The anxiety and dread of wartime Britain is recaptured in this anthology of horror stories and supernatural fiction dating from 1914 – 18. Rather than taking war as their theme, the tales offer readers escapist fare populated by ghosts, ghouls, and other malevolent spirits. Written amid the golden age of horror fiction — the decades between the turn of the twentieth century and 1940, when tales of terror and the weird flourished — these stories constitute forgotten gems by neglected masters. Seventeen tales include Max Beerbohm's "Enoch Soames," in which an obscure poet makes a deal with the devil and travels forward in time to discover history's verdict of his work; "Laura," by Saki, a witty and moving perspective on death and loss that recounts a dead woman's reincarnation as an animal that plagues her friends; "The Three Sisters," by W. W. Jacobs, author of "The Monkey's Paw," involving a plot to expedite an inheritance by simulating a ghostly visitation; "The Pavilion," by E. Nesbit, in which a pair of romantic rivals challenge each other to spend the night at a haunted pavilion; and "The King Waits," Clemence Dane's account of the final five minutes before Anne Boleyn's execution. Additional stories include the works of Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Lord Dunsany, and others.

Homefront Horrors: Frights Away From the Front Lines, 1914-1918 (Dover Mystery, Detective, Ghost Stories and Other Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Nevins, Jess

United States

Dover `

Increasing literacy rates and advanced printing technology gave rise to the pulp magazine in the late 19th century. Affordable, disposable, and commercially in-demand, the fiction magazines remained popular through the mid 20th century, and are now frequently cited by researchers as culturally and historically significant documents. This work is a comprehensive index of American pulp magazines. Entries are organized alphabetically by magazine title, and offer bibliographic data including author, volume/issue numbers, dates of publication, publisher, and a brief categorization. Each entry also includes a helpful list of current library holdings, if any, among American, Canadian, and European libraries.

Pulp Magazine Holdings Directory: Library Collections in North America and Europe

Genre Fiction

McFarland

The histories behind the fairy tale characters in New York Times best-selling author Bill Willingham's series FABLES are uncovered here in the FABLES ENCYCLOPEDIA. Exhaustively researched by author Jess Nevins, these annotations fill in details hailing down from ancient myth and forgotten civilizations of the timeless figures that compose the world of Fabletown, including Snow White, Bigby Wolf, Boy Blue and many more. This new compendium is a must-have addition to any FABLES afficianado's library as well as any fan of modern folk lore and fairy tales.

Fables Encyclopedia

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Vertigo

Using a broad array of historical and literary sources, this book presents an unprecedented detailed history of the superhero and its development across the course of human history.
How has the concept of the superhero developed over time? How has humanity's idealization of heroes with superhuman powers changed across millennia―and what superhero themes remain constant? Why does the idea of a superhero remain so powerful and relevant in the modern context, when our real-life technological capabilities arguably surpass the imagined superpowers of superheroes of the past? The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger: The 4,000-Year History of the Superhero is the first complete history of superheroes that thoroughly traces the development of superheroes, from their beginning in 2100 B.C.E. with the Epic of Gilgamesh to their fully entrenched status in modern pop culture and the comic book and graphic novel worlds. 
The book documents how the two modern superhero archetypes―the Costumed Avengers and the superhuman Supermen―can be traced back more than two centuries; turns a critical, evaluative eye upon the post-Superman history of the superhero; and shows how modern superheroes were created and influenced by sources as various as Egyptian poems, biblical heroes, medieval epics, Elizabethan urban legends, Jacobean masques, Gothic novels, dime novels, the Molly Maguires, the Ku Klux Klan, and pulp magazines. This work serves undergraduate or graduate students writing papers, professors or independent scholars, and anyone interested in learning about superheroes.
 • Presents a concise but thorough history of the superhero comic industry, from the 1930s to today
• Clearly describes the two main forms of the historical superhero, the Costumed Avenger and the Superman
• Suggests a new way in which to evaluate superheroes and explains why this new methodology is important
• Identifies and examines the ways in which superheroes have been present in popular literature since the beginning of human history

The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger: The 4,000-Year History of the Superhero

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

Praeger

Providing an indispensable resource for academics as well as readers interested in the evolution of horror fiction in the 20th century, this book provides a readable yet critical guide to global horror fiction and authors.
Horror Fiction in the 20th Century encompasses the world of 20th-century horror literature and explores it in a critical but balanced fashion. Readers will be exposed to the world of horror literature, a truly global phenomenon during the 20th century. 
Beginning with the modern genre's roots in the 19th century, the book proceeds to cover 20th-century horror literature in all of its manifestations, whether in comics, pulps, paperbacks, hardcover novels, or mainstream magazines, and from every country that produced it. The major horror authors of the century receive their due, but the works of many authors who are less well-known or who have been forgotten are also described and analyzed. In addition to providing critical assessments and judgments of individual authors and works, the book describes the evolution of the genre and the major movements within it. 
Horror Fiction in the 20th Century stands out from its competitors and will be of interest to its readers because of its informed critical analysis, its unprecedented coverage of female authors and writers of color, and its concise historical overview.
<ul>
<li>Covers both the best-known authors of horror literature and a large number of lesser-known or forgotten authors whose work would reward searching out by modern readers</li>
<li>Is unprecedented in its coverage of international horror literature and includes dozens of authors whose horror fiction has never before been translated into English</li>
<li>Covers the major 20th century developments and movements within horror literature in one volume, in a linear and chronological manner</li>
<li>Is a corrective to decades of sexist, racist, colonialist, and provincial horror criticism</li>
</ul>

Horror Fiction in the 20th Century: Exploring Literature's Most Chilling Genre

History & Criticism

This introductory guide to the canon of Victorian literature covers 61 novels by authors from Jane Austen to Emile Zola. Brief critical essays describe what each book is about and argue for its cultural, historical and literary importance. Literary canons remain a subject of debate but critics, readers and students continue to find them useful as overviews--and examinations--of the great works within a given period or culture. The Victorian canon is particularly rich with splendid novels that educate, enlighten and entertain.

The Victorian Bookshelf: An Introduction to 61 Essential Novels

Stagecoach Mary Fields (1832-1914) was the toughest woman on the frontier, and broke more noses than any man in Montana. The first female African-American mail carrier, she began work for the mail service at age 60, and twenty years later she was still head-butting men who'd try to keep her from drinking at her favorite saloon. STAGECOACH MARY is a Weird West collection featuring Mary Fields, and contains eight stories of her lesser-known adventures on the Montana frontier, involving ghosts, legendary beasts, the Devil, town-wide madnesses, phantom airships, supernatural threats, magic-spawned blizzards, and the rescue of innocent men framed by an uncaring legal system. Full of adventure, horror, and new twists on old stories, STAGECOACH MARY is sure to be of interest to those who like their Westerns weird and off-beat and to those in search of adventurous frontier fiction.

Stagecoach Mary

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Much has been written about the pulps, the medium of popular fiction which began in 1896. And yet, despite the number of books and essays written about the pulps, and despite the current enthusiasm for some of the genres of literature which appeared in the pulps, a great deal of information about the pulps remains obscure, and a number of seemingly obvious questions remain unanswered–or worse, answered with misleading or inaccurate information. What were the most popular genres in the pulps? What were the most significant pulp magazines? How many pulps were published? When were the pulps’ heyday? When did the pulps decline? How did the pulps compare to the dime novels, and when did the pulps supplant the dime novels? I’ve attempted to answer these questions and provide accurate information on the pulps in THE PULPS. I’ve gathered together a substantial amount of numerical information never before brought together and presented it, and with that information set out the true history of the pulps, rather than the received wisdom about them.

The Pulps: A Yearly Guide

Reference

This unique, one-volume encyclopedia contains entries on the more than 2000 superheroes, private eyes, cowboys, pilots, and adventure heroes who appeared in comics during the Golden Age (1935-1949) of superhero comics. Every heroic character from the Golden Age has been included; no one has been left out. Each entry contains a description of the hero, their significant villains, their creator credits, their first appearance, and their number of appearances in comics of the Golden Age. This collection is a one-of-a-kind compendium of superheroes that no fan of comics or superhero gaming should be without.

Jess Nevins’ Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes

High Rock Press

The first book to cover global horror fiction during the twentieth century, the decades in which the horror genre matured and came of age, HORROR NEEDS NO PASSPORT covers hundreds of authors and stories and novels from 72 countries. The great majority of these works have never been translated into English and are mentioned only slightly, if at all, in the standard horror genre reference books. Yet these stories and novels contain a wealth of high quality horror, whether written by Angolan authors or Uruguayan authors. It's a shame that nearly all of these horror stories and novels are unknown to readers in the United States and the United Kingdom, as they would enjoy these works greatly if they could read them. The book does not contain an over-arching narrative; the horror literatures of the world are far too varied for any one narrative to fit. Instead, each author gets their own one or two paragraph entry, placing them in the context of their time and place and describing what their horror fiction is about, why their horror fiction matters, and whether or not their horror fiction is worth reading. The following, about the fantastic Belgian horror writer Thomas Owen, is typical of the entries: "A much different writer from Ghelderode was Thomas Owen, a lawyer, plant manager, and art critic who became interested in writing following a meeting with detective writer Stanislas-André Steeman. From 1941-1943 Owen wrote detective novels, but in 1942, inspired by and perhaps jealous of the success of his friend Jean Ray, Owen began writing fantastika, primarily horror of l’ecole belge de l’etrange variety. In his lifetime Owen would write two dozen novels and over 300 short stories, most of which were fantastika. Owen would become (with Jean Ray) the most important Belgian writer of fantastika and horror, and arguably its best writer and stylist. Jean Ray never produced Art (and never bothered to try), while Owen routinely achieved it. Owen had obsessions distinctive to himself: morbid eroticism, perversity, and the animalistic. And Owen’s characters were usually present to create the effect of horror in the reader rather than existing as sympathetic beings. But Owen’s style—evocative, precise, restrained, clear and cold—overwhelmed these flaws, and the doomed atmosphere, erotically macabre imagery, and general existential dread Owen generates in the stories make them memorably frightening. Owen’s brand of terror has been called “intimate horror,” as it focuses closely on ordinary lives rent by the moral and emotional ambiguities of life to the point that Owen’s protagonists are vulnerable to supernatural assault. “Owen refined the tale of supernatural horror to an almost anachronistic degree of economy and purity…his unsettling work has been compared to that of Poe and Buzzati." Other reference books about horror fiction cover a scant handful of the authors and works described and analyzed in HORROR NEEDS NO PASSPORT and rarely venture outside Western Europe, Japan, and parts of Latin America. HORROR NEEDS NO PASSPORT covers multiple countries from every continent, going back to at least the turn of the twentieth century and in some cases well into the nineteenth century. Written for both casual readers and interested academics, HORROR NEEDS NO PASSPORT is unlike anything else on the market.

Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K.

Independently published

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