Daisy Butcher (ed.) – Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic

Daisy Butcher (ed.) – Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic (British Library, 2019)

Enrique Bernardou

Cover design by Maurico Villamayor

Daisy Butcher – Introduction

Nathaniel Hawthorne – Rappaccini’s Daughter
Arthur Conan Doyle – The American’s Tale
Lucy H. Hooper – Carnivorine
Charlotte Perkins Gilman – The Giant Wistaria
H.G. Wells – The Flowering of the Strange Orchid
Edmond Nolcini – The Guardian of Mystery Island
M.R. James – The Ash Tree
Ambrose Bierce – A Vine on a House
Howard R. Garis – Professor Jonkin’s Cannibal Plant
William Hope Hodgson – The Voice in the Night
Edith Nesbit – The Pavilion
H.C. McNeile – The Green Death
Abraham Merritt – The Woman of the Wood
Emma Vane – The Moaning Lily

Blurb:
Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the villainous (or perhaps just misunderstood) “killer plant” in fiction, film, and video games.
Step within to marvel at Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s giant wistaria and H. G. Wells’ hungry orchid; hear the calls of the ethereal women of the wood, and the frightful drone of the moaning lily; and do tread carefully around E. Nesbit’s wandering creepers…
Every strain of vegetable threat (and one deadly fungus) can be found within this new collection, representing the very best tales from the undergrowth of Gothic fiction.

Mike Ashley [ed.] – Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories

Mike Ashley [ed.] – Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories (British Library, 2018)

Mike Ashley – Introduction

Hugh E. Wright – On the Embankment
Elsie Norris – The Mystery of the Gables
Austin Philips – The Missing Word
Huan Mee – Phantom Death
Firth Scott – The Wraith of the Rapier
James Barr – The Soul of Maddalina Tonelli
Jack Edwards – Haunted!
Percy James Brebner – Our Strange Traveller
Guy Thorne – A Regent of Love Rhymes
Francis Xavier – Amid the Trees
Mary Schultze – The River’s Edge
Mary Reynolds – A Futile Ghost
Lumley Deakin – Ghosts
Elizabeth Jordan – Kearney
Philippa Forest – When Spirits Steal
Eric Purves – The House of the Black Evil
E. F. Benson – The Woman in the Veil
F. Britten Austin – The Treasure of the Tombs

Blurb:
A figure emerges from a painting to pursue a bitter vengeance: the last transmission at a dying man haunts the airwaves, seeking to reveal his murderer; a treasure hunt disturbs an ancient presence in the silence of a lost tomb…
From the vaults of the British Library comes a new anthology celebrating the best works of forgotten, never before republished supernatural fiction from the early 20th century.
Waiting within are malevolent spirits eager to possess the living and mysterious spectral guardians — a diverse host of phantoms exhumed from the rare pages of literary magazines and newspaper serials to thrill once more.

Mike Ashley is the author and editor of more than one hundred books, and is one of the foremost historians of popular fiction. He is series consultant for British Library Science Fiction Classics and his books include Adventures in The Strand, Out of This World, and The Age of Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines 1880-1950. His multi-volume history of science fiction magazines is published by Liverpool University Press.