And Midnight Never Come - Hugh Lamb and Richard Lamb

Richard Lamb, son of the respected ghost story anthologist Hugh Lamb, has reissued his father’s original anthologies in new editions, and he is now extending this work by editing new volumes based on his father’s notes and papers. He has recently announced publication of And Midnight Never Come, ‘the first brand new Hugh Lamb anthology for 30 years’.

The title is taken from a passage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus, in which the damned protagonist wishes he could halt time. It contains twenty stories, with an introduction by Richard Lamb, in which he explains that his father left ‘folders stuffed with photocopied stories that he had never used’, and ‘story lists for anthologies that never reached the publishing stage’. Contemporary anthologist Johnny Mains provides an afterword.

Many of the tales gathered here will be unfamiliar even to keen enthusiasts of supernatural fiction. In keeping with Hugh Lamb’s previous anthologies, they include stories selected from rare and forgotten books and periodicals. We are offered work by neglected Victorian and Edwardian authors such as E R Suffling, J H Pearce, Amyas Northcote and Mrs G Linnaeus Banks. There are also stories by more prominent proponents of the supernatural tale, such as Thomas Burke, William Hope Hodgson and R H Benson, but these are represented by lesser-known pieces. 

This looks like ideal reading for the darker nights, offering the reader excursions into the remoter regions of what Hugh Lamb called 'the world of shadows and superstition'.   

(Mark Valentine)