The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension

"All I can tell you is that I think it was pig’s meat.” “You mean you’re not sure?” “One can never be sure.”

A brush with the mushroom devil whets the appetite. The meat at the werewolf’s table is a dish to relish. Dessert with London’s cannibal club may be the cherry on top.

From fairy tales and folklore focused on magical foods and strange eating came an enduring tradition of writers playing with food and the uncanny. In the fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this tradition thrived, with themes of supernatural consumption, weird transformation and sensual euphoria as key ingredients.

Raiding this dark pantry of writing, this new collection presents a feast of sixteen classic tales, two poems and one essay, with choice morsels by masters of the macabre including Shirley Jackson, Franz Kafka, Angela Carter and Roald Dahl.

Publication Date: 27/07/2023

Author: Edited by Zara-Louise Stubbs

Brand: British Library Publishing

Number of pages: 288

Binding: Paperback

Dimensions: 190 x 130 mmSuddenly he tripped and fell his length over a prostrate body... he marvelled that so rough an impact should not have kicked a groan out of the drunkard...

With a stiff measure of the supernatural, a dram of melodrama and a chaser of the cautionary kind, tales of drink and drunkenness can be found in a well- stocked cabinet of Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction, reflecting an anxiety about the impact of alcohol and intoxicants in society, as well as an acknowledgment of their influence on humans’ perception of reality.

Featuring drink-fuelled classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ alongside obscurities from periodicals such as Blackwood’s Magazine, this new collection offers a (somewhat poisoned) chalice of dark and stormy short fiction, brimming with the weird, the grotesque, the entertaining and the outlandish.

Publication date: 28/09/2023

Author: Edited by Pam Lock

Brand: British Library Publishing

Number of pages: 288

Binding: Paperback

Dimensions: 190 x 130 mm"Where grow pines and firs amain,
Under Stars, sans heat or rain,
Chief of Hammand, ‘ware thy Bane!’"

So goes the ancient rhyme of the Hammands, a family hounded for centuries by a ferocious beast whose visitations wreak death and disorder. Now, in the wake of the First World War, siblings Oliver and Swanhild are the last of the Hammands, safe again at their ancestral home in the South Downs – until Oliver is beset by a creature in the pines by night. Desperate to dispel the curse, the siblings call on the occult detective Luna Bartendale to help unearth the dark origins of the Undying Monster and unshackle them from a savage doom.

First published in 1922, this cult novel is a heady brew of black magic lore, Norse mythology and weird mysteries spilling out of an eldritch ‘fifth dimension’ – complete with the first female occult detective to appear in an English novel, the ‘White Witch‘ Luna Bartendale.

Publication date: 22/02/2024

Author: Jessie Douglas Kerruish

Brand: British Library Publishing

Number of pages: 304

Binding: Paperback

Dimensions: 190 x 130