A couple of recent books I've edited and introduced that may be of interest to readers.
H.T.W. Bousfield, The Unknown Island, collects eight of Bousfield's short stories that appeared mostly in the 1930s in the slick magazines of the day. He's an interesting English author, best known for 'The God With Four Arms,' which Richard Dalby reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2.
The book is available from Ramble House.
The Vampire is a rare novel published by occult specialists Rider, and appeared in 1913, the year after Rider published the 9th edition of Dracula. Presumably The Vampire was conceived to cash in on the success of its famous predecessor. The author, Reginald Hodder, was a New Zealander, a relative of the Hodder family of publishers, and the introduction looks in some detail at his life.
Also published by Ramble House, this one is available from Amazon.
Finally, a reprint of Australian Nightmares, part of an anthology series I put together some years ago. Wildside/Borgo has reprinted the other two books in the series, Australian Gothic and Australian Hauntings, and this is the last.
This one is also available from Amazon. And here are the contents, slightly revised from the previous edition:
Introduction
Mary Fortune - The Blighted Meadow
Charles Junor - The Silent Sepulchre
Ernest Favenc - What the Rats Brought
Ernest Favenc - On the Island of Shadows
Hume Nisbet - The Odic Touch
J.A. Barry - Told in the 'Corona's' Cabin on Three Evenings
Rosa Praed - The House of Ill Omen
Morley Roberts - A Thing of Wax
James Edmund - The Prophetic Horror of the Great Experiment
James Edmund - The Precipitous Details of the High Mountain and the Three Skeletons
Lionel Sparrow - The Strange Case of Alan Heriot
Beatrice Grimshaw - The Blanket Fiend
James Francis Dwyer - The Phantom Ship of Dirk Van Tromp
Dulcie Deamer - The Devil's Ball
Helen Simpson - The Pledge
Vernon Knowles - The Watch
Vernon Knowles - The House That Took Revenge
Roger Dard - The Undying One
Good to see these republished, much as I felt Hodder's book was rather a disappointment, for many and varied reasons.
ReplyDeleteAs concerning the reprint of 'Australian Nightmares', I am glad to see another of the more elusive Sparrow tales back in print, yet I wonder if it werre not time to finally convince a publishing house to collect Sparrow's scattered writings into a collection for the first time, a hundred plus years after they appeared.
On that topic, I had found two tales by Sparrow, in addition to "The Red Chamber", in the pages of the journal, which have not been listed on the original Sparrow article. "A Tale of Tokio" from July 1891 and "The Masterpiece of Gerald Wayne" (as by Lionel S.) from May 1897.
Thanks for the comments. I agree about Lionel Sparrow - he certainly deserves a collection. And thanks for the two stories - I've got "A Tale of Tokio" but the other one doesn't ring any bells - I'll have to chase it up!
DeleteI have all the ones I found on a Google Drive document for the sake of convenience.
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