More Deadly than the Male
Masterpieces from the Queens of Horror
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A darkly luminous new anthology collecting the most terrifying horror stories by renowned female authors, presenting anew these forgotten classics to the modern reader.
Readers are well aware that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein: few know how many other tales of terror she created. In addition to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote some surprisingly effective horror stories. The year after Little Women appeared, Louisa May Alcott published one of the first mummy tales. These ladies weren’t alone. From the earliest days of Gothic and horror fiction, women were exploring the frontiers of fear, dreaming dark dreams that will still keep you up at night.
More Deadly than the Male includes unexpected horror tales by Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and forgotten writers like Mary Cholmondely and Charlotte Riddell, whose work deserves a modern audience. Readers will be drawn in by the familiar names and intrigued by their rare stories.
In The Beckside Boggle, Alice Rea brings a common piece of English folklore to hair-raising life, while Helene Blavatsky, best known as the founder of the spiritualist Theosophical Society, conjures up a solid and satisfying ghost story in The Cave of the Echoes. Edith Wharton’s great novel The Age of Innocence won her the Pulitzer prize, yet her horror stories are known only to a comparative few.
Readers will discover lost and forgotten women who wrote horror every bit as effectively as their male contemporaries. They will learn about their lives and careers, the challenges they faced as women working in a male-dominated field, the way they overcame those challenges, and the way they approached the genre—which was often subtler, more psychological, and more disturbing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 26 stories in this connoisseur's compilation, all published between 1830 and 1908, are a testament to the role that women writers played in shaping early fantasy and horror fiction. Some selections are long-established classics, among them Mary Shelley's tale of a personality swap, "The Transformation," and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's landmark psychological horror story, "The Yellow Wall-paper." Others are more obscure works from well-known writers, including Louisa May Alcott's "Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy's Curse" and Edith Wharton's stunning "The Duchess at Prayer." These are buttressed by "At Chrighton Abbey," a story about a death portent haunting an English manor house, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, one of several of the book's authors who can claim a full r sum of renowned weird tales, and "The Beckside Boggle" by Alice Rea, whose name and work will be largely unfamiliar to most readers. Davis (Colonial Horrors) has done thoughtful literary excavation, and the stories he has selected are a trove of fantastic gems.