Wordsworth Editions are a gold mine of Mystery and the Supernatural

God bless Wordsworth is how I wanted to start this; but perhaps it should be blessed by something else, given the nature of the stories that I extracted from their catalogue in my youth.

Throughout my interest in the horror genre, I've tried to cultivate an appreciation of where the genre came from. Admittedly, when I was very young, I would struggle with what seemed to be archaic writing styles, but I persisted. Frequently this persistence lead me to seek out something from the Wordsworth catalogue.

One of my prized possessions in my late teens was a beautiful Wordsworth hardback - Collected Ghost Stories by M R James, a Christmas present from some family friends.  If I look at my bookshelves there are plenty of other Wordsworth editions of significance in the literature of the macabre: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Shelley's Frankenstein, Henry James' Turn of the Screw (collected with The Aspern Papers), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le Fanu's In A Glass Darkly, The Collected Tales of Edgar Allen Poe and so on. All from good old Wordsworth.

They've been steadily pumping out affordable volumes all these years, but despite my appreciation I have to admit that I haven't bought a Wordsworth for quite a long time. I had my quota of classics long ago; I don't need any more.

How wrong I am.

What has brought them back to my attention is the recent release of The Dead of Night - The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions. Though I have many stories by Oliver Onions, due to an excess of ghost story anthologies, it's nowhere near a complete collection, and along with the likes of E F Benson (for example), Oliver Onions was a favourite. So at a measly three pounds sterling (or thereabouts), I ordered it.

It arrived a couple of weeks ago and what a volume it is - 657 pages! For three measly quid!
It features well-known tales such as "The Beckoning Fair One" (cited favourably by Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood), but it also features stories I am less familiar with. I know I'm going to treasure the process of catching up.

This got me looking at the rest of the catalogue, notably the "Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural" section, and what a gold mine it has become. Have a gander here.

Since the Oliver Onions book arrived I've ordered (and received) a couple more:

The Beast with Five Fingers by W F Harvey (418 pages)

I've only read a few stories from Harvey, but they've stuck in my mind.  "The Beast with Five Fingers" is a story featuring a disembodied hand. At one point it slides down a stair rail, which makes me wonder about the inspiration for Thing in the Addam's family. (Nah, probably not). Many (most? - I've got the best part of a bookful to catch up on yet) of his stories display a wicked sense of humour.







The Temple of Death - The Ghost Stories of A. C. & R. H. Benson (226 pages)

Ah, the Benson brothers: Arthur Christopher Benson (b 1862), Edward Frederic Benson (b 1867), and Robert Hugh Benson (b1871). What a morbid lot.
I'm a fan of the middle brother. The Panther edition of E F Benson's The Horror Horn was one of  my favourite books when I was very young (more on that some other time). I've heard that the stories of the older and younger of the three Benson brothers are often didactic in nature, but that they are still worth reading. This is more of a curiosity buy than anything.

There are plenty of others worth looking at - even some Lovecraft and Howard if you haven't had your fill of them. There are some obvious omissions in the Wordsworth supernatural line-up that I hope get filled one day - for example E F Benson (mentioned above) and H R Wakefield (whose "The Red Lodge", a story of slime covered undead, gave me the willies), but with a bit of luck the catalogue will continue to grow. And to educate!