Out of the Past

Tales of Haunting History

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British Library Publishing
Edited by Aaron Worth
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“Come inside, my bonny witch-finder. Here is shelter for thee…”

A tale of callous murder and deranged revenge rings out from fifteenth-century Italy. A witch-finder’s great triumph is also the herald of his own doom in Civil War Britain. A prisoner’s fate at the hands of the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Mexico leads to an encounter with the bestial and bizarre beneath the waves.

Summoning eleven stories chosen for their uncanny portrayals of weird history, this collection presents a dark timeline of grim visions harking from plague-racked England to revolutionary France and culminating in the last gasps of the nineteenth century.

Including stories by the greatest writers of history-turned-horrifying such as Marjorie Bowen, Frederick Cowles, Vernon Lee and the lost genius Vincent O’Sullivan, this volume is capped by two of Aaron Worth’s own tales of Victorian macabre alongside a chiller evoking M. R. James by the adapter of his stories for radio, Sheila Hodgson.

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Contributor Bio

AARON WORTH is a professor at Boston University, a celebrated editor and a short story writer. He has edited the Tales of the Weird collections Randalls Round and The Night Wire, as well as anthologies by Vernon Lee and Arthur Machen for Oxford University Press.

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