Author Description

The tension between the seen and the unseen is a driving force behind horror. More often than not, it is what we cannot see that is most frightening, or, as the iconic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft put it, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown." The fifteen stories in this volume represent more than five decades (1859-1913) of Victorian storytelling about the invisible, ranging from classic stories by major authors, such as Fitz-James O'Brien's "What Was It? " and Ambrose Bierce's "The Damned Thing," to obscure gems that have remained out of print since the nineteenth century. A few stories, like the anonymous "The Midnight Fiend" and A. Herbage Edwards's "Asamayama" even claimed to be true.