Since Odysseus' curious crew first unleashed the bag of winds gifted him by Aeolus, the God of Winds, literature has been awash with tales of bad or strange weather. From the flood myths of Babylon, the Mahabharata and the Bible, to twentieth-century psychological storms, this foray into troubled waters, heat waves, severe winters, hurricanes and hailstones, offers the perfect read on a rainy day -- or night. Featuring a selection of some of the finest writers in the English language -- Algernon Blackwood, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe and more -- this collection of weird tales will delight and disturb.

Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the villainous (or perhaps just misunderstood) `killer plant' in fiction, film and video games. Step within to marvel at Charlotte Perkins Gilman's giant wistaria and H. G. Wells' hungry orchid; hear the calls of the ethereal women of the wood, and the frightful drone of the moaning lily; and do tread carefully around E. Nesbit's wandering creepers... Every strain of vegetable threat (and one deadly fungus) can be found within this new collection, representing the very best tales from the undergrowth of Gothic fiction

'I have stood on the dim shore beyond time and matter and seen it. It moves through strange curves and outrageous angles. Some day I shall travel in time and meet it face to face.' Unlike nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted and the ghostly, early weird fiction probes the very boundaries of reality - the laws and limits of time, space and matter.

Here, unimaginable terrors lurk in hitherto unknown mirror dimensions, calamities in ultra-space threaten to wipe clean all evidence of our universe and experiments in non-Euclidean geometry lead to sickening consequences. In twelve speculative tales of our universe's mathematics and physics gone awry, this new anthology presents an abundance of curiosities - and terrors - with stories from Jorge Luis Borges, Miriam Allen deFord, Frank Belknap Long and Algernon Blackwood.

'The tiles of the hall floor were as pretty as ever, as cold as ever, and bore, as always on Christmas Eve, the trickling pattern of dark blood.'The gifts are unwrapped, the feast has been consumed and the fire is well fed - but the ghosts are still hungry. The ghosts are at the door. Welcome to a new collection of Christmas nightmares, ushering in a fresh host of ghastly phantoms and otherworldly intruders bent on ruining, or partaking in, the most wonderful time of the year.

With classic tales from Algernon Blackwood, Elizabeth Bowen, Charlotte Riddell and L. P. Hartley jostling with rare pieces from the sleeping periodicals and literary magazines of the British Library collections, it's time to open the door and let the real festivities begin.

A mariner inherits a skull that screams incessantly along with the roar of the sea; a phantom hare stalks the moors to deliver justice for a crime long dead; a man witnesses a murder in the woods near St. Ives, only to wonder whether it was he himself who committed the crime. Offering a bounty of lost or forgotten strange and Gothic tales set in Cornwall, Cornish Horrors explores the rich folklore and traditions of the region in a journey through mines, local mythology, shipwrecks, seascapes, and the coming of the railway and tourism.

With stories by Gothic luminaries such as Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe, this new collection also features chilling yarns of the haunted peninsula from a host of underappreciated writers from the past two centuries

Woods play an important and recurring role in horror, fantasy, the gothic and the weird. They are places in which strange things happen, where you often can't see where you are or what is around you. Supernatural creatures thrive in the thickets.

Trees reach into underworlds of earth, myth and magic. Forests are full of ghosts. In this new collection, immerse yourself in the whispering voices between the branches in Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor, witness an inexplicable death in Yorkshire's Strid Wood and prepare yourself for an encounter with malignant pagan powers in the dark of the New Forest.

This edition also includes notes on the real locations and folklore which inspired these deliciously sinister stories.

There was not a soul to be seen, up or down; and the trees stood like ghosts, and the silence was terrible, and everything clear as day. You don't know what silence is until you find it in the light like that...'Margaret Oliphant's superbly strange tales have been long overdue their rediscovery as classics of the Victorian ghost story genre. From suspenseful hauntings to weird experiences of the afterlife and encounters with sympathetic ghosts, Oliphant tells her tales with well-wrought imagery and a nuanced voice to deliver a thoroughly unnerving and unforgettable reading experience.

This newly edited volume collects six of her greatest 'Seen and Unseen' stories - Oliphant's most popular series in her day - and includes a new introduction exploring the life of this pioneering novelist.