E. F. Benson

The stars gave light enough for me to discern the figure as that of a man, but I could scarcely discover more. “Dark night, this,” I said. “Darker below,” he muttered, as though to himself; “darker, darker, darker.”Yorkshire: a land entwined with a distinctive tradition of uncanny literature and folklore, home to twilit towns thronging with restless ghosts, woods alive with the whispers of fairies and vast moorlands stalked by boggarts and barghests after dark. Exploring Yorkshire’s position as a heartland of British supernatural fiction, the stories and poems gathered here trace its weird literary heritage from medieval tales of shapeshifting spirits to the Gothic worlds of the Brontë sisters, and from wartime hauntings to modern folk horror. Including local legends from rare sources and unsettling stories from Arthur Machen, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Andrew Michael Hurley and many more, this collection offers glimpses of a stranger England hidden among the shadows of the dales.

'Come to-night', I heard the old man say, 'come to me to-night into the Wood of the Dead'. Join Weird Walk for a new journey into the ghostly and bizarre, striking out from the shelter of the inn for the places where the path begins to fade, from the sublime wilderness of mountains, coasts and ravines to forbidden, ancient tracts of woodland. Featuring disorientating classics from John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood alongside modern, thrilling (and sometimes violent) warnings to the intrepid from Lisa Tuttle and Dorothy K. Haynes, The Wayfarer's Weird leads you towards fae dangers, down lost tracks in time and deep into the liminal spaces of Britain and beyond.

As the storm booms out in the bay and the waves smash against the rocks, the masts of a cursed and spectral vessel are drawing near. As the mists roll over Bodmin moor, the moonlight reveals a night alive with spirits. Welcoming a fresh roster of seaside spectres, tin-mine terrors and holiday haunters, this return to the bountiful fold of Cornish horror fiction features more lost classics from Victorian periodicals alongside atmospheric tales from the great twentieth-century writers of the Cornish weird such as Mary Williams, Mary Butts and Sabine Baring-Gould.

The narrative follows the stylishly controversial Dodo, a young woman from the British upper-middle-class. She is very confident she is about to make a most advantageous match which should position her perfectly for the social status and money she so deeply craves. This makes for a work replete with sardonic and romantic and paranormal melodrama.

'Dodo Wonders' is the third and final installment in the 'Dodo' series by E. F. Benson. The series was rumoured to be based on Lady Asquith, though she herself claimed that she had little in common with the character of Dodo - except the splendour of her drawing-room, perhaps. The glitzy life of Lady Dodo Chesterford is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of World War I.

"Queen Lucia" (1920) is the first volume of E. F. Benson’s "Mapp and Lucia" 6-novel series. It is a comedy of manners, set in provincial Riseholme (Lincolnshire). Emmeline Lucas rules local society with the help of her friend Georgie Pillson, a position she fiercely protects from her rival Daisy Quantock.