Once I thought I glimpsed her high up in a bush, like dirty rags in a gale. Not that so far there has been any gale, or even any wind. The total silent stillness is one of the worst things.

Yes, it is a battle with strong and unknown forces that I have on my hands.

From the shorelines, hills and towns of ancient lands, tales of twisted creatures, sins against nature and pagan revenants have been passed down from generation to generation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, folklore from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man inspired a new strain of strange short stories, penned by writers of the weird and fantastic including masters of the form such as Arthur Machen, Edith Wharton and Robert Aickman.

In this volume, Johnny Mains dives into the archives to unearth a hoard of twenty-one enthralling tales imbued with elements of Celtic folklore, ranging from the 1820s to the 1980s and including three weird lost gems translated from Gaelic. Together they conjure uncanny visions of eternal forces, beings and traditions, resonating with the beguiling essence of this unique branch of strange fiction.

In the mid 1800s, the inexpensive publications known as penny bloods were all the rage in Britain. Spinning tales of high Gothic drama, violence and monstrosity, this literary phenomenon was significant for its depictions of dangerous and transgressive women which inspired such milestone Gothic works as Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla.

Collecting ten tales from classic - and truly obscure - penny publications and featuring newly edited text and insights from Dr Dittmer's research, this new volume revives a company of witches, femme fatales, vampire mistresses and deadly criminals to enthrall a new generation of readers.

Something was coming down the tide. It came down as quiet as a sleeping bairn, straight for him as he sat with his horse breasting the waters, and as it came the moon crept out of a cloud and he saw a glint of yellow hair.

From misty moors, crags and clifftops comes a hoard of eighteen strange tales gathered by Johnny Mains, award-winning anthologist and editor of the British Library anthology Celtic Weird. Sourced from Scotland's storied literary heritage and bustling with witches, ghosts, devils and merfolk, this selection celebrates the works of treasured Scottish writers such as John Buchan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dorothy K. Haynes and Neil M. Gunn alongside rare pieces by lesser-known authors - including two tales translated from Scots Gaelic.

Brooding in the borderlands where strange folklore, bizarre mythology and twentieth-century hauntings meet, this volume promises chills and shivers as keen and fresh as the wind-whipped wilds of Scotland.

Fired up by the accounts of exploring parties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers of the weird and supernatural began to construct a literary Arctic and Antarctic in which terrors lay undiscovered in the ice and gateways to bizarre hidden worlds were waiting. From James Hogg's lurid North Pole narrative of life amongst polar bears in 'The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon' to tales of mad science and ghostly visitations among the wind-blown expanse of the southern continent, this new collection showcases a wealth of neglected material and an overlooked niche of literature obsessed with the limits of human experience.

Pulp tales of alien forces emerging from the ice and a battle between hunter and invisible man-eating duck creature drift alongside modern horror from indigenous Arctic voices to show the extent and endurance of the lure of these sublime landscapes.

Each date is assigned one or more literary connections. Book lovers will find extracts from authors' diaries and letters, chance upon the narrative twists and transformative moments in their favorite novels, discover the winners of prestigious awards and losers of creative squabbles, and the delivery of manuscript, first publication and performance.

The book draws on the incredible collections of the British Library to find new, surprising and entertaining ways to celebrate every day of the year. Each month opens with a list of significant births and closes with a selection of pertinent last words, while entries roam across history from the great classics to modern authors.

There was no sleep for him that night; he fancied he had seen the stone - which, as you know, was a couple of fields away - as large as life, as if it were on watch outside his window.

The standing stones, stone circles, dolmens and burial sites of the British Isles still resonate with mystery of their primeval origins, enthralling our collective consciousness to this day. Rising up in the field of weird fiction, ancient stones and the rituals and dark forces they once witnessed have inspired a wicked branch of the genre by writers devoted to their eerie potential.

Gathered in tribute to these relics of a lost age - and their pagan legacy of blood - are fifteen stories of haunted henges, Druidic vengeance and solid rock alive with bloodlust, by authors including Algernon Blackwood, Lisa Tuttle, Arthur Machen and Nigel Kneale.

Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood. Let us go to sleep now.

A prophecy threatens a volcanic upheaval for a star-crossed pair. A forbidden rite binds a dark arts dabbler to a phantom bride. A barstool chancer invites a devilish retribution on the dance floor.

Beckoning from this tome are twelve tales of dark romance and undying passions hailing from 1832 to 2022, marrying bewitching classics by Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins and Angela Carter with twisting modern pieces by Nalo Hopkinson, Tracy Fahey and V. Castro--alongside the classic Gothic novella of sapphic vampire romance Carmilla.

Indulging in the strangest eddies of literary love, this new anthology bids you enter a doom-laden yet irresistibly seductive corner of the Weird.

In this anthology we see a thrilling spread of narratives: sailors are pitched against a nightmare from the depth, invisible to the naked eye; a German U-boat commander is tormented by an impossible transmission via Morse Code; a ship ensnares itself in the kelp of the Sargasso Sea and dooms a crew of mutineers, seemingly out of revenge for her lost captain.

The supernatural is set alongside the grim affairs of sailors scorned in these salt-soaked tales, recovered from obscurity for the 21st century.

The pipe music shrilled suddenly around her, seeming to come from the bushes at her very feet, and at the same moment the great beast slewed round and bore directly down upon her.

In 1894, Arthur Machen's landmark novella The Great God Pan was published, sparking a resurgence of literary fascination with the figure of the pagan goat god.

Tales from a broad spectrum of writers from E M Forster to prolific pulpsters such as Greye Le Spina took the god's rebellious and chaotic influence as their subject, spinning beguiling tales of society turned upside down and the forces of nature compelling protagonists to ecstatic heights or bizarre dooms.

Selecting an eclectic cross-section of tales and short poems from this boom of Pan-centric literature, many first published in the influential Weird Tales magazine, this new collection examines the roots of a cultural phenomenon and showcases Pan's potential to introduce themes of queer awakening and celebrations of the transgressive into the thrillingly weird stories in which he was invoked.

Fearsome Fairies taps into the enormous fascination with fairies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and includes cornerstone authors of the Weird genre such as Arthur Machen, M R James and Charlotte Riddell.

You see - no, you do not, but I see - such curious faces: and the people to whom they belong flit about so oddly, often at your elbow when you least expect it, and looking close into your face, as if they were searching for someone - who may be thankful, I think, if they do not find him.

There was an enormous fascination with fairies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which popularised depictions of benevolent, butterfly-winged beings and glittering pantomime figures. But the fae have always had a more sinister side. Taking inspiration from folk tales and medieval legends, the works of weird tale and ghost story writers such as Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Angela Carter and Charlotte Riddell show that fairies, goblins and other supernatural entities could be something far more unsettling.

Delving into a frightening realm of otherworldly creatures from banshees to changelings, this new collection of stories revives and revels in the fearsome power of the fairy folk.

Occult or psychic detective tales have been chilling readers for almost as long as there have been ghost stories. This beguiling subgenre follows specialists in occult lore - often with years of arcane training - investigating strange supernatural occurrences and pitting their wits against the bizarre and inexplicable.

With tales featuring the most prominent psychic detectives such as William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki, the Ghost Finder and Algernon Blackwood's Dr. Silence, this new collection also includes rare and never-before-reprinted cases investigated by the likes of Flaxman Low, Cosmo Thor, Aylmer Vance and Mesmer Milann.

The sunken continent of Atlantis has dwelt in the collective imagination of writers and artists for centuries; a bejeweled paradox bubbling with themes of irrecoverable loss and quixotic faith in its rediscovery.

This new anthology collects stories from the vast, yet seldom recognized, vault of Atlantean fiction from the Golden Age of Weird Tales magazine, presented in four core sections, perfect for diving into:

• Atlantis Rediscovered - in which the ruins of ancient Atlantis are found again
• Atlantis Revisited - tales of Deep Time, in which the descendants of Atlanteans re-live the experiences of ancestors
• Atlantis Resurrected - in which Atlantis never sunk at all but remains at large in the world
• Atlantis Reimagined - in which the continent is fertile ground for experiments in Weird Fantasy and beyond

'This is, after all, the season of abandonment, of the suspension of vitality, a long cessation of vigour in which we must cultivate our stoicism. Everything had put on the desolate smile of winter.'

Curl up with Stories for Winter, a collection of seasonal tales to sustain you through the long, dark evenings. Originally written and first published in the twentieth century, the fourteen stories in this new anthology bring together the creative minds of Angela Carter, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Berridge, Shirley Jackson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Angela Dickens, Elizabeth Bowen and Kate Roberts.

A woman waits for her lover across a flooded landscape; another braves a snowstorm for a stranger; while a young girl's unseasonal visit to the seaside ends in a shattering revelation. Exploring themes of loss and loneliness, resilience and renewal, this collection brings together many renowned female writers of the short-story form. In the spirit of the Women Writers series, these stories first appeared in books and periodicals in the twentieth century.

With a stiff measure of the supernatural, a dram of melodrama and a chaser of the cautionary kind, tales of drink and drunkenness can be found in a well- stocked cabinet of Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction, reflecting an anxiety about the impact of alcohol and intoxicants in society, as well as an acknowledgment of their influence on humans' perception of reality.

Featuring drink-fueled classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson's 'The Body Snatcher' alongside obscurities from periodicals such as Blackwood's Magazine, this new collection offers a (somewhat poisoned) chalice of dark and stormy short fiction, brimming with the weird, the grotesque, the entertaining and the outlandish.

Beyond the genre-defining influence of Dracula, Bram Stoker was also a master of the short story form. This new collection of the author's tales represents his diverse interests in the macabre and uncanny, ranging from the hallucinatory and dreamlike in 'The Shadow Builder' and 'In the Valley of the Shadow' to the more overtly horrifying in the mini- masterpieces of 'The Judge's House' and 'The Burial of the Rats'.

Alongside acknowledged classics of the horror short story canon, this new volume also includes obscurities such as the darkly comic 'Old Hoggen: A Mystery' and the morbid fairy tale 'The Castle of the King' to reflect the full brilliance of the legendary writer.

Offering a bounty of lost or forgotten strange and Gothic tales set in Cornwall, Cornish Horrors explores the rich folklore and traditions of the county in a journey through mines, local mythology, shipwrecks, seascapes, and the coming of the railway and tourism.

With tales by horror luminaries such as Bram Stoker, Poe, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, this edition also features a host of underappreciated writers such as F. Tennyson Jesse and Margery Williams - said to be a strong influence on Lovecraft's writing.

Delving into the strange imaginings of Arthur Conan Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, Sarban, Robert Holdstock and many more, this new collection brings together fourteen tales traversing uncanny collateral fates, weird eddies of alternative history, and otherworlds bordering our own reality.

He spoke of a new kind of terremauvaise, of strange regions, connected, indeed, with definite geographical limits upon the earth, yet somehow apart from them and beyond them.

A youth comes to a literal fork in his road where all three paths contrive to end in the same violent fate; a beleaguered man finds his neuroses oddly mirrored in a dark parallel world co-existing with our own; Kaiser Wilhelm II, rather than abdicate, leads the High Seas Fleet on one last voyage.

Treading the path of that which never existed (in our reality, at least) and the otherworlds bordering our own version of Earth, this new collection brings together tales of strange parallel destinies, unexplored forks in humanity's history, twisted pocket dimensions and forays into unsettling regions of Dark Fantasy.