In September 1897, hard on the heels of the publication of Dracula, came another novel of the bizarre and supernatural: The Beetle by Richard Marsh. The work was seized upon by the Victorian reading public, who made it even more of a popular success than Stoker's novel, and ensured the fame of the work’s author.

Unfortunately for Marsh, the success of The Beetle overshadowed much of his other work in the field of the weird tale, and today most of his other supernatural fiction is difficult, if not impossible, to find. Marsh himself was, for many years, shrouded in as much obscurity as his work, and his true identity was not revealed until many years after his death, when his grandson, Robert Aickman, revealed the author’s true name in his autobiography.

Now, Richard Dalby has collected together eighteen stories of horror and the supernatural by Richard Marsh, bringing together for the first time these weird tales by a Victorian master of the genre. In his in-depth introduction, Dalby provides a wealth of detail about Marsh’s life and works, providing a full portrait of the man who seemed, in the words of Sir Hugh Greene, to have been ‘haunted by demons’.