A. M. Burrage

Abandoned farmhouses, cursed barns, and haunted fields are well-established in classic supernatural and horror fiction. Remote rural communities go hand-in-hand with superstitions and ghost lore, where crop fields and orchards that delight in the sunshine turn lonely and grim at dusk. Wide open spaces become boxed with shadows around small fires and lamps, while hidden jealousies and hatreds encourage dark deeds. This collection of rural speculative fiction includes 18 stories written from 1850 to 1929. The stories included in Farming the Darkness: 'The Field of Terror', Friedrich De La Motte Fouqu ; 'O'Reilly's Improvements', Frances Brown; 'The Haunted House', George H. Coomer; 'The Hereditary Barn', Noah Brooks; 'The Hawthorne Farm Mystery', Jeremiah L. M'Carthy; 'The Haunted Orchard', Richard Le Gallienne; 'The Farmhouse on the Hill', Algernon Blackwood; 'The Haunted Cow', Bertram Munn; 'With Intent to Steal', Algernon Blackwood; 'The Scarecrow', Gwendolyn Ranger Wormser; 'In the Barn', Burges Johnson; 'In the Wheat', Maurice Level; 'At the Farmhouse', E. F. Benson; 'Dearth's Farm', Gerald Bullett; 'The Ghost Farm', Susan Andrews Rice; 'At Simmel Acres Farm', Eleanor Scott; 'Browdean Farm', A. M. Burrage; 'Crewe', Walter de la Mare

The supernatural tales of A M Burrage were recognised by contemporaries such as M R James and the critic E F Bleiler as some of the most imaginative and cleverly told ghost stories in the English language, and yet today his name haunts the fringes of the genre. Burrage was unafraid to position his ghosts among the trappings of modernity, and his experiments with the genre set him apart from the antiquarian 'Jamesian' tradition. Presenting 13 of the author's best tales from the 1920s and 30s - including accounts of uncanny living wax figures, unsettling timeslips into troubled pasts and Burrage's horror masterpiece 'One Who Saw' - this collection is another step towards restoring A M Burrage's name to the heights of the best writers of supernatural fiction.

Originally published on Christmas in 1931 and widely regarded as A. M. Burrage's masterpiece, "One Who Saw" tells the story of a wrtier enchanted by a spectre of a weeping woman. His obsession builds until her ghostly hand falls from her face and he, in horror, becomes "one who sees."