Description
“Tell me strange things” the dandified clergyman and vampirologist Montague Summers was wont to say.
With this volume, Summers’ enthusiastic contribution to the tradition of ghostly and gothic fiction, readers can at last encounter a full-fledged collection of his own strange tales. Unpublished during his lifetime, despite its exquisite quality, which was attested to by the author and medievalist M. R. James, Six Ghost Stories displays a range from the gruesome to the grotesquely comic, presenting posthumous vendettas, a bibliophile who unwittingly seeks domestic help from an unusual location, a toy theatre that affords its new owner a glimpse into the bloodiest tragedy of the Victorian stage, and other spectral intrusions. These pieces showcase Summers’ love of scandal, diablerie and the theatre, as well as offering a fascinating glimpse into the creative process of one of the most colourful men of Edwardian letters.
Montague Summers (1880-1948) was an English clergyman, occultist, poet and man of letters. His most famous products were a series of colourful studies of vampirism, lycanthropy and witchcraft, such as The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) and The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), as well as several volumes of supernatural stories which he edited. He compiled the critical editions of a number of writers, including Aphra Behn and William Congreve. Alongside these interests, he was also a champion of the English Gothic novel with, amongst other relevant productions, The Gothic Quest: a History of the Gothic Novel (1938) and A Gothic Bibliography (1941).