James Wade – författare

It had taken, at most, three seconds for the elevator to pass downwards from the sixteenth to the twelfth ... Mr Meldrum had ceased to be, and something hideously different took his place.A man convinced that he has developed a phantom beak edges towards a terrible metamorphosis. Interlopers dismissing the superstitions of hare-women in the countryside pay for their scepticism with blood. The cruel jokes of a girl at the village festival of the Green Man lead her to a crueller transfiguring in the woods.Tracing the quintessential horror concept of the strange transformation from the Victorian era through to the modern day, horror writer, expert and enthusiast Mark Morris presents a thrilling selection of metamorphic tales. Including stories of bestial shapeshifters such as the tiger-men, fox spirits and werewolves of world folklore, this collection also presents some of the weirder shifts of the horror genre, where a flatworm masquerades as a boy, a girl becomes one with a bridge, and a babe-in-arms and her beekeeper father come to reflect the creatures of the hives.

Composed toward the end of the fourteenth century, the anonymous Sir Torrent of Portingale is a Middle English romance defined by its outsized proportions and commitment to outdoing its predecessors. Its 2,671 lines make it one of the longer surviving tail-rhyme romances—nearly double the length of its nearest literary analogue and partial source, the romance Sir Eglamour of Artois. Its valorous Portuguese hero and virtuous but feisty princess, narrative investment in lineage and dynastic ambition, grand geographic scope, and sheer abundance of romance tropes speak to an audience both well-versed in the conventions of adventure literature and hungry for ever grander narratives. A likely influence on Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and prominent among the print editions of Middle English romance that flourished in the early Tudor period, Sir Torrent of Portingale showcases one of medieval England’s most popular literary genres in its full maturity.