Edited by David Stuart Davies
Published by Macmillan, 2024, 310 pages

There is something about reading a well-written horror story: the chills that run down your spine, the fear, and the feeling of being in the story while sitting at a comfortable distance from any actual danger.

This collection is guaranteed to make you shiver, with stories by writers known for this genre: Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James and E.F. Benson, for example. The book also includes stories by writers you would not associate with tales of horror or the supernatural, such as Theodore Dreiser, Arthur Conan Doyle, Guy de Maupassant and Edith Wharton.

In Edith Wharton’s A Bottle of Perrier, Medford visits Almodham, an acquaintance and a scholar, in his home in the desert, but his host has gone to look at some unexplored ruins in the south. Medford is waited upon by his host’s butler, Gosling, who seems a bit odd. What is really going on in that house, and where is the host?

A large wooden cupboard haunts a teacher in Algernon Blackwood’s The Occupant of the Room. Minturn, a teacher, arrives at an Alpine resort but finds that the only inn is full—except for one room. The lady renting the room went mountaineering two days ago and has not yet returned, so the innkeeper lets him have the room on condition that he vacates it as soon as the lady comes back. But Minturn has trouble sleeping in the room. There is something about the large cupboard that bothers him. Should he open it?

Lucrezia Borgia is the centre of Marjorie Bowen’s Twilight. A young man wanders into her garden at twilight and finds the Duchess alone. They talk, and he is struck by how old and faded she looks. He has heard people praise her for her refined splendour. But there is something about Lucrezia that strikes him as evil, a feeling that there is death upon her lips, and if he kisses her, he would die, as have many of her lovers. But he cannot seem to escape her.

There is so much here: haunted rooms, a strange creature living deep within a cave, and a woman who lives to avenge her son’s murder. It is a perfect book to curl up with on a dark night (with plenty of lights on to chase away any wandering ghosts!).

I just wish that there had been a list of authors at the end of the book with dates and a small write-up about them, to give the stories a bit of context. From what I can tell, the writers are mostly British, with a few Americans and one Frenchman, and born mainly at the end of the 19th century.

I would like to say something about this edition, one of Macmillan Collector’s Library. I discovered this series in a bookshop in Florence. They are beautifully produced books, hardcovers with a dust jacket, endpapers and gilded edged pages—and small enough to slip into a pocket or a handbag. A real pleasure to own.

A beautiful book with chilling tales and a memento of a wonderful trip—what more could anyone ask for?