Robert William Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895) has long been recognised as a landmark work in the field of the macabre, and has been described as the most important work of American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns. Despite the book’s success, its author was to return only rarely to the genre during the remainder of a writing career which spanned four decades.When Chambers did return to the supernatural, however, he displayed all the imagination and skill which distinguished The King in Yellow. He created the enigmatic and seemingly omniscient Westrel Keen, the ‘Tracer of Lost Persons’, and chronicled the strange adventures of an eminent naturalist who scours the earth for ‘extinct’ animals – and usually finds them. One of his greatest creations, perhaps, was 1920’s The Slayer of Souls, which features a monstrous conspiracy to take over the world: a conspiracy which can only be stopped by supernatural forces.For the first time in a single volume, Hugh Lamb has selected the best of the author’s supernatural tales, together with an introduction which provides further information about the author who was, in his heyday, called ‘the most popular writer in America’.

Edith Nesbit’s natural gift for storytelling has brought her worldwide renown as a classic children’s author. But beyond her beloved children’s stories lay a darker side to her imagination, revealed here in her chilling tales of the supernatural. Haunted by lifelong phobias which provoked, in her own words, ‘nights and nights of anguish and horror, long years of bitterest fear and dread’, Nesbit was inspired to pen terrifying stories of a twilight world where the dead walked the earth.All but forgotten for almost a hundred years until In the Dark was first published in 1988, this collection finally restored Nesbit’s reputation as a one of the most accomplished and entertaining ghost-story writers of the Victorian age.With seven extra newly-discovered stories now appearing for the first time in paperback, this revised edition includes an introduction by Hugh Lamb exploring the life of the woman behind these tales and the events and experiences that contributed to her fascination with the macabre. The opening story, the unforgettable 'Man-Size in Marple', was adapted by Mark Gatiss as the BBC's Ghost Story for Christmas in 2024.

A collection of rare ghosts and horror stories by the brothers of one of the finest writers of the genre, E. F. Benson.The Benson brothers – Arthur Christopher, Edward Frederic and Robert Hugh – were one of the most extraordinary and prolific literary families, between them writing more than 150 books. Arthur alone left four million words of diary, although his most lasting legacy is the words to Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory, while Fred is acknowledged as one of the finest writers of Edwardian supernatural fiction: the name E. F. Benson is mentioned in the same breath as other greats such as M. R. James and H. R. Wakefield.In fact, all three brothers wrote ghost stories, although the work of Arthur and Hugh in this field has long been overshadowed by their brother’s success. Now the best supernatural tales of A. C. and R. H. Benson have been gathered into one volume by anthologist Hugh Lamb, whose introduction examines the lives and writings of these two complex and fascinating men. Originally published between 1903 and 1927, the stories include A. C. Benson’s masterful ‘Basil Netherby’ and ‘The Uttermost Farthing’, and an intriguing article by R. H. Benson about real-life haunted houses.

A collection of rare horror stories that will thrill fans of classic writers such as M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and E. F. Benson.Jerome K. Jerome’s reputation as a humorist, renowned for his comic novel Three Men in a Boat, has thrown into undeserved obscurity his fine efforts in the ghost story genre.Three Men in the Dark collects Jerome’s major horror stories, together with a selection from two of his friends with whom he founded the magazines The Idler and Today – the journalist Robert Barr and the humorist Barry Pain. Like Jerome, their stories of terror and the supernatural have been overlooked for many years.Edited and introduced by veteran anthologist Hugh Lamb, this new edition includes as an extra bonus the long-lost novelette, ‘The Mystery of Black Rock Creek’. Written in five parts by Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain, Eden Phillpotts, E. F. Benson and Bram Stoker’s brother-in-law Frank Frankfort Moore, it rounds off one of the most unusual and entertaining anthologies of the macabre of recent years.