An interesting collection originally issued in 1931. I read the 1994 paperback edition by Bracken Books, with the same ISBN as the hardcover issued in the same year, oddly. It is a thick book but possibly has been edited down from the original, as another reviewer mentions several stories not in my copy.

The book features an introductory essay by Montague Summers, known to me for his works on the supernatural, including the Malleus Maleficarum and the witch persecutions which plagued Europe, particularly in the 16-17th centuries. Summers professes his belief in the supernatural in this essay and his stance that it isn't possible to write convincing fiction in the genre unless the writer actually believes in the supernatural. I'm not sure I subscribe to that myself, but the essay is an interesting summary of the history, not only of supernatural fiction up to the late 1920s, but of writing about the supernatural from early times. It mentions some writers of whom I was unaware previously, and no doubt was a valuable resource to readers in the pre-Internet age. Also interesting is his reference to "A well-reputed writer, whose name I will by your favour omit, gave us some excellent stories at first, but in his eagerness to create horror, to thrill and curdle our blood, latterly he trowels on the paint so thick, he creates such fantastic figures, such outrageous run-riot incidents at noon and in the sunlight, that it is all as topsy-turvey as Munchasen." Given the time this was written, I'm tempted to believe he is talking about H P Lovecraft, who is otherwise conspicuous by his absence from Summers' thorough review of the field.

The book mainly features nineteenth century writers, and there are classics such as Charles Dicken's The Signalman and J Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, which is probably the earliest fiction centred around a female vampire, certainly predating Stoker's Dracula with its wives of Dracula and ill-fated Lucy. Nowadays, we have been exposed so much to this genre through TV and films, and in my case from reading ghost stories from an early age, that the stories do not have the power to shock and chill that they would have had in their own time, plus the earlier ones are sometimes written in a style that today we find convoluted and over formal. But there are nevertheless some interesting tales, such as Brickett Bottom by Amyas Northcote in which a young girl befriends an old couple with disastrous results, and two pyschological stories by Vernon Lee, the pseudonym of Violet Paget. In the first of these, Armour Dure, a young Polish historian, residing in an Italian town for the purpose of writing a history of it, becomes increasingly obsessed with a femme fatale of two centuries previous. Oke of Okehurst is told from the point of view of a disinterested painter who spends a few months at a stately home to paint his host and hostess, but who becomes embroiled in the psychodrama in which the very strange wife identifies with a murderous female ancestor whom she resembles. I don't recall coming across this writer before, and according to Summers, she had ceased publication after 1890 when both these stories appeared. Perhaps it is not co-incidental that they have a more modern sensibility shared by Bram Stoker's Dracula, published in 1897.

One story which would not appeal to current tastes is towards the end of the book. The Story of Konner Old House by E and H Heron concerns the apparent haunting by the black servant of a former owner, who was implicated in the death of the owner's daughter. The answer turns out to be a prosaic one, but the story employs a word which is not acceptable to today's readership. Ironically, the concluding tale, set in Haiti, is free from any such racist terms.

I found one point interesting in a story by Roger Pater, otherwise not that remarkable. This is one of the tales from his collection about a priest's psychic encounters. Early on in De Profundis, the priest and his listener discuss the nature of ghosts. The priest expresses an idea that I originally thought was original to the late Nigel Kneale's play for the BBC, The Stone Tape. Pater does nothing with this notion - "that a place or a thing, such as a weapon or article of furniture - almost anything, in fact, which has played a part in events that aroused very intense emotional activity on the part of those who enacted them - becomes itself saturated, as it were, with the emotions involved. So much so, in fact, that it can influence people of exceptional sympathetic powers, and enable them to perceive the original events ....' The priest, who hears the dead, claims he can hear such recordings, but in this story, he hears the here-and-now complaints of a dead nun, reacting to contemporary events. To find this idea expressed in a story published in 1923 was astounding. I have no idea if Kneale read it and later developed the idea so effectively in his play, perhaps without remembering where he had seen it, but if not, it is an example of how the same idea can arise spontaneously at different times.

To conclude, an interesting survey of mostly lesser-known ghost, vampire, werewolf and zombie stories of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which for the most part found their first publication in magazines of the time. I've rated it 3-stars overall to reflect its varying quality. ( )

A classic collection ( )