Enter Arsene Lupin, Gentleman - Cambrioleur, the `Prince of Thieves', one of the most daring and dashing individuals who ever lifted a diamond necklace from under the noses of the authorities. Young and handsome, laughing his way through difficulties and danger, Lupin is also the master of disguise and languages. His sense of humour and conceit make life difficult for the police who attribute most of the major crimes in France to Lupin and his gang of ruffians and urchins.

` ...the hand was writhing in agonized contortions, squirming and wriggling upon the nail like a worm upon a hook. `We'll keep it there until it dies,' he said. `May I burn in hell, if I ever open the door of that safe again.'
The brilliant and scary The Beast with Five Fingers, is the first entry in this mammoth collection of strange and chilling short stories by W. F. Harvey, an unjustly neglected author of supernatural tales. This unique volume demonstrates clearly that Harvey is one of the masters of the genre.

'I saw him take a different shape before my eyes. His loose draperies fell about him...and there issued out of them a monstrous creature of the beetle tribe...'
From out of the dark and mystic Egypt comes The Beetle, a creature of horror, 'born of neither God nor man', which can change its form at will. It is bent on revenge for a crime committed against the devotees of an ancient religion. At large in London, it pursues its victims without mercy and no one, it seems, is safe from its gruesome clutches.

In the first four novels of the series, Bulldog Drummond, The Black Gang, The Third Round and The Final Count, all of which are contained within this volume, Hugh Drummond finds himself pitting his wits again Carl Peterson, a criminal genius with an insatiable passion for power and world domination. He has the great facility of disguise and his chameleon appearances are one of the joys of these thrilling tales. Peterson's constant companion is the sinister but beautiful Irma. The Drummond books are exciting page-turning adventures for grown up boys and girls.

Through a thinning of the cloud I saw one small eye... a pig's eye with a sort of vile understanding shining at the back of it'. Thomas Carnacki is a ghost finder, an Edwardian psychic detective, investigating a wide range of terrifying hauntings presented in the nine stories in this complete collection of his adventures.Encountering such spine-chilling phenomena as 'The Whistling Room', the life-threatening dangers of the phantom steed in 'The Horse of the Invisible' and the demons from the outside world in 'The Hog', Carnacki is constantly challenged by spiritual forces beyond our knowledge.

For the greater part of the 20th century, the countless escapades of super sleuth Sexton Blake kept millions of readers on the edge of their seats. Together with his faithful sidekick, the youthful Tinker, and his intelligent bloodhound, Pedro, he stood firm against an onslaught of crime and villainy, defeating his enemies with his extraordinary powers of deduction, iron fists and unyielding determination.

Let us introduce you to the enigmatic J. G. Reeder, a timid, gentle middle-aged man who carries a furled up umbrella and wears an old-fashioned flat-topped bowler hat. He is one of the great unsung sleuths of mystery fiction, created by the prolific Edgar Wallace, the `King of Thrillers'. Despite his insignificant appearance, Reeder is a cold and ruthless detective who credits his success to his `criminal mind' which allows him to solve a series of complex and audacious crimes and outwit the most cunning of villainous masterminds.

Vampires, those dark children of the night, who rise from their coffins to suck the blood of the living, continue to hold a strange fascination and dread. In this unique collection of vampire stories you will find some of the earliest depictions of these fearful creatures as in John Polidori's 'The Vampyre' and James Malcolm Rymer's 'Varney, the Vampyre', a tale which held readers in thrall when it was first published in the mid-nineteenth century.

This is a book to be read by a blazing fire on a winter's night, with the curtains drawn close and the doors securely locked. The un quiet souls of the dead, both as fictional creations and as 'real' apparitions, roam the pages of this haunting selection of ghost stories by Rex Collings.Some of these stories are classics while others are lesser-known gems unearthed from this vintage era of tales of the supernatural.

M.R. James is probably the finest ghost-story writer England has ever produced. These tales are not only classics of their genre, but are also superb examples of beautifully-paced understatement, convincing background and chilling terror.
As well as the preface, there is a fascinating tail-piece by M.R. James, `Stories I Have Tried To Write', which accompanies these thirty tales. Among them are `Casting the Runes', `Oh,Whistle and I'll come to you, My Lad', `The Tractate Middoth', `The Ash Tree' and `Canon Alberic's Scrapbook'.

In these thrilling yarns of daring do, mystery and international intrigue, the Just Men tackle wrongdoers of all kinds from criminalmasterminds and desperate anarchists to cunning murderers and obsessive madmen.Where Scotland Yard fails - they succeed. With a finely blended mixture of suspense, humour and action Edgar Wallace concocts a fantastic and unmissable series of page-turning adventures.

Oliver Onions is unique in the realms of ghost story writers in that his tales are so far ranging in their background and substance that they are not easily categorised. His stories are powerfully charged explorations of psychical violence, their effects heightened by detailed character studies graced with a powerful poetic elegance. In simple terms Oliver Onions goes for the cerebral rather than the jugular. However, make no mistake, his ghost stories achieve the desired effect. They draw you in, enmeshing you in their unnerving and disturbing narratives.

Thus Bram Stoker, one of the greatest exponents of the supernatural narrative, describes the demonic subject of his chilling masterpiece Dracula, a truly iconic and unsettling tale of vampirism.
The above is followed with a rich collection of Stoker's macabre tales including Dracula's Guest (which was omitted from the final version of Dracula); a devilishly dangerous haunted room in The Judge's House; a fatalistic tragedy in The Burial of the Rats; a terror of revenge from beyond the grave in The Secret of Growing Gold, and a surprising twist in the tail in The Gypsy's Prophecy. Other strange and frightening episodes provide a feast of terror for those readers who like to be unnerved as well as entertained.

This volume brings together the uncollected short fiction of the poet, writer and religious philosopher Aleister Crowley (1875 - 1947). Crowleywas a successful critic, editor and author of fiction from 1908 to 1922, and his short stories are long overdue for discovery. Of the fifty-two stories in the present volume, only thirty were published in his lifetime. Most of the rest appear here for the first time.

Henry James was arguably the greatest practitioner of what has been called the psychological ghost story. His stories explore the region which lies between the supernatural or straightforwardly marvellous and the darker areas of the human psyche. This edition includes all ten of his ghost stories, and as such is the fullest collection currently available.

This superb new collection brings together stories from the earliest decades of Gothic writing with later 19th and early 20th century tales from the period in which Gothic diversified into the familiar forms of the ghost- and-horror-story. Work by writers such as Poe, Dickens, Hawthorne, Gaskell and M. R. James appears alongside that of anonymous writers from the start of the period and many lesser-known authors from Britain and America.

This is a unique collection of strange stories from the cunning pen of Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The star attraction is the novella The Haunted Hotel, a clever combination of detective and ghost story set in Venice, a city of grim waterways, dark shadows and death. The action takes place in an ancient palazzo coverted into a modern hotel that houses a grisly secret.

From the unsurpassed imagination of the creator of Conan, Robert E. Howard, here are twenty-one tales of suspense, high adventure and Lovecraftian horror.
Foul sacrifices are made to a reptilian God in Hungary, a werewolf prowls the corridors of a castle in strife-torn
Africa, criminal masterminds on both sides of the Atlantic vie for world domination, an enchanted ring exerts a terrible influence upon its wearer...
...And, as written in the pages of the accursed Necronomicon and Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the Great Old Ones watch our world from beyond the void - and wait...

`My eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon a sight which no human creature could even imagine without panic, fear and physical exhaustion...'
A wax museum in London boasts a new exhibit, which no man has seen and remained sane... A businessman is trapped in a train carriage with a madman who claims to have created a new and efficient method of capital punishment... A doctor plans a horrible revenge, using as his murder weapon an insect believed capable of consuming the human soul...

The House by the Churchyard is perhaps his best novel in this genre. Setin the village of Chapelizod, near Dublin, in the 1760s the story opens with the accidental disinterment of an old skull in the churchyard, and an eerie late-night funeral. This discovery relates to murders, both recent and historical whose repercussions disrupt the complacent pace of village affairs and change the lives of many of its notable characters forever. Charm and chilling darkness abound in equal measure in one of the greatest novels of a Victorian master of mystery.

Amyas Northcote's In Ghostly Company is a rare and splendid collection of strange and disturbing tales from the golden age of ghost stories. His style is akin to that of the master of the genre M.R. James: it is measured and insidiously suggestive, producing unnerving chills rather than shocks and gasps. Northcote's tales make the reader unsettled and uneasy.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was one of the great masters of Victorian of mystery and horror fiction, and can be regarded as the father of the modern ghost story. In a Glass Darkly (1872), one of his most celebrated volumes, purports to be the casebook of Dr Hesselius, a pioneer psychologist.

In a similarly phlegmatic spirit, Wordsworth Editions presents this spellbinding collection of chilling Gothic tales of the macabre, all drawn from the rich and varied literary tradition of a culture long in thrall to things supernatural. The Irish, as William Butler Yeats remarked, 'any day prefer a ghost story or a fairy tale to The Times newspaper'.

Ann Radcliffe, author of The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho, is the high priestess of the gothic novel. In The Italian, first published in 1797, she creates a chilling, atmospheric concoction of thwarted lovers, ruined abbeys, imprisonment and dark passages, with an undercurrent of seething sexuality and presents us with a cunning villain in the sinister monk Schedoni

Horrific, horrendous, unspeakable, The Whitechapel Murderer, Jack the Ripper, stalked the streets of East London in 1888, slaughtering prostitutes and bewildering the police who were hunting him. They never succeeded in apprehending him, and to this day the mystery of his identity remains an enigma. But he did leave clues to his identity, and numerous theories have been entertained throughout the one hundred and twenty years since he held London's East End in his grip of terror.

Here are two great, neglected horror novels by Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, together in one volume for the first time. It is a double treat for lovers of blood-curdling fantasy fiction.
The Lady of the Shroud, published here in its full and unabridged form, is a fascinating and engrossing concoction of a vampire tale, Ruritanian adventure story and science fiction romance. The novel fully demonstrates the breadth and ingenuity of Stoker's imagination.

Only the expansive imagination of H.P. Lovecraft could conceive the delicious and spine-tingling horrors you will find within the pages of this unique collection. In addition to such classics as The Picture in the House, The Music of Erich Zann and The Rats in the Walls, this volume contains some fascinating rarities: examples of Lovecraft's earliest weird fiction and material unpublished during his lifetime.

Madam Crowl's Ghost & Other Stories are tales selected from Le Fanu's stories which mostly appeared in The Dublin University Magazine and other periodicals, and their haunting, sinister qualities still have an enormous appeal for the modern reader. The great M.R. James, who collected and introduces the stories in this book, considered that Le Fanu 'stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.'

Prepare to be shocked. This novel, written in 1796, is a Gothic festival of sex, magic and ghastly, ghostly violence rarely seen in literature. The Monk is remarkably modern in style and tells a breathless tale of temptation, imprisonment and betrayal. Matthew Lewis recounts the downfall of Ambrosio, the holier-than-thou monk seduced within the walls of a Madrid abbey until he heads for the utter corruption of the soul. Meanwhile, two sets of young lovers are thwarted and the reader thrills to pursuits through the woods by bandits and is chilled by the spectre of nuns imprisoned in vermin-ridden and skeleton-crowded vaults.

Here, in his first and most baffling case, the eighteen year old reporter astounds readers with his audacity and ingenuity. Who could have tried to murder Mademoiselle Stangerson, beautiful daughter of a famous radium scientist ? And how could they have entered and escaped from a completely locked and watched room ? With the Surete's top sleuth vying against him, Rouletabille is determined to prove only he can solve the case.

E. F. Benson was a master of the ghost story and now all his rich, imaginative, spine-tingling and beautifully written tales are presented together in this bumper collection. The range and variety of these spooky narratives is far broader and more adventurous than those of any other writer of supernatural fiction. Within the covers of this volume you will encounter revengeful spectres, vampires, homicidal spirits, monstrous spectral worms and slugs and other entities of nameless dread. This is a classic collection that cannot fail to charm and chill.

` - and the man saw that she had no eyes or nose or mouth - and he screamed.'
Lafcadio Hearn's fascinating and unsettling ghost stories are a reinterpretation of oriental legends, and folktales. They are a potent blend of weird beauty and horror.
Hearn, who referred to his narratives as `stories and studies of strange things', believed that the spectral world was part of the oriental landscape. Lakes, mountains, ruined castles and terraced fields were the natural locale of ghostly spirits, and their intervention in human affairs was part of the natural order of things. Hearn's apparitions are not a violent intrusion upon everyday reality; they are already a part of that reality, co-existing with the living.

Erik, the Phantom of the Paris Opera House, is one of the great icons of horror literature. This tormented and disfigured creature has made his home in the labyrinthine cellars of this opulent building where he can indulge in his great passion for music, which is a substitute for the love and emotion denied him because of his ghastly appearance.

Edith Nesbit, best known as the author of The Railway Children and other children's classics, was also the mistress of the ghost story and tales of terror. She was able to create genuinely chilling narratives in which the returning dead feature strongly. Sadly, these stories have been neglected for many years, but now, at last, they are back in print.

The sixteenth-century Puritan Solomon Kane has a thirst for justice which surpasses common reason. Sombre of mood, clad in black and grey, he 'never sought to analyse his motives and he never wavered once his mind was made up. Though he always acted on impulse, he firmly believed that all his actions were governed by cold and logical reasonings...A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, and avenge all crimes against right and justice'.

Scotland has a notoriously rich and diverse cultural tradition when it comes to the supernatural. Many of her greatest writers from Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg to Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan have explored the country's unique folkloric heritage to spine-chilling effect. From Highlands to Lowlands, from blasted heath or remote glen to wretched hovel or austere castle, the very topography lends itself somehow to the strange and unexplainable.

This volume brings together two series of short fiction by the poet, writer and religious philosopher Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). It includes the first complete publication of Simple Simon, the detective series featuring Crowley's most memorable fictional creation, the mystic-magician-philosopher-psychoanalyst-detective Simon Iff. The idealised Crowley in old age, Simon Iff is wise, knowing and unfailingly humorous as he applied psychoanalysis, Taoism and his own religious philosophy of Thelema to divine the depths of human nature and solve a wide array of crimes and mysteries.

Rudyard Kipling, celebrated author of The Jungle Book, the Just So Stories and other entertaining fictions, was also a master of the short story in which he was able to combine the strange and unnerving in order to draw the reader into the world of his own dark imaginings. This collection presents the best of these strange tales in which ghosts, monsters and inexplicable happenings abound.

The exploits of Sweeney Todd, `The Demon Barber of Fleet Street', have been recounted many times in plays, films and musicals, but the origins of the character largely were forgotten for many years. The String of Pearls - the original tale of Sweeney Todd, a classic of British horror -was first published as a weekly serial in 1846-7 by Edward Lloyd, the King of the Penny Dreadfuls. One of the earliest detective stories, it became an important source for Bram Stoker's Dracula, but it was after over 150 years of obscurity that it appeared first in book form in the Wordsworth edition published in 2005.

With an Introduction by John S. Whitley, University of Sussex.
This collection of Poe's best stories contains all the terrifying and bewildering tales that characterise his work. As wellas the Gothic horror of such famous stories as 'The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Premature Burial' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart', all of Poe's Auguste Dupin stories are included.
These are the first modern detective stories and include 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' and 'The Purloined Letter'.

This gripping set of tales by the master storyteller Arthur Conan Doyle is bound to thrill and unnerve you. In these twilight excursions, Doyle's vivid imagination for the strange, the grotesque and the frightening is given full rein. We move from the mysteries of Egypt and the strange powers granted by The Ring of Thoth to the isolated ghostlands of the Arctic in The Captain of the Polestar, we encounter a monstrous creature in The Terror of Blue John Cap and the beings that live above our heads in The Brazilian Cat and The Leather Funnel; and we shudder at the thing in the next room in Lot 249. Sit down in your uneasy chair and enjoy this unique collection of chillers.

Elizabeth Gaskell is better known today for her pioneering social novels such as Mary Barton (1848) but she also wrote some fascinating tales of the supernatural and the macabre, which are collected here in this volume. The real charm of this dark anthology is its variety. Unlike so many writers of this kind of material, Gaskell allows the story to fit the style rather than the other way around and as result there is a charming freshness to each tale.

Of all the writers of ghost and horror stories, Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most colourful. He was a dark, cynical and pessimistic soul who had a grim vision of fate and the unfairness of life, which he channelled into his fiction. And in his death, or rather his disappearance, he created a mystery as strange and unresolved as any that he penned himself

This second edition adds several additional stories, including the Qabalistic allegory Ambrosii Magi Hortus Rosarum, featuring the author's previously unpublished annotations. This revised and expanded second edition brings together the uncollected short fiction of the poet, writer and religious philosopher Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Of the fifty-four stories in the present volume, only thirty-five were published in his lifetime. Most of the rest appear in this collection for the first time. The title story The Drug stands as one of the first accounts if not the first of a psychedelic experience. His Black and Silver is a knowing early noir discovery that anticipates an entire genre. Atlantis is a masterpiece of occult fantasy that can stand with Samuel Butlers Erewhon. Frank Harris considered The Testament of Magdalen Blair the most terrifying tale ever written.

From the dark, mind-expanding imagination of H P Lovecraft, Wordsworth presents a third volume of tales penned by the greatest horror writer of the 20th Century. Here are some of Lovecraft's weirdest flesh-creeping masterpieces, including Pickman's Model, The Shunned House, his famous serial Herbert West - Reanimator, and several classic tales from the Cthulhu Mythos, in which mankind is subjected to the unimaginable terrors known only to those who have read from the forbidden Necronomicon. Also included in this compelling collection are the complete Randolph Carter stories, chronicling his adventures in this world and the realm of his dreams, where he faces perils beyond comprehension.

With its strange, imaginative blend of horror, science fiction, romance and lyrical prose, Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow is a classic masterpiece of weird fiction. This series of vaguely connected stories is linked by the presence of a monstrous and suppressed book which brings fright, madness and spectral tragedy to all those who read it. An air of futility and doom pervade these pages like a sweet insidious poison. Dare you read it?

Master of the ghost story genre M.R. James commented that the, 'final terrific murder-scene and escape can hardly be forgotten' by those who have read Uncle Silas. Neither does the opening disappoint. As the November winds wail in ivied chimneys we are drawn into a Victorian Gothic atmosphere of menacing, sombre gloom and ebony shadows. Sheridan Le Fanu leaves us in no doubt that we are in for a feast of exciting drama, luring us into the intensely claustrophobic world of the nineteenth century sensational novel.

Bannerworth Hall, Hampshire. Midnight. The night is woken by screams, from the bedroom of the beautiful and noble-hearted Flora. To their horror, her family discover that she has been the victim of a murderous attack. The Bannerworths are about to lose their home, to pay the debts of their dead father. The hunt is for his missing gold on, but then they begin to have doubts about their repulsive, hissing new neighbour, Sir Franc

In this collection of rare and out of print stories you will encounter the curses of the great Guinea-Snake, the Sheen, the weredog whose very touch means certain death, the curious tale of the `magicked' mirror, and fiendish manikins who make life a living hell. Included in this festival of shivering fear is the remarkable narrative `Williamson' which every editor who read the story shied away from publishing.

This original collection offers some of the greatest, rarest and most unusual werewolf stories ever. From the forests of Transylvania to the ordered lawns of an English country estate, here are all the classic aspects of the tale. You will encounter shadows that lope under the moon, chilling howls, family curses, crimson feasts, the desperate chase and the deathly duel.