| Horror tales, English |
| Horror tales, American |
| English fiction -- Women authors |
| English horror tales |
| American horror tales |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Mansfield Public Library | FIC MORE | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Somerset-Berkley Regional HS | FIC MORE | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Swansea Public Library | MORE DEADLY | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A darkly luminous new anthology collecting the most terrifying horror stories by renowned female authors, presenting anew these forgotten classics to the modern reader.
Readers are well aware that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein : few know how many other tales of terror she created. In addition to Uncle Tom's Cabin , Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote some surprisingly effective horror stories. The year after Little Women appeared, Louisa May Alcott published one of the first mummy tales. These ladies weren't alone. From the earliest days of Gothic and horror fiction, women were exploring the frontiers of fear, dreaming dark dreams that will still keep you up at night.
More Deadly than the Male includes unexpected horror tales by Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and forgotten writers like Mary Cholmondely and Charlotte Riddell, whose work deserves a modern audience. Readers will be drawn in by the familiar names and intrigued by their rare stories.
In The Beckside Boggle , Alice Rea brings a common piece of English folklore to hair-raising life, while Helene Blavatsky, best known as the founder of the spiritualist Theosophical Society, conjures up a solid and satisfying ghost story in The Cave of the Echoes . Edith Wharton's great novel The Age of Innocence won her the Pulitzer prize, yet her horror stories are known only to a comparative few.
Readers will discover lost and forgotten women who wrote horror every bit as effectively as their male contemporaries. They will learn about their lives and careers, the challenges they faced as women working in a male-dominated field, the way they overcame those challenges, and the way they approached the genre--which was often subtler, more psychological, and more disturbing.
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
Few consider authors Louisa May Alcott, Edith Nesbit, and Edith Wharton purveyors of the macabre. But this collection of horror tales by women writers includes these voices alongside many others, presenting a different perspective of the genre. The entries were written between the years 1830 and 1908. Alcott, Nesbit, and Wharton offer stories about a mummy's curse, an ominous funeral mass that foretells a tragedy, and a ghastly praying statue that hides a secret. Very few of the selections are overtly frightening-these are subtle tales that necessitate careful reading in order to be truly appreciated. Among the standouts are Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Tom Toothacre's Ghost Story," in which the teller describes how a fresh coat of paint can eliminate a troublesome spirit; Vernon Lee's "The Hidden Door," in which the main character may be haunted by an evil spirit or by his own guilty conscience; and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall Paper," an account of madness that contains no supernatural elements yet is among the more horrifying pieces here. VERDICT For those who enjoy in-your-face, blood-and-guts horror, this work won't satisfy. But it will delight those who desire shivery tales of moral ambiguity, subtlety, and psychological dilemma.-Heather M. Campbell, formerly at Philip S. Miller Library, Castle Rock, CO © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
The 26 stories in this connoisseur's compilation, all published between 1830 and 1908, are a testament to the role that women writers played in shaping early fantasy and horror fiction. Some selections are long-established classics, among them Mary Shelley's tale of a personality swap, "The Transformation," and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's landmark psychological horror story, "The Yellow Wall-paper." Others are more obscure works from well-known writers, including Louisa May Alcott's "Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy's Curse" and Edith Wharton's stunning "The Duchess at Prayer." These are buttressed by "At Chrighton Abbey," a story about a death portent haunting an English manor house, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, one of several of the book's authors who can claim a full rAcsumAc of renowned weird tales, and "The Beckside Boggle" by Alice Rea, whose name and work will be largely unfamiliar to most readers. Davis (Colonial Horrors) has done thoughtful literary excavation, and the stories he has selected are a trove of fantastic gems. Agent: Philip Turner, Philip Turner Book Productions. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
While Mary Shelley and Ann Radcliffe are well-known names from the earliest days of the genre, there were actually many women writing thoughtful, psychologically intense horror in the nineteenth century. Davis (Colonial Horrors, 2017) presents 26 of their stories, many previously lost to history. His introduction contemplates the place of female writers in the genre's history and provides information about each author's personal and publishing life and why he chose each story. The result is a book that is a slice of women's history, an examination of the evolution of horror, and an anthology of entertaining, creepy reads. Famous names in the collection will attract attention, like Louisa May Alcott, but it is the compelling and uneasy work of little-known authors like Eliza Lynn Linton or Mary E. Wilkins Freeman that will captivate readers. Suggest this collection to those who enjoy recent female-driven horror like Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (2017) or editor Amber Fallon's Fright into Flight anthology (2018), but fans of psychological suspense by best-selling authors like Gillian Flynn will find much to like here too.--Becky Spratford Copyright 2018 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| The Transformation | p. 1 |
| The Dark Lady | p. 19 |
| Morton Hall | p. 31 |
| A Ghost Story | p. 69 |
| An Engineer's Story | p. 81 |
| Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy's Curse | p. 101 |
| Tom Toothacre's Ghost Story | p. 113 |
| Kentucky's Ghost | p. 121 |
| At Chrighton Abbey | p. 139 |
| The Fate of Madame Cabanel | p. 171 |
| Forewarned, Forearmed | p. 187 |
| The Portrait | p. 205 |
| The Shrine of Death | p. 243 |
| The Beckside Boggle | p. 249 |
| The Hidden Door | p. 265 |
| Unexplained | p. 291 |
| Let Loose | p. 339 |
| The Cave of the Echoes | p. 357 |
| The Yellow Wall Paper | p. 369 |
| The Mass for the Dead | p. 387 |
| The Tyburn Ghost by The Countess of Munster | p. 397 |
| The Duchess at Prayer | p. 405 |
| The Vacant Lot | p. 427 |
| An Unscientific Story | p. 443 |
| A Dissatisfied Soul | p. 457 |
| The Readjustment | p. 475 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 483 |