£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.
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Description
One of the very few known photographs of D K Broster, from about 1914.
From the Abyss contains eleven stories:
- ‘All Souls Day’ (1907), in which a deadly enemy saves his soul.
- ‘Fils D’Émigré’ (1913), in which a small boy sees across water and time.
- ‘The Window’ (1929), in which a deserted chateau takes revenge on anyone who opens one particular window.
- ‘Clairvoyance’ (1932), in which a katana wreaks its revenge.
- ‘The Promised Land’ (1932), in which the worm turns deadly.
- ‘The Pestering’ (1932), in whch an ancient curse traps its maker.
- ‘Couching at the Door’ (1933), in which a spurned mistress becomes a familiar.
- ‘Juggernaut’ (1935), in which a bathchair goes over the cliff.
- ‘The Pavement’ (1938), in which the protectress of a Roman mosaic cannot bear to let it go.
- ‘From the Abyss’ (1940), in which the survivor of a car crash develops a doppelganger.
- ‘The Taste of Pomegranates’ (1945, previously unpublished version), in which the present-day enters the Palaeolithic.
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.
Reviews
‘ … many of the featured supernatural stories in this volume also [have] a strong historical background. For instance, the events in “Fils d’Émigré” take place in 1795 during the French Revolution, and many of the other stories, albeit set in the present, follow well-established traditions of supernatural fiction, where the past encroaches on the modern world. In “The Window”, a young British army officer on duty in France is trapped by a falling sash window in a deserted chateau, an accident which leads to visions of past violence during the French Revolution. “The Taste of Pomegranates” (featured in a previously unpublished version) is a peculiar “time slip” story, where the protagonists have an unexpected glimpse of the Palaeolithic Age. “The Pavement” refers to an ancient Roman mosaic and the strange pull it exerts on its elderly custodian – it can be read as much as a “supernatural” story as one of obsession and madness. But perhaps in this respect the most effective piece is “The Pestering”, the longest item in this volume. A couple buy a Tudor-era house, and soon start to be bothered by an insistent stranger who wants to be let inside. After a quasi-comic start to it, the tale becomes darker and eerier – this is a different take on the “haunted house” genre. ‘ – To the Ends of the Word
You may be interested in these other anthologies of fantasy fiction 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.
Strange Relics, an anthology of classic supernatural stories about archaeological finds, curated by Amara Thornton and Katy Soar (to be published 20 September 2022).
