Jonathan Newell

Hodgson, in the company of Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Arthur Conan Doyle and many other fine and distinguished authors of the late Victorian era, created the foundations of the modern short story, the weird, the dark and the delightful, the supernatural and the fantastic and the imaginative. This new collection of Hodgson's tales highlights his sinuous storytelling prowess, and range and depth of his wonderful work. The Flame Tree Gothic Fantasy, Classic Stories and Epic Tales collections bring together the entire range of myth, folklore and modern short fiction. Highlighting the roots of suspense, supernatural, science fiction and mystery stories, the books in Flame Tree Collections series are beautifully presented, perfect as a gift and offer a lifetime of reading pleasure.

A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937 offers a new critical perspective on the weird that combines two ways of looking at weird and cosmic horror. On the one hand, critics have considered weird fiction in relation to aesthetics - the emotional effects and literary form of the weird. On the other hand, recent scholarship has also emphasised the potential philosophical underpinnings and implications of weird fiction, especially in relation to burgeoning philosophical movements such as new materialism and speculative realism. This study bridges the gap between these two approaches, considering the weird from its early outgrowth from the Gothic through to Lovecraft's stories - a `weird century' from 1832-1937. Combining recent speculative philosophy and affect theory, it argues that weird fiction harnesses the affective power of disgust to provoke a re-examination of subjectival boundaries and the complex entanglement of the human and nonhuman.