£12.99
To be published on 9 August 2022.
D K Broster was one of the great British historical novelists of the twentieth century, but her Weird fiction has long been forgotten. She wrote some of the most impressive supernatural short stories to be published between the wars. Melissa Edmundson, editor of Women’s Weird, Women’s Weird 2, Elinor Mordaunt’s The Villa and The Vortex and Helen Simpson’s The Outcast and The Rite, all published by Handheld, has curated a selection of Broster’s best and most terrifying work.
We will be publishing this fine collection as a paperback and as an ebook.
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Description
From the Abyss contains eleven stories, including:
- ‘The Window’, in which a deserted chateau takes revenge on anyone who opens one particular window.
- ‘The Pavement’, in which the protectress of a Roman mosaic cannot bear to let it go.
- ‘Clairvoyance’, in which the spirit of a vengeful Japanese swordmaster enters an adolescent girl.
- ‘From the Abyss’, in which the survivor of a car crash is followed out of the gorge by her doppelganger.
Dorothy Kathleen Broster was born in 1877 near Liverpool. She earned a degree in Modern History at Oxford and worked as a nurse in the First World War. Her name as a novelist was made by her bestselling Jacobite trilogy, The Flight of the Heron (1925), The Gleam in the North (1927), and The Dark Mile (1929). Most of her supernatural fiction appeared in two collections: A Fire of Driftwood (1932) and Couching at the Door (1942). She died in 1950.
You may be interested in these other supernatural collections from Handheld
Women’s Weird: the original anthology edited by Melissa Edmundson. Contains thirteen excellent supernatural stories encompassing the boundaries of Weird by outstanding women authors. Includes stories by Edith Wharton, May Sinclair, Margery Lawrence and E Nesbit.
Women’s Weird 2: our second anthology edited by Melissa Edmundson, this collection of short supernatural fiction from 1893 to 1937 covers new geographical territory with fiction from Canada, Australia, India, the USA and New Zealand.
British Weird: edited by James Machin, this collection of short British supernatural fiction from 1981 to 1937 displays an unsettling mastery of Weird preoccupations.
The Villa and The Vortex, by Elinor Mordaunt, the first anthology of this exceptionally good but unaccountably forgotten Weird writer to be in print for decades.
The Outcast and The Rite, by the Australian writer Helen Simpson, this collects the best of her unsettling supernatural writing, adding some little-known stories to her 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric (to be published in May 2022).
